Today we released a bunch of changes to the BadwareBusters.org beta based on feedback from the community. Our goal with these changes was to improve the overall appearance and usability of the site. The changes include:
A new, more intuitive home page that displays only for users who are not logged in (those logged in redirect to the Browse page)
A cleaner, more organized browse page
Several new views, including "Selected by the moderators" and "Topics awaiting a response" to make it easier to zero in on the the most relevant content
Also to help filter content, the site now allows users to tag their posts with relevant keywords, which can be browsed and searched
To help users keep up with the site, several new e-mail and RSS subscription options are available. Look for RSS icons in various views and check My Dashboard for site-wide e-mail subscription sign-up
Speaking of My Dashboard, it has been redesigned and includes a centralized tab to manage all e-mail subscriptions
Site language has been made simpler and more consistent to make the site more accessible to new users
A "More Resources" page has been added with links to other sites that may be of interest to the community
Search has been tweaked to provide more relevant results
New conversation topics now include a subject line for easier browsing
The view of individual conversations includes smaller but more convenient voting buttons, improved overall design, and better emphasis/de-emphasis of responses based on user votes
While we’re not done yet (we have several other small changes planned for the next couple of weeks), we hope you will find this set of improvements helpful. Please let us know what you think by replying to this topic!
I agree, going in the right direction.
The Browse page is easier to browse.
The navigation links now better describe what will be found on those pages.
Subject lines work better to determine the subject of a post than what I think was the old method of using the first few words of the post.
The one page I checked validates at W3C, which should help with cross-browser compatibility.
There is a remaining quirk in IE7 in that the lightest font being used looks like it’s only about 1 pixel thick, which makes it still very light and pixelated-looking. Verdana might possibly scale better than Trebuchet MS. In the CSS, the font size is specified in pixels instead of points, and that might also be a factor affecting rendering; not sure about that.
I find the Browse page easier on the eyes than the topic pages that have peach-colored backgrounds.
