Let us know what you think of the new Serato.com

Is it...
Good?
Bad?
Ugly?

Nice!

Really nice! And of course I like the new info/page about the VCI and ITCH :) Rock on!

It's weird. I like the floating toolbox though.

It feels like Post/Preview should be swapped? The colors contrast a bit, but I can't see anyway so we can blame it on that... maybe? The pop-up quote and report buttons are kinda wide on the red. The time and user info is a little small, but again this could be my bad eyes. I think it's the gray I don't care for? It reminds me of ITCH... which I don't particularly care for either. Ha.

Oh, and that nifty thing that happens when you post... dopeness.

lol. I thought I was the only one thinking that.


Esp. the user name is very small.

I miss the boxes or at least some kind of visual separation between the posts and the emtpy area on the left and right of it.

Hm, I think the font size is a little bit too small in general.

looks good to me
it will take some times to get used to
maybe a little more color

and yes, switch the 'preview and post'

What browser are you using? It looks wrong in Firefox 2 (but not 3). I thought I'd fixed that before launch, but it looks like not. Oops.

Although I want to change the look of those quote/report buttons completely. I liked it when I first did them, but now they're annoying me.


Yeah, I'm going to make the user name part larger.

A few Serato people have been grumbling the same. We're going to put in one of those font size changing boxes on each page. You know, the one with three A's in it, small, medium, big, and when you click it the fonts all change immediately and it remembers your setting.

A touch too much white for my taste. Maybe if the post section is broken up/apart from the empty edges a bit as mentioned above that would feel better.

Will take some getting used to so give me a few days of navigation to figure out how I really feel about it. Who knows, might grow on me more as is.

HA! I love the "Shortly Thundercat will say" in the preview screen!

I love that people like that. That was just me being too lazy to write the code to put a time in. Sometimes being lazy pays off ;)

Oops. And that's me posting under my testing account :)

It looks as though (unlike the case with the other forums) the contents of the old Help forum aren't on the new site at all (just a couple new threads in the Scratch Live help section here). Not sure whether it's intentional or not, but it's a little confusing since everything else looks mirrored between the two sites.

I actually (at first) completely missed seeing the Help section at all, since I was looking for it in the list of forums...before realizing Help is in its own "section" at the top.

Also, it looks like the new report and quote buttons are unavailable when viewing on the iPhone's Safari browser.

Overall, I like the new design.

I really couldn't see too many ways to improve upon perfection, but you folks at Serato continually amaze me.

I do miss seeing the number of unread tracked messages next to the link. Is that coming to the new version of the site.

too much...! love it

The help area at serato.com will soon be the same as the one at scratchlive.net


Yep, coming soon. Same with private discussions.

We had to cut some corners to get it online (before our 10th birthday party was old news), but that stuff will be coming very soon.

How often do you use your iPhone with Serato websites?

I think our web team needs some for testing :)

Bug: preview'ing a post does not wrap long lines correctly.

Bug: posting in a existing thread where you havent posted yet does not automatically track this discussion

More than you'd probably expect...especially when traveling and the iPhone is my only internet connectivity.

I had to copy/paste the quoted text here manually, by the way...all that clicking "quote" did was put one bracketed "quote" into the message-editing area.

Thanks. The web team definitely needs some for testing now :)

We can definitely provide an iPhone specific CSS file that makes the report/quote buttons always visible, as well as positioned better. I'll be picking up an iPhone once the 3G ones come out in a few weeks, so testing'll be easier.


Yeah, I mostly buggered quoting unintentionally with another last minute fix. I'll get it working properly again when I get back in the office.

It's so monotone... and I usually LIKE monotone color schemes?

I'll tell you one thing... when opening ITCH and seeing the light gray colors, it doesn't really do anything for me (kinda like the color scheme here). BUT... when I open SSL I always think how sexy the dark color scheme is (kinda like the old serato.com). The other day when I was at work and opened 1.8.1 to build overviews on my 20" wide screen... it looked SOOOO pretty! The site doesn't have that feel any longer.

This actually "feels" like an early version 1 of the web site where A LOT of changes are to still be made...

I like this page: www.serato.com but there's no easy way to get back to it once you've navigated to one of the sections? Possibly something for the discussion toolbox?

I think I read something about a customizable discussion toolbox? That's cool and all, but it would be nice to have a site we didn't have to "configure."

I agree. There's a lot of stuff still to come, and the look and feel of the place is a big part of that. I'm expecting it to evolve over time as feedback comes in. I'm a big fan of websites being launched in beta state, as they're largely community driven these days anyway.


The problem is as the site grows there's going to be a much broader range of interests that people have, and having links to all of them everywhere will be just too much. Ideally the most commonly desired links would be all easily accessible, but I'm unsure if we're going to have an easily discernible selection of common favourites.

What if it only took one click to add (or remove) any area or forum or whatever from your toolbox. And we try to have the most commonly used (by the total audience) links available outside of the toolbox in various appropriate places.

Sounds good! For the record, I laughed out loud when I hit the quote button. Hahaa

Gotta agree.

Usually I am all for "no bells and whistles"...

Yes, SSL is very sexy. ITCH is likely the younger sister,5 coming of age; not as hot as the older sibling but cute in it's own way. I don't like the library font, but I don't mind the color scheme or the rest of the GUI.

OT: Adobe has a really sweet Color picker @ kuler.adobe.com

As far as the Serato.com make-over, I think it looks much better in Safari than it does in Firefox. Take a look at these screenshots from my Macbook: dj3pm.com
The curves are smoother in Safari and the font display is different.

Yeah, that's Firefox 2's fault :) Once Firefox 3 comes out (which looks like a couple of weeks away) all will be well. It does corners much much better, as well as having a couple of other annoying CSS omissions/bugs fixed.

I can attest from long experiences that Firefox 2.X's font-display was really bad. I've been using FF3.0RC1 for the last few weeks, and have been really happy with it...things look better, and it's way faster (really noticeable improvement).

I wonder if the new forums would be easier on the eyes if the background color-scheme was inverted. Seems like having that area much darker would help focus the eyes on the text areas.

this is way cool:
- click quote button on a post: text is added to the preview box in quote tags
- click quote button on another post: text is added to the preview box as well in tags

double quotes?!? that rocks!

bug:
- click quote button on a post that already has a quote in it
*just get one quote tag

Yeah, that's a pain that one. It's fixed in Safari and Firefox now, but still broken in IE. If you're using Firefox or Safari and it's still broken, give the page a refresh to get the new Javascript file.

*confirmed

;-)

That would be dope! I often check the forum with my iPhone (more than once a day), and the new website doesn't work well with it.

Oh, just recognized the time sais "Just now" directly after the post. What about a today and yesterday together with the time?

The "just now" is only for posts you've just made yourself. For everything else it shows a proper date stamp. Although in the future the date stamps could include relative terminology, yeah.

They're consistent now.

Ahh, ok :)

Another thing: I think it would be very helpfull to be able to upload and integrate images in your post. At least for the help section and the beta areas...

I like the new website.

I think the font size is fine viewed on a 1280x1024 19" screen. If I was using a 17" then I would probably want to zoom in but firefox 3 and IE 7 make this very easy now (ctrl +) and remember the setting for each site you visit.

Any chance for a "mark this forum as read" link (as in the old forum) or better yet, "mark all forums as read"?

The 'Mark this area as read' option is coming soon.

Are you sure you want "mark all forums as read"?

I could imagine you asking for an undo button next :)

Especially the foreign language forums (which I never read), it would handy...

Also, it would be handy to show how many unread posts you have; eg "Tracked Discussions (12 new)"

+1

Yeah tracked counts are coming.

As to marking areas read that you never read, I think that's the wrong answer. Better to be able to hide or ignore them, rather than have to do constant maintenance of the read state of something that you're never going to read.

There will be soon the ability to collapse/hide a whole group of areas (say, the international areas), which will go part way to providing an "ignore area" feature.

but in the international area you probabply want one of these to show up, but not the others, and not to collapse all.

hmmm... that sounds pretty good. how would this work for other parts of the forum? there's plenty of topics in, say, off-topic or feature suggestions I'll never read either. I don't want to completely "ignore" or collapse those. What you're suggesting is definitely useful though.

Right now, the forum encourages you to read every topic in every forum. That was doable years ago when we only got a dozen topics in a day. I believe the other reason the forum was made this way was so moderators could easily keep up with new posts. Today, imo the crap to useful ratio is probably about 100:1.

Other forums have a "30 new posts since your last visit" indicator for example. In other words, whether you read the forum or not it's irrelevant and your unread count goes to zero when you leave the forum. I find that a lot easier to swallow.

I never like this cause it happens quite a lot that during one session I don't have enough time to check all new posts, so with the next sessions all unread posts will appear as read. Not good.. I dislike this standard behaviour on a lot of phbb boards.

Gotta agree with the rest of your post however.

Ideally I'd like to be able to ignore a whole area as well as being able to ignore individual threads. Put together, those'd make the forum a lot easier to keep up with, I think.


My preference is to have a combination of both. Have the absolute, real counts for what you have and haven't read, as well as some indications of what's new since your last "visit" (which is a bit of a fuzzy thing).

The latter is a useful thing to give you a quick sense of what's happened since you were last browsing around, while the former gives you exact knowledge of what you really have and haven't read.

Whitelabel.net has the "last visit" thing, which is immediately informative to me, but lacks the absolute information. While the forum has the absolute information but lacks the fuzzy "visit" stuff.

whatever you come up with should be interesting nonetheless...

One other that's kinda bugging me and maybe worth considering is dropping the top-level forum headers or at least making them smaller. They don't do anything (can you make them at least return you to the forum they correspond with?) and they eat up a lot of vertical space. Is the forum description really necessary on every topic in every post? The breadcrumbs do about the same job. I find myself trying to click there since it's a pretty big target but end up using the breadcrumbs instead.

Once we make the descriptions in them more relevant, yes :) It's to dissuade people from posting the wrong things in the wrong places, as well as remind them of the expected standards of discourse. Two things that we have had consistent problems with.

But yeah, makes sense that it could be a link back to the area view too.

yes, I would like them to link back, I was clicking on them to.

but yes keep anything that might clue someone in to the topic

Any comment to this? I definitly think it would be a big improovement to the forum, as uploading images elsewhere takes a lot of time an isn't very intuitive.

I like the idea of clicking on a link to a graphic causes it to display on the page. This way you wont be bothered by postings you arnt interested in seeing. But you dont have to leave the site to see them which causes a disconnect to the words.

How about being able to post the links to graphics that are archived with your profile. This way information wont be lost to broken links to the outside. And give serato.com more control over content.

Maybe to keep the crap down, this option would only be open to members after an amount of active time, several months.

maybe not

I think this is something that's ripe for abuse, at least in the general discussion areas. Although screenshots would be helpful in the support and beta areas, so it may come at some stage.

If we are able to add images to threads at some point please make it like AKIEM says so that the pictures are only displayed as links on the page in line pictures on forums are a nightmare for increasing page load times and messing up the formating of the page.

Are we ever gonna get a delete function? Might add to less clutter


Are we ever gonna get a delete function? Might add to less clutter

Delete function, no. Edit function, yes. Inline image posting, no. Hosting images that're shown only as links, possibly.

Sweet

Mattie G, can we make the edit function with a time limit? Thanks. I'm new.

scratch the "we" part. hahaha. Can YOU make the edit function a time limit one? Thanks. I'm reposting.

Hehe. Yeah, I think that's part of the plan for how editing will work.

Dopeness. Thanks!

agree