Meso

Apologies for the downtime over the past 14 hours or so guys. Things should be stable now again.

Thanks for this, I agree with your sentiments and we'll swap the gear and classifieds to cater, as the classifieds are more frequented and makes complete sense in priority.

I'd like to mention that we've made some additions from requests. - I've added more information about the user when hovering over their icon on a thread. The hover card now includes information like jump numbers, home dz and years in sport. Similar to what was displayed next to users on the old site. - I have also added a "Mark Site As Read" button on the main forum page, which allows for one to easily clear all new posts across the forums. - Have also changed the icon for 'new messages' next to forums to orange to make it easier to see which sections have new posts.

Can you please elaborate on the inability to navigate on a mobile device? There may be some bugs we're unaware of causing this problem. The main menu on the right should provide the same top level navigation as any other desktop browser. And the breadcrumbs should provide the low level reverse navigation. Where are you having problems navigating?

Signature lines will be around on your previous posts, but not on your new ones until you set it in your profile. They were reset, but retained on the posts, so if you can't remember what yours was, you can just go copy and paste it from one of your older posts. Shouldn't take more than a minute to do.

It's not impossible for us to do that, and move it to the other forums too. We just don't want to cause uses excessively more page load on each forum. I'm thinking of perhaps pulling it across to every category, but not to the post level. And thanks for the headsup on which forums it selected, that helps as we have the ability to tune it to those skydiving only categories too, which I'll do today.

Could you perhaps make a screenshot and highlight for me the areas linespacing that seem weird. When looking at the line spacing in the classifieds I don't see anything crazy at all. Are you referring to the height between lines in the same paragraph, or the line space between new paragraphs?

Thanks Peek! Here's an update on the bugs and the progress. If you see something not listed below, that is still an issue. Please do let me know, doing my best to source reports from various threads and PMs. Forums No signature break in forum posts Medium Resolved Classifieds Not able to post ad due to image bug High Resolved Forums Unable to edit posts after making them Medium Resolved Forums Unable to easily tell quoted text from body of message (probably a 'feature') Low Resolved Forums Mark all threads as read option doesn't exist Medium Pending Forums Recent Forum Posts gone from old site Low In Progress Forums Descriptions of forums in mobile but not desktop Medium Resolved Classifieds Classifieds text running into next ad in carousel Medium Resolved Forums Incorrect post numbers being shown apparently under "Canadian law.." Medium Pending Forums No display of amount of new threads & posts in a forum Low / Medium Pending Classifieds Cannot edit own classifieds High Resolved Profile No options for selecting certain fields that are tied to gear relationships Medium Pending Classifieds No return address for people sending email, so unable to contact back Urgent Resolved Global Image sizes too large, need to pull through thumbs or mediums High In Progress

Thanks for this feedback, it's quite helpful to know the nature of the load delays. We're busy working on optimizing load times at the moment, we've managed to cut down some big size numbers on the pages, but that wouldn't affect the site the way you're saying here with the long initial page load. I keep trying to recreate it, but I'm getting full page loads immediately this side. But we're trying to figure it out. If anyone has the desire to help us further, a video grab of the screen when moving to other pages will help a lot too. But we'll continue to try and find what it is causing the load issues.

I'll be responding to everything in more detail a bit later, but for now I just want to say that we're aware of the loading time issues and we're looking at ways to resolve this as a priority. And many of the feedback issues provided are things that will be worked on, if you're finding the site harder to use, don't worry we're going to still use your feedback to fix most of those issues, this isn't the final product by any means. But we needed to go live to receive this kind of feedback from you guys to make the small little changes that us developers may have missed.

Thanks for the constructive feedback. The country flag is definitely something I'd like to bring back. It was something I added several years back after the country name was removed, and people do seem to enjoy it. I do want to find a way to incorporate that again. Even if it just pulls through on the hover card you get when you hover over a poster's icon/name. Jump numbers is also something that was initially planned for release, but needed to become something we add afterwards. So you can probably expect that to return pretty quickly as we start moving to the bugs that don't break functionality. I've adjusted the quote boxes today and feedback would be appreciated on that. Should make them stand out more. Bringing back numbers on threads to display unread post numbers and new threads etc is something we want to do. Our CMS didn't come with this functionality off the bat, so we may need to build it, but we do want it back. I don't believe there is any option for showing a full thread, as that kind of thread view isn't very common among modern forums and something that is typically found more in older designs. Will take a look at the messages issue.

We hadn't noticed it being particularly slow in use, we are aware of some images being pulled through larger than they should be. Which we are working on. But running it through benchmarks, the reports definitely aren't good. We'll investigate this and ensure loading times are increased. Thanks

Thankfully this has been resolved as of Friday night, and ads should be able to post without issue. Is it essential that it exists on every forum category? This can be done, but don't want to add extra content where not necessary. We've added this back to the main forum page. If you go to the primary forum landing page, you can see that the bottom of the forums will now show the latest 10 posts from across the forums. Big and clunky is a modern design standard. Websites of the early 2000s followed a sense of squeezing everything in together, but with time that style has become seen as a negative user experience. And the modern practices push for more white space and larger, bolder fonts etc. With that said, we realize that the white space in some areas may exceed what is considered a good amount. And we're busy working on adjusting that in places at the moment too. You'll notice that the forum categories are now half the height that they were. I wasn't able to see it not working in internet explorer, I did test on mine now before responding and didn't encounter any issues? We may actually remove the descriptions from the mobile forum layout so that its neater and more along the lines what what you're after, the amount of information that gets shown on a screen at any single time. Remove the descriptions will make the categories much easier to navigate. Unfortunately some areas are tougher, like the threads. The size is directly related to the amount of info being shown. If we were to drop the info like "Thread starter" and "Date thread was started", it could be streamlined more. Thanks, this was something that we had issues with pre-launch but thought we had resolved. I'll look into this too. Thanks for letting us know, will definitely check this out.

After some very light nights last week and into the weekend to get this site going, I'm back in the office this morning and will be spending this week going through all this suggestions and feedback posts and doing what I can to resolve them as quick as possible. Some of the items mentioned above are able to be resolved fairly easily, while others may take a bit longer. I will however post updates in response to certain reports and feedback.

It does.. Posts listed that you have unread posts in, you will a blue button on the left next to the title, that's a signal for a thread with new posts, clicking that blue dot will take you to the first unread post.

The closest we have to this at the moment is the discover feature which shows you the latest actions on the site across all sections, though this will in most cases be the forums. https://www.dropzone.com/discover/ We may look to reintroduce something along the lines of the old one though, we'll take a closer look at discuss.

I'm not sure you can be a tester with this being your first post. But with that said, if you're going to provide feedback, we'd appreciate you describing your complaints, as saying "It sucks" doesn't really assist anyone.

Clicking on the blue dot on the left of a forum post will take you to the latest unread post. Clicking on the date on the right of a forum post listing, under the user icon will take you to the latest post.

There is only the ability to mark a specific forum category as read. However, it does make sense to have a mark all forums as read, and we'll work on getting that functionality back up.

Thanks for the feedback. I've adjusted the forum permissions for the archives, which were meant to be hidden and definitely was the last time I tested. But I've found the problem there and resolved that. With regards to the white space, our main focus here now is to ensure that users don't feel like important information is being left out in the white space. The white space is more a result of widening the forum layout, we moved from around 650px widths on pages to nearly double that on desktops, the reasons why mobile may feel more nice and compact is just because the screen width is much lower. But we don't think the white space is a result of removing anything? If it is, please let us know. And we are looking into adding possible forum descriptions on desktop, in order to reduce the feeling of excessive white space on the main forum page.

We've fixed this now, by increasing the edit time to 6 hours by default, instead of the 5 minutes it had. I've also tweaked the quote box slightly to bring it out a touch more and make it more obvious who one is quoting.

This is something that we will look into fixing, it was in our development environment but appears to have gotten lost along the way. The idea is for this info to show up when you hover over a poster's image, in the modal that pops up. Alternatively we may look at adding it to the left panel. Just for clarification, what feels wrong about it? So we can take it into account. The post running into signatures is a known issue that we will be looking to resolve very soon. User reputation is going to be used as a means to aid in combating spam, and giving special privileges to those who show themselves as valuable contributors. Things like not having to have items approved on submissions etc. With regards to markup. The new editor is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, meaning that everything you see is how it will be when posted. So in order to do specific things, you can just use the icons at the top of the editor (things like adding links, bolding, italics etc) If there's anything you see that you could do via the other editor but not here, let me know.

Hey guys, I realize that the change may be something one feels uncomfortable with at first, but there was method to the madness for sure. Mobile traffic is now the majority on the site, so to cater to mobile first is catering to the majority of the users. So OP is very much correct in that getting the site to actually be readable for majority of visitors was the number 1 priority. With regards to the white space, it's a change but it's more in line with what modern design standards are these days. It doesn't make sense to move to a new CMS and then to keep the same archaic 90s design that we had. I realize that the old cramped style is what you guys are used to, but at least give the white space a chance, as it's considered to be far better for readability. "If it ain't broke don't fix it", to be honest it was broken. Very broken. There was no way for anyone other than a desktop user to enjoy the site as it was a complete mess. Not only that but our old CMS was very restricted in terms of technology moving forward. We're hoping to develop new tools and functionality that will make the site far more interesting for users, but we needed a change to make that happen. This will also end up decreasing spam and scammers. With regards to ad block, we're definitely going to be looking to enforce turning off ad block. We designed the site in a way that it will look better with ads than without. And the simple fact of the matter is, we run almost primarily on ads and without them dropzone.com would not be able to sustain itself. We're still happy to hear feedback on problematic ads you encounter that may hinder your experience, and to resolve them serving. Messages are in the large envelop icon on the top right. Posts are automatically previewed, the editor shows a real representation of what the post will look like when posted, so it's providing a real time preview. The edit ability is a bug and we will resolve it. The signature line is the same, there should be a visible breaker between the signature and post, which we will fix too. IMPORTANT: We'd appreciate it if you could post any concerns about functionality to the feedback forums, or the bug forum in the announcements. Having numerous threads reporting issues makes it harder to track and resolve. Or to give you answers about getting used to the new layout.

What section was that in? The settings shouldn't be any different, but there is 640px width maximum to prevent the page layout breaking, which could cause a similar issue. This will be a non-issue in the next week or 2 when the new site comes online as the image attachment limits are much higher in all regards.

Apologies everyone. We had hoped to have everything ready for launch today, however in the process we discovered a bug that would have negatively impacted forum users, and decided to rather postpone the launch for a few more days and resolve the issue completely, than sacrifice user experience. Right now, we're busy implementing the fix and hope to have a more concrete ETA in the next 18 hours or so. Sorry again for any inconvenience, but we'll keep you updated.