First Update in a Year- What do you think?!

[davide101]

We rolled out a major upgrade to our forums today and implemented a big portion of our wish list:

• Fixed layout - 974px default with a 1174px option
• Better use of the sidebar. In particular, we moved a lot of the thread controls from the bottom of the page to the side.
• Likes system

We also consolidated all of our manual customizations to additional.css, header, footer, headinclude, navigation, forumhome, forum listings, and showhread. This will make future updates a breeze.

Next up will be a big focus on surfacing the most liked and most shared content on the website. For example, what are the most Liked posts of the day? The week? The month? We could potentially give out special recognition to those that have a high likes to post ratio to incentivize quality over quantity.

What do you think? Like the new layout? Have any suggestions?

http://www.diabetesdaily.com/forum/

[Loco.M]

I like the very simple look to the forums, sidebar and post
the post did take a while to load though, might see if you can speed the load up.
I'd like to see a bit more on the side column for the post page, I dig the "similar threads" box, great idea!

[davide101]

Thanks, Loco. I think we'll eventually show the most liked posts from the same forum. Or we may do a longer similar threads listing but sort it by the number of likes. We've never had all of that space to work with, so I'm a little overwhelmed by the possibilities.

I'm looking to moving everything on the showthread template to sprites. We just did that for the forum homepage and it cut the loading time in half (literally). We also discovered that we could compress the stock vB image sizes by an average of over 80% without loss in quality.

[Riasat]

looks nice