Despite the couple of rough edges I think this has been a pretty smooth upgrade, really looking forward to pushing forward with it once everything is more finalised and stable again. 

Really loving the more usable mobile site, and looking forward to getting in to customising these activity streams!

Still getting the hang of where things have moved to, but other than that everything looks and feels great!

I understand the need of upgrading and for some things I also see the improvement.

But when it comes to navigating through the forum, man, I was almost used to the way it changed too last time and now it changes again, with auto preview etc. For me personally, I like a clear overview of all "latest forum activity" titles only, so I am able to quickly pick the ones out where I might be able to help out. I really have to search now to find anything.

5 minutes ago, cozzie said:

I like a clear overview of all "latest forum activity" titles only

You can get this by setting up your own Activity Stream (Activity -> My Activity Streams -> Create New Stream.

Select:

• Content Items Only
• Topics

And whatever other options you might want. Save and you can see "latest forum activity".

Thanks, that helps a lot.

6 hours ago, khawk said:

You can get this by setting up your own Activity Stream (Activity -> My Activity Streams -> Create New Stream.

That's pretty awesome - can there be a way to pin (at least 1) custom stream to the top-right corner where the default "Unread Content" stream sits?  Use-case is that if I create a stream that suits me better as a default (and I have!) then I would like easy access to that stream instead of the site-provided default.  Otherwise my "go to" custom stream is buried in a dropdown menu 2-levels down (which is slightly too unforgiving of my sloppy mouse usage).

Overall I really like the direction the site is going! 

I am stunned. How are the heck are people saying that the upgrade has been good?

- Old articles are broken. The value of gamedev.net tumbles.

On 6/19/2017 at 2:24 PM, khawk said:

You can get this by setting up your own Activity Stream (Activity -> My Activity Streams -> Create New Stream.

Select:

• Content Items Only
• Topics

And whatever other options you might want. Save and you can see "latest forum activity".

So now I need to set up an activity list? I'd rather the older option where the forum topics are bumped up upon a post. The live feed was what I'd consider a majorly interesting part of the site.

Over the past several updates gamedev.net has been getting more and more bloated. Design has also taken a turn for the worse. For example, when I'm reading a forum post I don't have a need to see Game Job's or Ads at the right side of the post. It makes information harder and harder to read and to find. Color contrast looks really bad imo, light grays and whites.

Rough edges... such as the broken link to http://blogs/entry/2263079-new-software-and-server-for-gamedevnet/ that seems to be the only way to reach this article?

We don't get a General Programming forum anymore, without the permanently-ambiguous "Gameplay" programming also being brought into it?

You're now linking against not one, not two, but TEN separate advertising services in every single pageload, all fighting for access to the page?

No Search/Find function anywhere to be found? Good luck hand-trawling the 144k topics in General Programming alone looking for if your question has been asked recently, and what other people have discussed more than one goldfish's memory ago.

13 minutes ago, Wyrframe said:

Rough edges... such as the broken link to http://blogs/entry/2263079-new-software-and-server-for-gamedevnet/ that seems to be the only way to reach this article?

Thanks for the broken link report. This is accessible in the Staff Blog (Blogs menu item).

13 minutes ago, Wyrframe said:

We don't get a General Programming forum anymore

Right, general and gameplay were merged. With all of the forum merges, we expect Tags to be used to denote specifics of the topic. Tags are searchable/filterable, so if you're looking for something specific you can find it. This was discussed in the Staff blog a few months ago asking for feedback.

13 minutes ago, Wyrframe said:

You're now linking against not one, not two, but TEN separate advertising services in every single pageload, all fighting for access to the page?

Aside from fitting into the new layout, there have been no changes to ads. I'm not sure what your comment is referring to.

13 minutes ago, Wyrframe said:

No Search/Find function anywhere to be found? Good luck hand-trawling the 144k topics in General Programming alone looking for if your question has been asked recently, and what other people have discussed more than one goldfish's memory ago.

Really? Did you explore the Activity menu?

Search is in Activity -> Search.

In fact, explore the Activity menu in full to understand how easy it is to find exactly what you want now - and save it for your own use.

The Activity menu is not the greatest spot for the Search link, but we'll find a better one soon. Still.. a little exploration would find it.

15 minutes ago, khawk said:

The Activity menu is not the greatest spot for the Search link, but we'll find a better one soon. Still.. a little exploration would find it.

Why on earth would you expect someone to look at the global navigation bar to find a search form for the forum or forum-topic they're already looking at... and then be somehow pleased that they have to pick the forum they wanted to search in again?

Even then. Let's give it a little test? Here's a topic started one month ago. It contains the precise phrase "measure memory used by process". Let's go to the search page, paste that into the search field, note that the default options include "title and body", "all content", and "all search terms", and hit enter. And the results are... three articles which each contain only one or two of those words.

Seriously. "Rough edges" doesn't begin to describe a search function that can't even find its own ass with both hands, never mind how cumbersome and hidden you've made accessing that search function in the first place.

13 minutes ago, khawk said:

Aside from fitting into the new layout, there have been no changes to ads. I'm not sure what your comment is referring to.

See attached. Two weeks ago this list wouldn't grow beyond eight. This is why people adblock; not because they want you to fail as a service, but because they don't agree you have the right to farm your visitors out to literally dozens of third-party services, who aren't even paying you properly for the whoring you've chosen to descend to.

46 minutes ago, Wyrframe said:

Why on earth would you expect someone to look at the global navigation bar to find a search form for the forum or forum-topic they're already looking at... and then be somehow pleased that they have to pick the forum they wanted to search in again?

I think you're assuming we set to launch the perfect setup. That, we did not do. We did intend to launch something better than had previously existed and to do so in a timely manner since our old setup was cracking. I'll refer to my comment that there is still plenty to fix. Point noted though: search isn't accessible enough, and the existing search needs work.

46 minutes ago, Wyrframe said:

See attached. Two weeks ago this list wouldn't grow beyond eight.

Interesting. We've actually dropped a few things in the upgrade. For full disclosure, this is what we do (can confirm by looking at the downloaded javascript):

• Google Analytics
• Google Adsense
• Google Publisher Tags (used by some of our direct campaigns)
• Google Safeframe (for ad frames to prevent malicious JS)
• Amazon CPM
• Amazon Recommendations
• Skimlinks (under evaluation)
• Affiliate programs (ads directly served by us to affiliate links)
• GDNet+ Member Ads (approved by us)

I'll put this on a page sometime soon because we're not trying to hide anything, and in the interest of recognizing our community's concerns with online advertising we don't do nearly as much with advertising as we could or get even close to what 95% of the rest of the world does.

I don't know where all those tags are coming from, but it's not GameDev.net. I would guess that it's coming through some of the ads themselves, and I recognize a few of them as ad networks or ad services, which all will use things like Adsense and Amazon.

So, I recognize you think this upgrade is the worst thing since Duke Nukem Forever and that we've totally gone rogue, and while with the upgrade all we can do is try to address member concerns with the site and provide a solid platform for the community, and even that might not be good enough, I can at least assure you that we haven't gone rogue with advertising. It's been very tempting at times, but we haven't sold out like so many others.

On 6/19/2017 at 8:24 AM, khawk said:

You can get this by setting up your own Activity Stream (Activity -> My Activity Streams -> Create New Stream.

Is it possible to create a stream which contains all forum threads in a given sub-set of forums?

E.g. create a stream that contains all threads/posts that appear in only the AI + Math & Physics forums.

I can only imagine that this has been answered somewhere already, but it sort of looks like some people's usernames have recently reverted to names they had a long time ago. Is that related to the upgrade, or just coincidence?

24 minutes ago, Lactose said:

Is it possible to create a stream which contains all forum threads in a given sub-set of forums?

E.g. create a stream that contains all threads/posts that appear in only the AI + Math & Physics forums.

Not yet, but that is a good evolution for future development.

42 minutes ago, cowsarenotevil said:

I can only imagine that this has been answered somewhere already, but it sort of looks like some people's usernames have recently reverted to names they had a long time ago. Is that related to the upgrade, or just coincidence?

It's an artifact of the new system. Display names and login names were merged in the new software. You can still change your name under the Profiler menu -> Account Settings.

Here's my search screen. Can you even see what I typed into the search field?

When people say that this upgrade is okay, or even that it's 'rough edges', I can't help but think where have the standards gone to. It's like the basic features have not even been tested.

6 hours ago, khawk said:

I recognize you think this upgrade is the worst thing since Duke Nukem Forever and that we've totally gone rogue,

I thought the transition to IP.Board back in 2010 was far more jarring.  That also came with the site being down for a week instead of this with part of a day.

This update is painful mostly because the visual style is so different, but the functionality is basically the same as the last. Thankfully I can slowly rebuild my Stylish scripts to fix all the whitespace issues that annoy me so much.  My original concern from moving from the old version (pre-2010) remains, I dislike the default content density.  Way back then I could see five comments at once, more or less.  Now it is down to about 2.5 comments on screen at once. For longer replies sometimes it is difficult to read the comment I'm replying to while writing a response.  Slowly but surely I'll update my Stylish script to wipe out those huge margins, borders, and padding boxes. 

1 hour ago, ddengster said:

Here's my search screen. Can you even see what I typed into the search field?

Fair enough. A fix was pushed for this about 6 hours ago. I'll check it.

[Edit: The formatting for the Search and Activity Stream creation pages has been fixed.]

19 hours ago, ddengster said:

- Old articles are broken.

We are working on this. Not all articles could be properly converted without manual effort in the new system. These articles have been formatted for 6 different systems over 18 years, and in some cases we don't know the original formatting. We also brought back old articles that weren't publicly in the system. Complex problem, time constraints, not enough resources. We did the best we could with what we had. I'm glad you reported the articles - it's faster than going through thousands on our own.

[Edit: The formatting for these two articles has been fixed.]

19 hours ago, ddengster said:

So now I need to set up an activity list? I'd rather the older option where the forum topics are bumped up upon a post. The live feed was what I'd consider a majorly interesting part of the site.

We thought you'd like the ability to customize GameDev.net for the things you want to see. We understand not everyone will appreciate this.

Edit: I also recommend the Unread Content page, which has a little different filtering availability, including something a little closer to what you want. I personally haven't used it much and forgot about it, as I prefer the Activity Stream.

19 hours ago, ddengster said:

Over the past several updates gamedev.net has been getting more and more bloated. Design has also taken a turn for the worse. For example, when I'm reading a forum post I don't have a need to see Game Job's or Ads at the right side of the post. It makes information harder and harder to read and to find. Color contrast looks really bad imo, light grays and whites.

We'll have a dark theme available in the future. That may suit you better.

I like it so far! Hoping for that dark theme

On 6/20/2017 at 3:13 AM, ddengster said:

- Old articles are broken.

While not perfect due to different formatting styles that have evolved over time, the article content has been fixed. I'll admit I didn't check all 4000+ articles, but a heavy sample of articles showed good results. Most articles have proper formatting with some needing a little clean up for readability.

Everyone's blogs have been updated as well, since quite a few lost content during the conversion. Again, heavy sampling but always possible a few didn't convert correctly.

"Smart quotes" were the issue. Lots and lots of character encoding issues from copy and paste.

If anyone sees further problems we can handle them on a case-by-case basis at https://www.gamedev.net/support.

One thing I'd like to see is more obvious call-out of "read" versus "not read" -- the blue filled/unfilled little icon on the left isn't quite punchy enough.

29 minutes ago, hplus0603 said:

One thing I'd like to see is more obvious call-out of "read" versus "not read" -- the blue filled/unfilled little icon on the left isn't quite punchy enough.

I agree; and I'm not quite sure why some posts have a yellow tinge and others don't. I initially thought it was to indicate posts I haven't read yet, but that doesn't seem to hold true, because if I scroll up in this very thread there's a post by frob that I definitely have read (since the ones below it are white) but its still yellow. As is your post I am quoting now (is it based on user rep? over 10k maybe?)

Similarly, I feel like pinned and featured topics are very understated. Both states just seem to be little icons in the title, and forcing the topic to the top of the forum list. But they don't do a whole lot to make them stand out, and I think they should. Maybe force the title to be bold, or use a special background for the post listing.

My question is... I noticed the pictures that were attached to older blog entries are no longer visible.  Is this a permanent thing affecting all blog entries prior to the update?  Would I need to go through and re-attach them?  It was nice seeing the visual history of my project.

6 minutes ago, Awoken said:

My question is... I noticed the pictures that were attached to older blog entries are no longer visible.  Is this a permanent thing affecting all blog entries prior to the update?  Would I need to go through and re-attach them?  It was nice seeing the visual history of my project.

Interesting. I knew some didn't convert attachments but yours really failed to convert.

You could go back and re-attach them if you wanted, but they're still around. Just need the conversion to work properly. I can look at it in the near future (need to finish other things).

1 minute ago, khawk said:

Interesting. I knew some didn't convert attachments but yours really failed to convert.

You could go back and re-attach them if you wanted, but they're still around. Just need the conversion to work properly. I can look at it in the near future (need to finish other things).

Thanks, some of those photos I no longer have.

How can I find out what the number on the hamburger menu icon means?

In my case it says 3, I assume that there are 3 updates on forum topics I'm in/following, but how do I find which ones?

Also I was wondering where I can find "my messages" (inbox etc).

btw, I'm on mobile currently, so maybe it differs on desktop.

I think old comments were broken, mine aren't showing up. 

Articles navigation is annoying, I want to see all programming articles, not just a specific category. Too many different things to keep track of when I want to see more than several categories. 

Front page is noisy, at first glance most of the content seem like ads, and front page is actually pretty stuffed full of ads. 

Fantastic!

I've been away for quite a while, dealing with non-gamedev things. Now i'm back and ready to be part of this community again - liking what i see, keep it up!