New CoasterBuzz

I agree with DantheCoasterman about the News and Recent Topics seperation. I also have a hard time reading and need different colors/font. Otherwise it's just too confusing

Gemini said:

ERAU Rocketeer said:
It is an improvement over the new PointBuzz

That means a lot coming from an infrequent site user outside the web industry.

Not to mention the layouts, especially the forum, are nearly identical.

Actually, I visit both sites quite often and have a minor in computer science.

And you're a troll, too.

Oh, and Walt and I don't have degrees in anything computer related, but we've been running community sites for about 18 years between us. You'd think we'd know better than to feed trolls.

Great Job Jeff! :-)

I have been reading this site for years and I love the new layout and changes that you have added Jeff. Great Job!

Not to come across as ungrateful of the hard work you have put in, however I would like to point out that on many of the coaster photos, the description of the photo now includes the email address of the person who contributed it (ex, http://coasterbuzz.com/CoasterPhoto.aspx?id=2668 ).

I like it. However, I do wish that when I click on the more recent active forum topics key on the bottum it could seperate the TR's from the general buzz like it used to.

Looks nice, Jeff. Excellent job. :)

I posted twice because I wasn't acknowledged about it, whether you even realized it was like that, are keeping it, etc. and you asked for constructive criticism, 'tiz all. And you said you were going to keep it no matter what, that's all i needed to here and I don't need to mention it again. Was also curious how other people thought about it. I have designed a few websites and took a class in school so I was curious if it bothered anyone else or if it was just a weird pet peeve or what.

The big box ad kind of screws up the layout since it's fixed width, 350 width grey space with nothing (except ad at top) is a bit extreme, and 618 width for the actual content means more than a 1/3 is blank / unused space. But if thats what you need to keep the site goin' then thats what you have to do. [I know, I know, pay the $20...] but i'm talking blank real-estate, not the actual ad part. Just seems wasteful to me.

GIGAFORCE01 said:
I like it. However, I do wish that when I click on the more recent active forum topics key on the bottum it could seperate the TR's from the general buzz like it used to.

I don't even understand what that means.

mfivsdarienlake said:
I posted twice because I wasn't acknowledged about it...

There are 70 posts in this topic now and I'm prioritizing things. I wasn't aware I was being held accountable to you.

I've got news for you chief... the body area of the old site was 550px, so this 610px is wider than it was before. And for club members, it's even 760px. The box ad isn't going anywhere. Furthermore, text is not readable when it goes a thousand pixels across a screen. That's why newspapers (those things they deliver to houses made of paper with words printed on them) have the text in narrow columns. Thus the fixed width. It's easier to read.

So now you can tell the other kids at school what you learned about human factors when you're building Web sites. Learning is fun!

^^It means when you scroll down to the bottom of the home page and click on the more recent active forum topics key it goes to the rest of the most recent topics, but they are not organized. All of the tr’s and general buzz are together. It used to be on the old buzz that once I clicked active forum topics on the homepage. I could choose whether I wanted to view the most recent tr’s, general buzz, or ect.

I hope that clarifies things a bit.

As for the maintenance of the database by users, I'm all for it. There's always little things that need to be tweaked that always bother me, but I never think they're important enough to bother you with. Perhaps make the database editing a members thing? Just a thought.

Just another random thought, will members get to pick different color schemes down the road? Oh, and, great job on the site!

You should add an iPhone homepage icon for the site

Why?

I wasn't arguing the total width, just the gray bar width. I agree that fixed width is better. Only other thing i've noticed is parsing links automatically in the signature, since there is no dynamic text box there and doing the url="blah" can be confusing for some people; but of course that's getting into the nitty gritty / low / no priority list. entering a link as is will just give you plain text.

Is the podcast site going to get integrated eventually? Another suggestion to maybe fill up some of the real-estate in the gray bar is with a miniature calendar of the month or month + next month with the events/meetups/etc, because I know a lot of people don't use or know about the calendar because its kind of seperate and such a small link, but if there was a miniature version in the side bar (perhaps bolding the dates with events like the page is now, but keep it smaller and leave out all the text boxes etc. I think more people would use it and I think it would integrate well with the sidebar making it the same size as the small boxes so it integrates with club members as well.

Oh my God dude... step away from teh Internets before I fill the right side with your avatar. I'm not discussing the finer points of design with you anymore. It's irritating.

Eric: Recent posts have always been mixed together, otherwise there'd be no point and you could simply go to a specific forum page.

Bob: OK... I wanted to gauge interest first. I have some ideas that would allow quasi-editing in a non-destructive way.

I may allow the member skinning again at some point. Almost no one used it on the old site, even though I thought it was cool back in 2003. :)

What about the iPhone icon?

Noticed everything loading much faster now!

Well, you say that thinner is better, but yet the club members get the wide version anyways which is exactly what I was talking about [if it's about the 1 box ad, then that's fine, but now you are stating that you want a thin view]. Then you say you are keeping the right alignment on the thread list, but yet the exact same threads listed on the home page the # of views, comments, etc. is left aligned. It's inconsistent. I'm honestly not trying to be an ass or irritating. Now my tone is probably coming across different then it really is, abecause it seems like we are fighting back in forth when i'm not trying to at all. I'll just let it go, and move on and away from the thread I don't have a problem with that if its irritating so as of this post I won't anymore in this thread. But before I shut up, thanks for the hard work you have done. You've been wanting to change it for awhile and I like it, and I truly mean that. I'm more of a design guy, not a code guy so I appreciate the many hours/days/weeks/months/years you spend doing these things, because I could never do it. The ASP, c++, ajax, whatever you kids speak of are foreign words to me. I can go as far as css, php and sql and that's about it... but that's why I stayed away from computer science and stuck with information technology. Not trying to be on your bad side... and hey, you even liked me at ONE time at least (or at least my website)... you gratiously hosted it on your servers and domain for a few years!

Thanks.