GRM site redesign coming--with a brief outage

MattGent wrote: Constructive feedback: If we're going to have all of that white space on the left, may as well fill it with advertising.

I thought it was.

Only for the first few posts, at the bottom of longer threads/pages it is blank.

That white space on the left is free for you to fill with your imagination. We won't clutter it up with ads or other junk. Think of it as our gift to you. A place where nothing will take your attention away from the wit and wisdom of your fellow forum-goers.

The open-in-new-window feature, red post preview text, and "read more at" copy/paste text will all be fixed shortly. Thanks for all your input, folks. Our developers at Rise Creative Group have been working very hard for almost 16 hours (with just a couple hours of sleep in the middle) in order to get this launched and to address your concerns post-launch.

The performance issues we had this morning were related to all the thumbnails in the Readers Rides section. The site had to generate more than 8000 new thumbnails very quickly, which at times quintupled processor usage compared to normal levels.

We're looking into options to let you navigate between forums more easily. That fix won't come right away, but it'll go into our queue of problems to solve and features to implement. Thanks for mentioning it.

Thank you all, again, for your input. Feel free to keep posting your concerns or problems. You can also email me. I'll address them as best as I can.

My first view.

Speed is good, but the whole thing looks really horrible on my IPhone. The format keeps resizing, and there is a thoroughly annoying popup window to subscribe which covers half the screen, floats as I scroll, and can't be read or clicked on. It's just enough to distract and annoy, but can't be read. Useless.

Additionally, the text box hides behind the keyboard. I'm typing this blind- cant read anything I'm typing.

Will check back later.

In reply to SVreX:

What version iPhone are you using? I'll run this by our developers.

Speed is slow on Safari on Mac OS X 10.5.8

Speed is fairly normal on my Mac running OS X 10.8.5.

speed is about 50% of prefacelift - chrome/windows 7

Looks ok on my iPhone 4 running OS7. Runs slow on my iMac running 10.9. I GREATLY appreciate the lack of ads to the left.

Not sure what the status is supposed to be at this time, but I'm running IE9 on a WIN7 computer. I'm pretty sure this isn't what you intend. Formats are all over the place with text running over text, huge areas of black at the top of my screen, etc.

Very nuch isn't working at the moment.

Oh, that's for the forum. I'm not getting anything for the new website- that's directly for grassrootsmotorsports.com for me. Nada.

Forum pages were wonky till a couple hours ago. Better now, I likes it. Haven't tried the mobile yet.

Alan Cesar wrote: In reply to SVreX: What version iPhone are you using? I'll run this by our developers.

IPhone5 6.1.4 (Previous gen OS). It's really bad.

Better on my MacBook Pro OS 10.6.8.

A lot of inconsistency over here.

On a MacBook Pro OSX 10.6.8: With Firefox, it moves at a reasonable speed, but all your side bar info is invisible. Same with the banner ad at the top. Actually, maybe it is just in the completely wrong place... there appears to be a re-formatted version of the sidebar (messed up, and laid out poorly- vertical on the right) between the bottom of the forum posts and your signature block.

Same machine with Safari, the sidebar prints OK on some pages, and is invisible on others. Runs slow.

"Other Publications" in the signature is blank in one browser, and shows publications in the other.

Advertising shows in some places, not others.

Say what you want about the creative approach to the "white sidebar", but honestly, it just looks like poor graphics layout.

The graphics and fonts are crisp, but that wasted space on the right (and too much red type) makes the page a little hard to read for older eyes. Windows and typing blocks are overlaying each other in awkward ways.

The Iphone5 is unusable.

Not trying to complain. Trying to give you feedback.

Nice to see the return of the search bar, but it's still not functioning well. It searches (and is quick) but gives extremely incomplete results.

Home page looks nice.

SVreX wrote: Nice to see the return of the search bar, but it's still not functioning well. It searches (and is quick) but gives extremely incomplete results.

The search had been working for some time.

Still really slow for me on FF and Safari.

Zomby Woof wrote:

SVreX wrote: Nice to see the return of the search bar, but it's still not functioning well. It searches (and is quick) but gives extremely incomplete results.

The search had been working for some time. Still really slow for me on FF and Safari.

Could be. I stopped trying.

Very incomplete results.

I never used the mobile site on the old layout, but the formatting of the new non mobile site is about as berkeleyed up as a soup sandwich on my phone. There's no link to click for a mobile version either. I just took a stab in the dark and put an "m." in front of the url and it worked. Mobile version looks good, good speed.

My one gripe, and it's possible it's been addressed already, my latest topics button is no longer where it used to be. Once I reply to a thread, I have to go back out to the forum main page, and hit the latest topics button from there, where I used to be able to skip the 2nd step.

In reply to mndsm:

Agreed. I always did it that way too.

Alan Cesar wrote: That white space on the left is free for you to fill with your imagination. We won't clutter it up with ads or other junk.

That's exactly why it doesn't look right - the forum posts, the things that people generally are on a forum to read, are squished off to the right side.

I guess it bothers me a lot because two other of my favorite sites recently did a similar large overhaul where the only real "feature" is that the actual content of the site was made more difficult to access, because BUTTONS AND STUFF. And I like the GRM forum and its people, and it sucks that the usability issues mean that it is no longer a fun place to be.

It's like automotive maintenance - if it's not easy, you don't enjoy it as much, and you're more likely to not do it.

It's still slow (but a lot better than this morning) on my laptop with Firefox.

Internet explorer, slow as heck. Don't like having to back out to get to a different forum. I have no "New post" info.

The layout is cramped and less appealing to me, but I'll get used to it. Old monitor, so maybe it will be laid out better on a widescreen setup.

speed ok (at least for now )

but still no way to tell what threads have unread posts

and still no leaderboard

speed ok (at least for now )

but still no way to tell what threads have unread posts

and still no leaderboard