Ads are supposed to grab your attention. It's not whitespace but content too. I don't like them either but I'm sure it'll soon get filtered out, and you can just pay for GD.net if you want to avoid them. GD has costs to cover, you suggest a better alternative for the real world?

SiCrane is a moderator so I assume he shouldn't be seeing the ads in the first place?

Personally I find the reactions here somewhat surprising. From my perspective, most of the problems seems to be just cosmetic, which should be relatively easy to adjust, if needed. Half of that can be done in CSS. I think parts of the layout looks a bit too busy, such as the overuse of dividers, borders and the like. In any case, the current theme looks miles ahead of the old theme. Personally I think content has precedence over anything else, which is the only reason why I'm here, not because I want to admire the widgets, or to socialise with members. (P.S. It's not that I don't like you guys... but the place is a bit to busy for that kind of thing, and I don't have the patience to hang out here for too long at any given time, when all I want is to find solutions to problems.)

It's a bit off-putting to see people get so teary eyed over a software change when we're ostensibly supposed to be software engineers, but then again I guess that may be part of the why rather than in spite of it.

Just to go in to pure kiss-ass mode for a moment, for a decade or more GDNet has been THE community to learn about game development as well as providing a great community of like minded people to kick around non-game development ideas. Taking your ball and going home over some CSS and infrastructure changes seems a bit silly.

Dave, Kevin, Frizzlefry, Gaiden and company have provided a great user experience for thousands of folks for a long time. Hundreds or maybe thousands of you have gone from "why does my naked void pointer give me a memory leak" to producing images of the day and full blown games. Take a deep breath and try to not be that same pain in the ass customer you so despise dealing with in your 9 to 5.

Good software is iterative. So remember this roll out the next time you're throwing a tantrum over whatever ultimately replaces this one.

As for the single line of ad text there's only one important detail to recall.

Gamedev ATI pop-up ad!

okay I would prefer all ranting be done in one place please. We have enough feedback avenues to track as is.