Facebook: 7-8 replies at once. (Fewer for long posts, images, etc.) Instagram: 10+ LinkedIn: 8 Reddit: 10-15 Slashdot: 6+ StackOverflow: 6+ replies at once, unless they're actual code or longer answers Twitter: 8 Youtube: 11+

To be fair, none of those are forums of our style. The best comparison to most of those is the comments section of an article, blog, or news story. Of course we can rip out the post headers, functional buttons, etc, and make ourselves look just like any of them, but that doesn't serve much purpose other than to cram as much information into a vertical space as possible.

What I've done instead is shrunk as much space out of the post blocks as possible without creating usability issues.

Also worth mentioning that very little was changed with the forum layout so far. Mostly colors and fixing some basic styles. It takes more vertical space because it's not full width, but to really address the vertical spacing issue we have to create a completely new design, which was not on the table for this milestone.

This newer theme also seems to include duplicate lines for paragraph breaks, or perhaps the editor isn't merging consecutive lines any more.

The editor settings were changed so the input reflects the exact output. Enter is new paragraph (new <p></p> pair). Shift+enter is a line break (new <br>). This was not the case before, and it led to messy text. It'll be less of an issue here once all the caches get the updated JS. Meanwhile, I edit people's posts as I see it and have even run DB queries to replace the offending HTML.

I'm really curious why this was done.

https://www.gamedev.net/blog/2223/entry-2262603-another-skin-for-gamedevnet/

1) The width is ridiculous. I do NOT want to mess with style crap addons to use a decent percentage of my screen area. Currently half my screen goes unused.

I hear what the vocalists here are saying, but I don't necessarily agree that every bit of screen space needs to be filled. Show me a site like GameDev.net with similar content, components, etc that is full width. If you can find one then I'm willing to learn their approach.

I've tried playing with different widths and might settle on something for wider screens (~200px more than current), but it will not be 100% width. I've tested it - way too much empty space inside of content with long lines that make reading and information digestion difficult. Using more blocks or elements to break up the content isn't the answer either because you have to keep in mind lower resolutions. As I've said before, high resolutions (> 1920px) are the exception, not the norm.

2) Probably a side effect of 1, the list of forums takes way too much vertical space, so I have to scroll now where I didn't have to.

The forum list was hardly changed, aside from being full width to containerized. I have some simple ideas to improve this. The problem is the basic layout and information presentation, not the width.

3) Speed! I hope you're currently ironing out issues, but it got way slower than it was. I get "Not responding" every few clicks, never had that before. Also the editor takes quite a lot at startup until all my keypresses show.

Performance is looked at every day, and small changes are made nearly every day in the interest of performance. There are several reasons you may see slowdowns, but it's not because of this new theme.

the user avatar to the left of the 'reply to' box is just dumb.

This isn't new.. but I agree and was already planning to remove it or do something different. Just don't see it as a big deal when I wanted to get this layout live at this point in time. Enough things to do besides worry about an avatar on a reply box.

The main forum listing is also a disaster; no per-line delimiters meaning content just runs together like a de-saturated mess.

Not clear what you're referring to. Besides width, nothing changed on the main forum listing. Literally everything is the same there.

Edge the layout feels slightly broken

Edge has not been friendly with FontAwesome icons since switching over to them a few months ago (so also not a new thing).

It's not the web's fault for going to fixed width centered containers for content. It's psychology. The research I've done into design and usability convinced me that fixed width containers are a better style for a site like gamedev.net where people are trying to consume and retain information. This was not an easy mindset change as I've always preferred 100% width. Research suggests that properly contained content is easier to read, easier to digest, and ultimately more efficient to process. The trick is ensuring proper whitespace balancing to structure the content. This is why the web has gone that way, although I think more mobile and varied displays contribute to that as well.

I've increased the container width for a certain size screen. Parts of the site look terrible and disrupt content flow at this width, but I suspect anyone who cares more about width won't care about content flow.

As I've said before, high resolutions (> 1920px) are the exception, not the norm.

I'm not sure that's actually true for the members of this forum - do you collect resolution data from users' browsers?

If you look at the average out there, sure, bargain basement Chromebooks and the like are going to pull the average down. But my experience is that game developers tend to have above-average hardware.

For example, my 5 year-old MacBook has a 2880x1800 display, and the smallest display Apple currently manufactures is 2304x1440. Any decent PC laptop has the same resolution or higher (there are a bunch of PCs with optional 4k displays).

Edit: The new theme is definitely doubling my paragraph breaks. What shows as a single blank line in the editor is displayed as two once I hit submit.