Hey, post ratings. That's cool. Also, where the hell is everybody setting custom avatars from...?

It appears that there's something similar on the Community section, as "Recent Forum Posts". But it's pretty hidden away, and is a bit short with only the last 5 posts shown...

I also miss the old-style Active Topics page, which is where I spend most of my time.

Well there is this Active content page now.

I had to get a new password to log in, my old saved password was showing as incorrect.
Otherwise its fine

Polls? Really?

what's wrong with them? If anything it's just an added feature that may be useful.

The switch to IPboard (that's what I heard someone say it was, but I am not sure) I think is a good switch just because there are so many preexisting things that could be useful in the long run. If I'm not mistaken it supports per user templates for people that might like a darker background, the only problem being finding one or creating one.

I haven't noticed the thinness because my home PC size is a laptop, which is probably the width it would be at anyway, but having it scale would be nice. There really does seem to be a lot of wasted useless space, which actually was one of the huge selling points of the old forum. If you look at the old forums, there's just so much more useful information on a screen than on the new one. It's actually pretty shocking.

A lot of the complaints so far are just growing pains. Once people relearn the site I think a lot of them will go away.

I think the most important complaints to address are the ones that aren't feature related; things like darker backgrounds, width, and the amount of wasted space make the ok features seem bad by association.

what's wrong with them? If anything it's just an added feature that may be useful.

As for spacing and color schemes, neither bothers me, because it's very similar to the previous .NET and I'm fortunate enough to have a big enough monitor that the spacing is little issue, but I can understand where others are coming from, especially when I switch to my laptop.

As for poll and what's wrong with them:

A site should be tailored to it's definition, and it's content should reflect this. GameDev.net I would assume would be a site about game development. If we're talking forums here, it should be questions and answers on how to approach certain aspects, be it programming, art, etc. I guess it comes down to my opinion, that outside of very specialized instances, polls are really nothing more than a Lounge addition. And while the Lounge is a nice place to post off topic threads, I guess I don't really see it as being the main reason for visiting this site. (Yes, I haven't posted outside the Lounge in awhile, but mainly what I want to ask has been asked, and I've found it while searching the forums, or the questions I feel I'm qualified to answer have already been answered by another person. Just because my posting stays in the Lounge does not necessarily equate to the Lounge being my main area of focus on this site.)

The polls are similar to a lot of other additions. They look great and give the site a more recent look and appeal, but at the same time, they detract from the actual game development aspects of the site imho. While I have my opinions on such, it wouldn't feel right to rate the site's effectiveness. Maybe it's just because I was too comfortable with the previous GameDev, or am just getting old an afraid of new things.

I'm against using a floating width layout. When you introduce variability into the template, you are going to create different user experiences for different people, and it will invariably lead to problems with some pages at some widths.

I think for the rest of the site this is the case, but forums lend themselves very well to floating widths because a lot of the action on a forum page is just scrolling up and down to read all the posts.

As for spacing and color schemes, neither bothers me, because it's very similar to the previous .NET and I'm fortunate enough to have a big enough monitor that the spacing is little issue, but I can understand where others are coming from, especially when I switch to my laptop.

One important color difference in the old one is that the background is light gray, not white. Even that small change makes a huge difference on the harshness.

On polls: I guess I'm just of the opinion that since it's there it won't hurt anything. If it were a decision to put them in or work on something more pressing, then I might think less of the feature. Since it's already there, it may as well stay there.