How are things looking? Bugs aside, what do people think of the new site theme and layout?
To any devs, what else is coming? To me, the site looks a bit barren compared to the last iteration. I’m assuming it’s still a work-in-progress, you know, like just about all my stupid art! 
I like it! I wish it responded a little better on mobile (but I’m sure that will get ironed out), and I wish there was a little bit more demarcation between individual posts in a thread, but that’s pretty much just a nitpick. Over-all I think Travis and Co. did a great job.
I am wondering though - a while back Travis mentioned a partnership with another platform (some kind of social media style site for artists) - I don’t see any of that here yet. @Travis - is that still coming, or did I imagine that (wouldn’t be the first time lol).
Anyway, yeah, liking the redesign so far.
I definitely like the color scheme and layout, but there’s almost no images anywhere even on the main page and that makes it feel barren - at least compared to the old site, which had some images. Most “forum” sites don’t, but this one is ABOUT images, so it’s kinda stark to me right now with nothing but text.
Okay, that was supposed to be a “Reply” to Genesis. So we don’t have nested threads or subthreads yet, evidently?
If you look in the upper-right corner of your previous post, you’ll see the “reply” arrow next to Genesis’s name. So I think it’s working, it’s just a little less “in your face”.
Thanks for the tip!
A lot more is working now, but a few things still need work in my opinion. If I have the site less than full-screen size, I can’t click on the Posts in the notifications, only the person who commented or posted. But in full-screen the word “Post” is a link, which works fine.
Also it’s nice to see more images popping up on the site. It seemed barren compared to the old one or the existing CGSociety main site.
Hey guys,
Images will be coming back we have a reacurring bug that’s been causing the images to post some times and not others so we have held off on posting i ages or fixing this until that bug is cured for good.
I would say 90% of fixes are back end and user related making sure log in works correctly site links are not broken for older threads. The irony is we are spending most of the time on things you wouldn’t know are broke if you weren’t looking for them.
Visual fixes are to follow they may be more in your face or obvious but they are easier to fix but lower priority as we have a small team. Some things like advanced search are coming but will take a while just know every month we are updating.
The platform we acquired was cg+ we are working out all bugs before adding more code for new features.
Let us know what you do and dont like and we will do our best to review and put into a priority flow to update when slots appear
I’m glad the right side scroll bar is gone or fixed.
Aside from that to echo what’s been said is that the lack of art is a problem. I would tend to believe that unless that interfered with all of the forum code that should have been the first thing that was fixed.
You only get one chance to make a first impression or a new first impression after that it becomes exponentially more difficult to attract new visitors.
The only thing I dislike is the lack of visible info under members usernames in their posts. Basic stuff like their date joined and number of posts really should be displayed like it used to be.
IDK what’s up with this, but it seems like the number of spam threads has been higher in the last week than it has been in the last few years. Outside of flagging them, anything else we can do to help w/that?
The three day hold on new user post has been removed as to many users were mistaking the hold for the registration being broken this means you may see more spam especially if you use the “latest” thread viewer for forums. If you see Spam just tag my name or any admin names we try to make sure spam is removed instantly or within 6 hours max but there are times of the day between Los Angeles, the Uk and Australia we miss it.
Just for the record, not trying to complain, but the Notifications still don’t have links built-in currently. I have to click “View All Notifications” to actually get to them; the only clickable link in the drop-down “menu” thingy is for the person who posted or commented, taking me to their member bio page and not to the comment/post I’m being notified about.
Hope that makes sense.
Hi, The old layout seemed so much easier for me to get intuitively. The biggest problem I’m having … and this has been significant enough for me that I’ve actually looked elsewhere for answers to problems than here (and this used to be my main source to go to) … is that, prior, we could search within a forum for a term. Now, any search seems to return results from the whole site/all forums, it seems. And the previews of the messages (rather than just showing the title of the posts) run so long, that I have to scroll a lot to look through the posts. Specially, I’m seeing many posts with long pieces of code … I know that these posts are not relevant to my search, but I still have to scroll through them to get to the next one … and since most results aren’t relevant, I’m spending a lot more time scrolling/sifting through the search results.
The biggest thing … is there an advanced search like there was before, where we can search for results in just one forum? That would be the most helpful.
Overall, I found the older layout/theme to be much more easily to intuitively move around in. Fwiw.
Also, just noticed … the search results don’t indicate what forum they’re from. So the only way to see if they’re relevant to my search/software, is by clicking on it, then going back to the results, etc. Taking a lot of energy/time to sift through. And the title for each thread … is at the bottom of the preview. Seems a bit contrary to how someone would normally process a search result. I’d expect first to see what forum the thread is in, then the title, and if I already know from those two bits of info that it’s not relevant to my search, I’d go down to the next search result. Much slower for the eyes to sort through results the way they’re showing now.Again, fwiw.
Thanks for the feedback. I have mentioned a few times in a few forums that advanced search is on our list to build. This does mean we don’t have a quick solution but it is a priority for us as well .
One workaround is to actually tag the search terms you are looking for in google followed by cgtalk or cgsociety 8x out of 10 i found threads faster than the old advanced search that way.
All I can say for now is that this is a scheduled fix we plan on getting to asap and sorry for the temporary inconvienince
Thanks for that info, Travis. That’s got to be frustrating for you and the team, to be working on something but get criticism. Thanks for the work you’re doing, truly. I hadn’t seen any posts about that, so I didn’t know or realize that this is a work in progress. I’m guessing there are others that also don’t know about it … ? May I suggest a sticky somewhere to give everyone a heads up that the change is in fact an ongoing project? And perhaps a notification somewhere on the site where everyone will be sure to see it, pointing them to this sticky? If people know what’s going on, I know they’ll have no problems understanding that you guys are, so graciously, working hard behind the scenes on these things. And thank you for all the work you do!
Perhaps an interim workaround would be a Google-based search box that automatically plopped “CGtalk” as the first term or something? I too search a lot, but haven’t lately.
Web design can be as much a nightmare as any heavy CGI project. Keep up the good work, Travis and everyone! It’s getting better and better.