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XF2 testbed now available

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I don't care for the available themes (Dark is too light of a grey, Light is too eye-searing)... but XF2 is pretty mature and has plenty of themes available for it, so that's just a limited testbed implementation thing. I assume that some nicely dark option will be added before the release, and browsing and posting seemed to work from a quick test.
 
It seems I may be in the minority, but I generally like the look of XF2. I don't like the blackened themes here because they look like they could be default templates for an Invision Board forum from 2008. That is to say, outdated and ugly as hell. Granted, that might be a pinch of hyperbole on my part. Most of the other options are full-width styles, and I actually prefer the empty spaces on the side. On that note, will the final version retain the change width button? I only had a chance to check mobile before the default width was changed, but now that I'm on desktop I don't see the Change Width text to make it smaller again. Somewhat related: is there no way to hide the sidebar?

The only style I really use currently is the UI.X Dark style specifically because I feel it most closely matches the "modern" designs that are so common in XF2. My only real gripe about it is that the UI.X styles don't display the tags of a thread, but that's not a problem in the XF2 styles, so I'm already pretty satisfied all things considered. On the topic of tags, I do kinda feel like their inclusion in the thread list on mobile makes the thread rows a bit more elongated than I'd like, but the benefit of seeing the first few tags might outweigh that.

I do agree with the others that giving the dark style a splash of color would be an improvement. Some have mentioned darkening the gray, but I'd personally be fine whether the current gray is kept or it's made darker. I think an accent color would go much further aesthetically.

As a request, the UI.X styles have floating to-top and to-bottom buttons so you can quickly navigate to either end no matter where you are on the page. The XF2 styles have a button to go to the top on mobile, and that is probably the more useful of the two, but would it be possible to also add a button to go to the bottom?

Lastly, yay, centered text retains formatting when pasted over. This is gonna be huge for my third post in 6 years.
 
Wait, so everything is going to move to the other site in the future for the final version? If so, would we be able to include videos in threads that doesn't appear on YouTube and other sites?
 
I mean, with the margins issue fixed, and the unholy abomination that is circle avatars replaced with good, honest squares as god intended, most of the most egregious issues I had are fixed.

All that's left is to hopefully/maybe get a Theme akin to the DarkResponsive-Green I've been using since pretty much forever, and my smooth walnut caveman brain probably won't even notice a change.

Though my text editor was that shitty blue one by default, and I had to change it in preferences, but that one being garbage and a terrible default might just be my opinion.
 
The text editor is my biggest concern.

The non-blue editor is somewhat close to proper functionality for me. The most major issues are the fucked-up-ness of the Colored Text button (I FUCKING HATE having to click and pick the color each time, instead of keeping the color you used unless you specifically change it), and the lack of fullscreen.
(the shitty text formatting indicators and not immediately having every option are slightly lower concerns)

The blue one has a lot more issues for me.
 
The text editor is my biggest concern.

The non-blue editor is somewhat close to proper functionality for me. The most major issues are the fucked-up-ness of the Colored Text button (I FUCKING HATE having to click and pick the color each time, instead of keeping the color you used unless you specifically change it), and the lack of fullscreen.
(the shitty text formatting indicators and not immediately having every option are slightly lower concerns)

The blue one has a lot more issues for me.

The blue one, imo, is borderline unusable. Just flat-out a case of "If you're using it, you are objectively using the website wrong".

The other one, yeah, closer to what we've got here, my only *real* gripe other than what you mentioned is that there doesn't appear to be a Symbols/Special Characters button. Which admittedly quite minor and isn't some huge dealbreaker, but a bit annoying in the very rare cases I need one.

↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → β Æ ℜ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ω ϖ Ø

Those kinda things. Has a full suite of emojis/smilies, though. So at least the absolutely mandatory :V is retained.
 
Couldn't get a 2FA email to come through but the backup codes worked, so I'm going to guess it had something to do with it being a snapshot and that I won't get locked out of my account after the transition because of missing emails.

I've only got minor complaints that others have already mentioned, like the black rich text editor keeping some of the other options inside menus to seemingly slim the editor down. Personally I don't think keeping the editor small is necessary and prefer the chunkier one we have right now.

And that having to click ellipsis to gradually reveal the list of threadmarks is not as convenient as being able to just scroll down the list.
 
Seriously though, port the current themes to XF2 before the move actually happens. At least one of each if you can't do all the colors of each. The XF2 "dark" theme is barely darker than the current light theme. Make it the same colors as the current one.

Also unsticky the top bar, no one likes that it wastes far too much screen space.
 
Also unsticky the top bar, no one likes that it wastes far too much screen space.
Oh yeah, that one needs to be done.
And that having to click ellipsis to gradually reveal the list of threadmarks is not as convenient as being able to just scroll down the list.
Oh shit, oh fuck.

They better not keep the stupid fuckery where the threadmarks do not reveal all of themselves at once. At very large threads, they refuse to show everything even when I go directly to the threadmarks page!

Fuck that. I hate the threadmarks listing of XF2.
 
Also the change width button seems to have vanished and there are borders on mobile that shouldn't be there that I can't get rid of.
 
Something else I would like is for the profile page modal behavior on XF1 is different than the XF2 testbed. In XF1, the avatar size on the modal is like twice the size of the avatar size next to posts. On the XF2 testbed, it is the same size.

I would like it if we could have the old modal style back, or atleast the avatar size to be the same. I like to look at the avatars closer up without having to go to the actual profile page.
 
Does xf2 really not have a fullscreen mode for its text box?

Not the blue one.
 
I have noticed older embedded images aren't working.

Is that just because it's a snapshot or should I start scouring my stories to save them somewhere else in preparation?
 
Uh, the blue editor (the one that's supposed to be the current one?) is bugged out beyond belief on mobile right now.
Edit: Correction, they both are near useless on mobile currently.
The normal XF1 editor.
k46ace3qne7.jpg
XF2 TinyMCE
84apcow56x4.jpg
XF2 Frola
345xcwqv6d7.jpg
Nearly everything is missing and you have horizontally scroll the blue one. This is nowhere near ready to go out.
 
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Yeah on mobile the xf2 textboxes are so fucking clunky.
 
There's some weirdness.

My avatar is an old one I had (out of the countless I've used), and my like count I'd 5,000 lower than over here.

Aside from that it does look pretty sexy tho.
 
There's some weirdness.

My avatar is an old one I had (out of the countless I've used), and my like count I'd 5,000 lower than over here.

Aside from that it does look pretty sexy tho.
It looks awful.

Also some weirdness? It's got giant borders that won't go away, the text editors are unusable on mobile, posts are crushed in too small to read comfortably (even turning the text size down to 12, the minimum it currently allows, there's still not as much text per line as currently), and the header's sticky for no reason with no way to turn that off.

Also the font is some horrible sans serif thing that's just awful to try and read.
 
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So..one bit of feedback from using the Dark Theme on XF2
It is..incredibly hard to distinguish regular text from hyperlinked text in this version. Old one had the text in distinguishable yellow(for me since I'm using Blackend theme) color, this one is barely a shade lighter grey compared to the rest of the text..the only reason I even knew it was a hyperlink was because I'm the one who made it...

Further small comment on the dark theme.
By switching to a lighter grey it makes any colored text (like admin names)..blur a bit? While at the same poppping out as it actually seems brighter then the rest of the text Sorry, don't know how to call it..point is, compared to here, colored text is harder to read unless you actually zoom in several times....

To sum up, from the visual perspective the issue is that the theme got a bit too blended into grey while the bits of color in people's names/texts pop up far too much compared to the rest of the theme

ON a more general feedback..didn't have much time to properly poke around, but one thing to comment on is:
the various pictures being broken.
I'm assuming that pics in actual forum threads being broken is due to this being a test server so the...picture hosting? doesn't translate currently to XF2?
(opened a couple of forums on current QQ and XF2 QQ to check, current QQ had pics working without issue compared to borked XF2 pics)
That and seeing that multiple people's pfp not showing up
 
Margins seem very narrow on desktop for the Dark theme (which is called dark BECAUSE IT'S DARKER THAN WHITE DARK DOESN'T MEAN BLACK FOR FUCKS SAKE).

image.png
image.png

Both are full screen and from the edge of the browser to more or less the same point in the post.
 
Margins seem very narrow on desktop for the Dark theme (which is called dark BECAUSE IT'S DARKER THAN WHITE DARK DOESN'T MEAN BLACK FOR FUCKS SAKE).

image.png
image.png

Both are full screen and from the edge of the browser to more or less the same point in the post.
Why's this a bad thing? Wide margins waste space. Wikipedia's far shittier to browse since the redesign, and the whitespace is a big chunk of it.
 
which is called dark BECAUSE IT'S DARKER THAN WHITE DARK DOESN'T MEAN BLACK FOR FUCKS SAKE).
...huh.
While factually you are absolutely correct, gotta admit you're literally the first one on my 30 years of life who doesn't associate/use dark as almost completely black/a dark grey/something on the darker side of the color spectrum..whereas for something that's not as bright as white theyvuse light grey/light x color...

Speaking of colors....
Forewarning, never looked into ui so idk how easy/difficult it is, nor have i looked into xf2 discussions beforehand so if it was brought up before sorry...
I dearly, dearly hope that the themes of the current forum (especially Blackend variants) will be ported to xf2 layout because (i may possibly be in a very small minority here) all gray background themes (like dark theme) for some reason heavily strain my eyes...
 
The one under the View tab?
I said NOT the blue one. The blue one has it, but it has a lot of problems.

I'm talking the xenforo froala.
It is..incredibly hard to distinguish regular text from hyperlinked text in this version. Old one had the text in distinguishable yellow(for me since I'm using Blackend theme) color, this one is barely a shade lighter grey compared to the rest of the text..the only reason I even knew it was a hyperlink was because I'm the one who made it...
Dark theme for xf1 has hyperlinks in blue, should be like that.

alethiophile hyperlinks hard to distinguish. Would be good if you could make them actually differently-colored.
Further small comment on the dark theme.
By switching to a lighter grey it makes any colored text (like admin names)..blur a bit? While at the same poppping out as it actually seems brighter then the rest of the text Sorry, don't know how to call it..point is, compared to here, colored text is harder to read unless you actually zoom in several times....

To sum up, from the visual perspective the issue is that the theme got a bit too blended into grey while the bits of color in people's names/texts pop up far too much compared to the rest of the theme
It's called not enough 'contrast'.

Look at XF1 flexile dark with the XF2 dark.
XF2's black is more dark grey. The white text is more light grey. They blur together. Not enough sharp contrast.


The dark grey background needs to be darker. The light grey text needs to be whiter.

Like, in general alethiophile a color scheme more similar to the current XF1 flexile dark would be much appreciated. There's a lot of blurriness and same-y-ness to the XF2 that makes it less convenient when it comes to coloration.
I'd honestly prefer variable margin width.
Variable margin would be nice.


Anyways, I'm still most concerned about the textbox. Is there really no fullscreen for the froalla textbox?
 
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Code mostly feels snappy, which is good, but the spoiler expansion + image load feels a bit slower than current.

I like the top bar.

Themes need help.

Do you need another programmer / web monkey?
 
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