[lennardseah]

you can't beat (nginx+php-fpm) with litespeed/apache on raw performance and board load issues are not a problem for SLC SSDs

[tensor]

ohh may i ask which SSD its using ah.
could it be Z-drive e84?

[Slammer]

IMHO, the new look takes more steps backwards than it takes forward.

Pros:
- Slicker and nicer colours.
- More polished UI elements like buttons etc.

Cons:
- Minimum browser window width is too high. Not everyone maximizes their browser window.
- Page load and scroll speed is now much slower on my firefox 3.5.3 running on AMD quad core. Never had such issues with the old layout. Even hardwarezone feels smoother now.
- Some font sizes are too large, especially the forum section titles on the main forum page. Along with the increased minimum page width, the title often wraps to the next line further uglifying things.
- The Last Post preview text could be lengthened to fill the width of its column, and not prematurely truncated with a '...'. See screenshot below.

Here's how things look like on my screen:

[pixelman]

Hi Slammer,
Thanks for the feedback.

The forums was indeed designed for 1024x768 screen res and above. Registered users can collapse the ads by clicking on '↑↓ Ads' under the page title. this should allow the forums to fit well in a 1024x768 screen, unless the posts you are viewing have extra wide images.

The scroll speed is a known FF bug for absolute/fixed positioned elements on the page - in our case the top controlbar. To improve performance, turn off smooth scrolling in FF preferences. Since most users have found it useful to have the controlbar sit on the top of the scrolling page, we have gone with that. Currently we are in the process of optimizing the layout such that it will bypass FF from rendering the entire page content during scroll. This feature should be available shortly. You can give Google Chrome a try. It's blazing fast on the forums.

The font size for the forum titles has been increased due to user feedback. I've done some space optimization so that the titles should fit comfortable in 1024x768 layout.

[Slammer]

Thanks for the prompt response pixelman.

Originally Posted by pixelman

The scroll speed is a known FF bug for absolute/fixed positioned elements on the page - in our case the top controlbar. To improve performance, turn off smooth scrolling in FF preferences. Since most users have found it useful to have the controlbar sit on the top of the scrolling page, we have gone with that. Currently we are in the process of optimizing the layout such that it will bypass FF from rendering the entire page content during scroll. This feature should be available shortly. You can give Google Chrome a try. It's blazing fast on the forums.

The font size for the forum titles has been increased due to user feedback. I've done some space optimization so that the titles should fit comfortable in 1024x768 layout.

The width of the screenshot is 1093 pixels (about 1062 pixels without the borders and vertical scrollbar), so the site should fit nicely but it doesn't...

Completely doing away with smooth scrolling is not a option unfortunately. I debugged the issue and concluded that as well, and ended up installing a firefox smooth scrolling extension to work around the issue. But still the scrolling performance is relatively sluggish compared with other sites.

I have Chrome 4 with smooth scrolling extension installed and it works great. But Chrome is not my primary choice of browser as it doesn't have other extensions that I have grown to depend on in Firefox.

Don't get me wrong, it is not disastrously bad... just felt like a step backwards.

[pixelman]

The width of the screenshot is 1093 pixels (about 1062 pixels without the borders and vertical scrollbar), so the site should fit nicely but it doesn't...

As mentioned, you can use the collapse Ads feature for now. As the ad dimensions were carried over from the previous layout, we are in the midst of changing the ad dimensions such that it will not force the page to be wider than 1024.

As for scrolling, the FF bug reference is here. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201307 We're working on a work-around solution, so hang in there. thanks!

[nstc]

Is it possible to customise the background colour of the thread title and posts pages? Just a feedback - Current colour is beige (and on the bright side) scheme which makes it strenuous to my eyes. Nowadays I don't come to VR Forum as often due to this issue. Not so friendly to the eyes.. I still like the blue colour background (contrast with black characters is better). Tks.

[Blitzzzz]

I agree with the new site being a tad too bright for my liking. Perhaps there could be options to skin the forums in different colors.

[pixelman]

will see how we can plan that in for updates ahead.

[Bad Cyborg]

Problem with size? You can try NoSquint for Firefox.

This forum looks perfectly alright with setting of 95% Full zoom and 120% Text zoom.

[bad]

I prefer the former look...

Not too strain on the eyes