# Sooo how is everyone liking the new ENWorld?



## iwarrior-poet (Jul 8, 2008)

Gotta be honest, the new front-page interface is going to take a little while to get used to. It seems more image based (as opposed to text based). Still, it does look awful Purrrty and I am sure I will adjust to it soon.
Are there some distinct improvements (in terms of ease of use) that have occurred? I haven't had enough free time to fully play with it.


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## Mark (Jul 8, 2008)

Rocks!  MM did a great job!


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## blargney the second (Jul 8, 2008)

I'm loving the performance improvements.  Top notch.
-blarg


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## Mistwell (Jul 8, 2008)

Really great job!


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## Intrope (Jul 8, 2008)

It rocks! Consistently fast, nifty little improvements all over the place.


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## Armadillo (Jul 8, 2008)

I like the faster loading times.  I don't like the slider bars around the stories on the front page.  They seem unnecessary and really add visual clutter.


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## jdrakeh (Jul 8, 2008)

I'm digging it.


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## Merkuri (Jul 9, 2008)

I love all the new nifty features, like tags and the wiki.  This stuff is like candy to me.


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## BulletMagnet (Jul 9, 2008)

I guess Im the only that does NOT like the the new front page. I used to like just clicking on my shortcut and BAM there is all the latest text in news all there in my face. Now I my eyes just glaze over at all the prudict reviews and other stuff that I have no interest in whatsoever in my face. I dont expect it to change and I guess I'll have to find a different site for my 4th edition news....


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## Angel Tarragon (Jul 9, 2008)

EnWorld 1 feels like I had a plane ticket for coach seating and the upgrade to EnWorld 2 feels like I've been upgraded to First Class seating.


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## StreamOfTheSky (Jul 9, 2008)

To be quite honest?  I preffered EN1.  I like the speed, I like the multiquote option, now that I've gotten the hang of it.  The avatars for supporters and staff are nicely done, if that's considered part of the shift.  The rest?  I have no need or desire for blogs and wikis, I liked actually having a formatting/smily/etc... interface, cause I have trouble remembering the text codes for them.  In fact, I preferred the design of the old smilies.  The wink looks like a pirate now, what the heck?  And I liked the old maniacal laughter one.

These are minor things, and while i prefferred 1, 2 is certainly still a very good site, and I suppose if I had more use for the new features I'd be ecstatic about them.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, it's probably just me, but I don't like the Fork thread option.  It just looks unsightly on a main forum page to see so many "Forked" titles in large print, and i don't see the need for it at all.  I never had a problem copying an address, going to the appropriate forum, and pasting it in my new thread.


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## Kor (Jul 9, 2008)

BulletMagnet said:


> I used to like just clicking on my shortcut and BAM there is all the latest text in news all there in my face. Now I my eyes just glaze over at all the prudict reviews and other stuff that I have no interest in whatsoever in my face. I dont expect it to change and I guess I'll have to find a different site for my 4th edition news....




My thoughts as well.  All the little windows that I have to use to scroll to see if the news within is interesting are getting annoying as hell.

If there's any chance of changing back or having a more "text based" display, then please consider it.  All these windows are just far too annoying.


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## Michael Morris (Jul 9, 2008)

Kor said:


> My thoughts as well.  All the little windows that I have to use to scroll to see if the news within is interesting are getting annoying as hell.
> 
> If there's any chance of changing back or having a more "text based" display, then please consider it.  All these windows are just far too annoying.



I've recently adjusted the CSS so that now only Internet Explorer has scroll bars.  Other browsers have auto-adjusting heights on the boxes.  Internet Explorer doesn't fully display the images if the div height isn't explicitly set, yet another example of its thousands of violations of the CSS 2.1 specification.


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## Jonny Nexus (Jul 9, 2008)

The advert interface is a lot better. In the past, once you'd created the ad it would simply blast away at full speed until it had exhausted all your impressions. If you were the only person advertising, then you could blow a million impressions in a few days, which is pretty pointless. Also, you couldn't turn advertisments on and off, so you had to keep deleting them and then re-creating them.

Now you can set a number of impressions you want them the advert to show, and the date range within which you want them shown. And you can toggle the advert on and off.

That's a big help for advertisers.


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## Michael Morris (Jul 9, 2008)

Speaking of which, animated gifs should be working now.  And btw - I have other feature ideas for that section - one of the first is figuring out a means to have an ad evenly distribute over the course of it's run.  That is if you buy 1000 impressions and want it to run 10 days the system will make sure only 100 ads run per day.


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## hewligan (Jul 9, 2008)

My view: first the positives:

Faster. Actually, it is much faster and generally more responsive.
The forum posting interface is better.

Now the negatives:

I cannot spend much time on the site at the moment due to the white text on black issue. I need my papyrus mode (or black text on white) back so that I can use the site without getting a headache.

The front page needs work. It is crowded and the importance of text has been relegated. I used to read the front page every day. Now I skip it and go straight to the forums.


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## iwarrior-poet (Jul 9, 2008)

*bottomline (for me)*

Frontpage:
I like the look of the icons, but I miss the wealth of info/links on the front page. I don't really have time to drill down into each of the article/icons. I would prefer being able to read through the info and then select what to follow-up on.

Forums:
I do think that the form improvements are mighty, mighty slick!


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## iwarrior-poet (Jul 9, 2008)

Hmm... I may have spoken too soon. The elimination of the myriad scroll bars is a vast improvement. Now I can easily go through the whole page. Also now there is more helpful text along with the icons. 
Nice Job!


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## Merkuri (Jul 9, 2008)

StreamOfTheSky said:


> Forgot to mention, it's probably just me, but I don't like the Fork thread option.  It just looks unsightly on a main forum page to see so many "Forked" titles in large print, and i don't see the need for it at all.  I never had a problem copying an address, going to the appropriate forum, and pasting it in my new thread.




You may not have a problem making your own new threads, but a lot of other people do.   I think the fork button is great.  It encourages people to start new threads instead of derailing old ones (though we still have a little bit of that).

Speaking of the fork option, I haven't used it much myself, but does it put a post in the thread you forked from?  If it doesn't do that already I think that would be a great addition (if it's simple).  That way you could make sure people already in a discussion could follow your fork if they were interested in your tangent, and it would be an easy way to tell if somebody had already forked about that topic.  Say a topic does go off on a tangent.  I'd like to be able to fork a new thread and make it obvious to everybody in the first thread that they should go to the new one for more on that topic instead of continuing to clutter the original thread with the tangent topic.


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## Arnwyn (Jul 9, 2008)

Not bad so far. It looks a little early, so I'm not sure I can fairly comment, but still not bad.

The speed is good, and some of the features (forked threads, multiquote, etc) are spiffy.

Still missing a bunch of things (a _useable_ stealth skin, options for the # of threads per page) as well as an inferior front page and worse smilies compared to ENW1, but like I said, still early.


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## Scurvy_Platypus (Jul 9, 2008)

You know... I've never bothered with the front page. It was only because of this thread that I actually looked at it. I'm sure I must have seen the old front page at some point, but I really can't remember. The new one seems fine if that's the sort of thing you're into.

Me, I have a shortcut that goes directly to the forums and I go from there.

But the performance overall is nice, and there seems to be some other nifty new bits kicking around. If I was actually running a d20 game right now, I'd probably go ahead and take advantage of the blogging thing; since I'm not and I do have a LiveJournal account, I'll have to pass on the blogging thing for now.


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## Kor (Jul 9, 2008)

Michael Morris said:


> I've recently adjusted the CSS so that now only Internet Explorer has scroll bars.  Other browsers have auto-adjusting heights on the boxes.  Internet Explorer doesn't fully display the images if the div height isn't explicitly set, yet another example of its thousands of violations of the CSS 2.1 specification.




Hrmm, yet another reason for me to consider trying Firefox.  Everyone who uses it seems very satisfied with it, yet I have never even looked at it in use -- I may have to change that


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## iwarrior-poet (Jul 9, 2008)

I have been using Firefox for the last 18 months. It is GREAT! I haven't even peeked at Explorer in awhile---so it might be making a comeback---but I prefer to stay away from MS when I can. Firefox 3.0 is very, very nice.


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## Michael Morris (Jul 9, 2008)

Kor said:


> Hrmm, yet another reason for me to consider trying Firefox.  Everyone who uses it seems very satisfied with it, yet I have never even looked at it in use -- I may have to change that



Firefox 3 parses javascript 9 times faster than Internet Explorer. NINE TIMES...  On any ajax heavy site it's impossible to tolerate IE once you've been on Firefox.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Jul 10, 2008)

Thanks for the elimination of scroll bars! I'm loving it! (Safari user here! Give it up for all standards compliant browsers!) Thanks for all the work going in to polishing everything.


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## Michael Morris (Jul 10, 2008)

Safari used to be weird - it mastered CSS 2.1 about version 2.02 but it kept screwing up tables until version 3 which made it quiet test to dev for alonside IE since tables were for a long time the only reliable cross browser markup for layout.


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## Orius (Jul 10, 2008)

I too prefered the standard smilies, and I'd like to have a skin or whatever that uses the classic ENWorld look.  I can't figure out how features that I hadn't given much though to work either, stuff like signatures only appearing once on a page, and all articles being automatically marked as read once /i log off or close the browser.


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## Blue (Jul 10, 2008)

I'm liking it a lot!

The only thing I'm missing from the old ENWorld is the "latest forum posts" box on the front page.  I rarely have time to check all the forums, and seeing a selection from all of them brought me to some threads I would otherwise have missed.

A very good job Michael, I'm liking it.

Cheers,
=Blue(23)


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## Blue (Jul 10, 2008)

Double post, sorry.


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## Holy Bovine (Jul 10, 2008)

I freaking love it.  The front page looks awesome - I always hated the unending stream of text and links that it was before.  The next, clean boxes are simply beautiful.  The speed of the forums is amazing.  I never thought I would see ENW like this again.  Bravo to Michael - he done good.


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## HellHound (Jul 14, 2008)

*love* the new front page and overall work.


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## Olaf the Stout (Jul 28, 2008)

I like most of the new stuff on ENW2.  I do look forward to the return of a Stealth skin though.  I'm sure that will happen eventually.

One thing I don't like compared to ENW1 is the front page.  I used to read the front page all the time on ENW1, even though I had the forums bookmarked in my favourites.  Since the change to ENW2 I rarely look at the front page now.

I'm on IE at work so I still get the scroll bars.  However, even without them I still definitely prefer the old, text-based setup.  It was just a lot easier to read the stories that I was interested in.  It also allowed a lot more stories to sit on the one page compared to the current set-up.  Is it possible to set things up so that individual users can choose to view the front page using the ENW1 display maybe?

Good stuff overall though.

Olaf the Stout


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## Sparky (Jul 29, 2008)

+1 to all the loves.

My single favorite feature:
Hot keys when formatting text... ctrl-b now makes bold tags! (etc, etc) Woot!

My single biggest complaint:
Non-white default text. The contrast between the default post text and the background is too sharp for my liking.

A color somwhere between white and the yellow link text would do the trick. 

Maybe a skin that is identical in every way, except that the default text less contrasty. That'd be nice.


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## HellHound (Jul 30, 2008)

Sparky said:


> +1 to all the loves.
> 
> My single favorite feature:
> Hot keys when formatting text... ctrl-b now makes bold tags! (etc, etc) Woot!.




Hells yes.

it bugs me on other sites where those hot keys don't work. The one I've really noticed is eBay where whenever I want to bold something I end up pulling up the bookmarks doohickey.


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## Chadarius (Aug 2, 2008)

I have to be honest. I love the content of ENWorld. But this new version is just as horrible as the last one to use. Using vBulletin as a backend for a whole website just doesn't make sense to me. I think you would be much better off using a real content management system for news. Certainly you could continue to use vBulletin for the message boards I suppose. 

The whole thing is just highly cluttered, slow, and missing everything I would want in a modern news and comment based website. 

I'd scrap the whole thing and start working on some MySQL scripts to convert the whole blasted thing to Drupal or something. At least then your news pages can be cached and throttled better. 

RSS feeds are built in. Tons of great modules for blogging and adding in some great "Web 2.0" (man I hate that buzz phrase, but what else do you call it?) stuff to integrate into twitter, messaging, digg, delicious, pounce, etc... You would have much better media support as well.

Seems like you are already familiar with PHP. Take the jump! 

Let me remind you that I am still totally loving the content of this site. This is not meant to be desparaging. I'm just speaking my mind. I could be on crack you know!


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## ki11erDM (Aug 2, 2008)

Chadarius said:


> I have to be honest. I love the content of ENWorld. But this new version is just as horrible as the last one to use. Using vBulletin as a backend for a whole website just doesn't make sense to me. I think you would be much better off using a real content management system for news...




I could not agree with this more.  But thanks for fixing the scroll bars, for the most part.
And I am really unhappy with the front page content now, almost none at all.  How did the news go from dozens of interesting links and stories to maybe one a day?  You have honestly gone from one of my favorite sites on the web to a site I dread visiting.  *shrug*  (oh and why the heck does the font not default to a viewable color when you cut and past into the message box?)


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## Morrus (Aug 2, 2008)

Chadarius said:


> I have to be honest. I love the content of ENWorld. But this new version is just as horrible as the last one to use. Using vBulletin as a backend for a whole website just doesn't make sense to me. I think you would be much better off using a real content management system for news. Certainly you could continue to use vBulletin for the message boards I suppose.




The old site used VBulletin as a news backend.  This version doesn't, though.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Aug 2, 2008)

ki11erDM said:


> How did the news go from dozens of interesting links and stories to maybe one a day?  You have honestly gone from one of my favorite sites on the web to a site I dread visiting.  *shrug*



You know what, I was so concerned with the funny scroll bars within boxes that when those were fixed (for non-IE users) I was satisfied enough that I didn't pay attention to the serious reduction of real news on the front page. You just got me to take an inventory of how I use the front page and what I miss. I really miss the dozens and dozens of small links to industry and community news and happenings on the front page as well sorted nicely by category. 

Now the front page is simply a place I find the link to go to the forums. It feels like very little is going on at all in the hobby.


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## Lazybones (Aug 2, 2008)

I miss the skins (I am glad they are on the list of future adds), and the ability to download threads to a text file. I am also still getting occasional hangs when I access the site, but it's much better than it was a few weeks back. Threads here seem to take about two to three times as long to open as on other sites (5-8 seconds as opposed to 2-3 at other sites, in a random test from my favs folder). 

I haven't really noticed any improvements in terms of functionality, but then again I don't really need to fork threads or visit the front page very often. 

If it keeps ENWorld more stable and functional in the long run, I'm all for it. But from an outsider's perspective (i.e. someone who doesn't know the inner workings of the site), the transition has degraded my ENWorld experience somewhat. Still a great site, just my 2c.

EDIT: It just took six minutes for this post to register, and another 30 seconds to bring open the edit dialog.


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## Morrus (Aug 2, 2008)

Eric Anondson said:


> You know what, I was so concerned with the funny scroll bars within boxes that when those were fixed (for non-IE users) I was satisfied enough that I didn't pay attention to the serious reduction of real news on the front page. You just got me to take an inventory of how I use the front page and what I miss. I really miss the dozens and dozens of small links to industry and community news and happenings on the front page as well sorted nicely by category.
> 
> Now the front page is simply a place I find the link to go to the forums. It feels like very little is going on at all in the hobby.




To be fair, the _amount_ of news isn't even remotely linked to the format.


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## AdmundfortGeographer (Aug 2, 2008)

Morrus said:


> To be fair, the _amount_ of news isn't even remotely linked to the format.



So true. It feels like there is a faming of D20 news lately. Maybe that is but another consequence of the developments in the industry lately . . . everyone is announcing little or producing less, therefor nothing to report.


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## Seeker95 (Aug 6, 2008)

*Front Page News*

My only complaint regarding the new ENW is with the front page news. Specifically,

*1. Dating.*
I wish the news was arranged by date. I can understand "sticky-ing" a specific story to the top left, but after that, I feel stories should be listed in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom, ordered-by-date, newest-to-oldest format. I visit daily.  Having to scroll down the page to find the new news is odd, and sometimes it gets missed when I am popping in for a quick "is there anything new" look.

*2. Bylines 1.*
I seriously could not care less who posted a story. And if I am going to see who the scoop was, I would rather see it at the end of the box blurb.

*3. Bylines 2.*
I would suggest replacing the current byline location with a story-source tag instead. If a story is about a WotC release, put WotC there.  If the story is about a Green Ronin announcement, say Green Ronin. Very few stories we see on EN are not publisher-related. Those that are, are obviously so.


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## Merkuri (Aug 6, 2008)

Seeker95 said:


> *3. Bylines 2.*
> I would suggest replacing the current byline location with a story-source tag instead. If a story is about a WotC release, put WotC there.  If the story is about a Green Ronin announcement, say Green Ronin. Very few stories we see on EN are not publisher-related. Those that are, are obviously so.




That's a good idea.  I always expected that second line after the title to be a topic or publisher related instead of the person who wrote the scoop.


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## Arnwyn (Aug 7, 2008)

Everything Seeker95 said (I can't believe it's not in date order).

Of course, with that said, I like the news layout of the _temp page_ more than ENW2's page. Heh.


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## Chadarius (Aug 8, 2008)

Arnwyn. I too like the temp page better. Less is so much more. Just think of the bandwidth savings. I say add more news links and slap the EN world logo on that temp page and call it a web site! If you offered that temp page as an option, I would use it all the time by the way.


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## Chadarius (Aug 8, 2008)

Arnwyn. I too like the temp page better. Less is so much more. Just think of the bandwidth savings. I say add more news links and slap the EN world logo on that temp page and call it a web site! If you offered that temp page as an option, I would use it all the time by the way.


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## Jürgen Hubert (Aug 8, 2008)

All in all, I like the new site - the wiki, the blogs, and the Social Groups are all very useful.

The only downside is that the site often seems to break down when I try to load a page - for me, this is much more noticeable than with the old site (since I'm living in Europe, I rarely experience the site as its busiest hours of the day...).


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## Dark Mistress (Sep 4, 2008)

I like how it is much faster than the old site. Don't care overly for the new front page, not a major deal i just liked the old one better.

My big dislike and this one bugs me a lot. The new reviews, I really don't like how they are not broken up by company anymore. That was hands down the biggest reason i came to ENworld for reviews. I could hit all the companies I was a fan of and check all their latest products quickly and easily.


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## Mustrum_Ridcully (Sep 14, 2008)

Sometimes, it's the "subtle" stuff.

For example, I just posted a link to a website in plain-text - instead of just showing the address, it showed the web site title instead.

Of course, that's also a kind of "security" risk - if someone doesn't bother to check what he clicks on, he might go to his fake bank account website or far worse and likely, he will get rickrolled!


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## ki11erDM (Sep 15, 2008)

Just popping back in and saying: The front page and news is kicking some good butt now days.  I really like the new downloads part 

Thanks for your hard work!


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## iwarrior-poet (Sep 17, 2008)

*Starting to really get turned off by the front page...*

There just simply isn't enough context info. There aren't any date references, no clear indications which website/companies the links are tied to. It may be quicker, but it is not in the least attractive. A website should be FUN, and the new front page is definitely not fun.


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## iwarrior-poet (Sep 23, 2008)

OK, now we are beginning to cook a bit---definitely enjoying the added info with the links on the current front page (9/23/08)


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## Kor (Sep 24, 2008)

I really think EN World should switch back to their old website format.  It was very easy to see what was new for the day, and you got a quick little preview of the text.  (And in some cases, a short paragraph was all that was needed).

The second last change with all the windows took a little getting used to -- I downloaded Firefox and it worked great.  Sadly, 80% of the people using the Internet are using IE... so I'm guessing that is why the "windowed" page was scrapped.

The new page now looks very amateurish.  Perhaps it was just meant to be "simple" but now it looks so simple that it gives the appearance to be designed by a novice.  It doesn't convey much info at a glance and it just looks bad.

Please, please, please switch back to your old format (the one that you were using prior to the "windowed" look.)


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## iwarrior-poet (Sep 24, 2008)

Oooo!!!
They put back the dates!!! Psyche!!! Slowly getting back to a snazzy front page!!!
(I don't think I am being sarcastic---but am old and jaded so I might be )


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## Graf (Sep 25, 2008)

I really like how the addresses are now the actually forum titles. Combined with the newer browers uni-bar function it makes it a lot easier to just type and go.

So thanks!


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## iwarrior-poet (Sep 26, 2008)

And now paragraphs of info explaining the links!!! Sweet!!! Getting back to some of the old front page ---upfrontlotofinfo angle!!!


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## Cat Moon (Sep 27, 2008)

Except for a couple of new shiny buttons, I really hadn't noticed much of a change.


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## Aus_Snow (Sep 27, 2008)

Um, I actually prefer the old site, all in all.  Don't kill me or nuffin' - I's only a poor gobbo!

I do honestly appreciate all the time and hard work that went into the changes, and some of the additional features are great. . .

It's just an [overall, pretty] _insignificant_, _aesthetic_ preference for the way it was. I thought it was much prettier and well, a fair dash quicker too. And the front page was 100% better.  Like I said, nothin' personal O wise and mighty staff and co.  I even gave what I could to Mr. Morris, so's he hopefully wouldn't go falling apart.

Stealth, yeah - useful. The PHB skin was nice, too. Or was I the only fool liking that colour scheme? 

But hey, if the changes were necessary, then what're a few appearance and speed niggles anyway. Feh.


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## iwarrior-poet (Sep 29, 2008)

Friday's front page was as just about the best I have seen in the past several months. Snazzy pic of Draconomicon, good info on links, nice all around. If this is going to be the new level----then I am plenty happy with it.


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