Any chance of having the old WP back please?

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I do miss the previous version. The brightness does not bother me, but the posts seem too spaced out from each other. In the previous version, the posts were in boxes and it seemed more precise. Now it's like one post almost covers the whole screen and you have to scroll down a bit to get to the next post.

But I suppose I shouldn't moan. This is better than not having a Wrong Planet at all.

Yeah I didn't notice any issue with the avatars except some where more pixily ...but I remember even before I had to resize pictures to that size or smaller or they wouldn't work. So if that is still the case that bit is not really a difference from the old site and does not seem to concerning to me.

Thank you very much. I've just done it now.

Sooo much white meh ill get used to it although i think slightly darker and lighter shades of blue would be easier on the eyes.

While I agree that

1. This color scheme should have never been used on a website for Autistic people.
2. Despite constant exposure those with sensory sensitivities have never gotten used to fluorescent light, so why would they get used to a florescent white background?

However
1. Alex said in another thread that changing the theme is defiantly going to be looked at
2. There are a number of workarounds that are a easily and quickly installed.
3. The old site was horribly buggy it wasted my time very often. As time management is a problem of mine and many others on the spectrum, that was a big deal. There were times I considered leaving WP because of it. What was really frustrating was when I wound spend an hour or more creating a post on a topic I really cared about I hit that submit button and it was gone forever. This happened a number of times. I would attempt recreate it but that version was rushed and written when I was obviously angry and what ended up being posted reflected that.
4. Considering the botched rollout I really feared this would be a disaster, but so for this version seems zippy and we have a draft option to save posts, so at least you get part of your message back.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 24 Nov 2014, 4:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

it irritates me that you are irritated..because many answers are based on the brightness of the background and that is a perfectly legitimate comment.
As for the other issues of "clunkiness" with the old site, well I never used it to compare but please dig deep and find some empathy here, sensory issues can sometimes be the most hardest symptom to live with in regards to ASD's.
I agree with the tone of the page, especially teaming with the pale blue. There is nowhere to rest your eyes. I know a fair amount about colour, design and psychology. Team that with empathy for ASD's and I would want to smack someone over the head if they were asking me to use these colours for WP, or any site really. Such a no brainer, I can't believe this scheme would ever be considered unless you were desperate or clueless.

Overall, I wish it had never happened but can see why and how it had to.

I too am having a bit of sensory bother with the brighter background, though in my case I'm not all that vulnerable to it.......I know some folks here will be hurt a lot more than I have been. But there seems to be a workaround (plugin for Firefox).

The lockout was a shock. I'd have appreciated a more conspicuous warning about that. I know there were warnings, but anything short of a specific email or an impossible-to-miss alert on the website itself wouldn't have done the trick, I'm just too "beeline" in my approach for anything less, there's only me and the topics I want to read and write about, all else is just distracting fluff to me. I guess that's down to my autism.

My email topic reply notifications seemed to stop (though it's hard to be sure), and clicking the links in the old ones just gave me "page not found" errors, so it was hard to check whether I'd missed anything new on the topics I'm currently watching. The search features on the site and in my browser mitigated a lot of the problem though. I'm left with a slightly spooky feeling that I've overlooked a topic somewhere and will never know, otherwise I think I've overcome my initial anxieties when I first saw what had happened.

I don't like the feeling that I've been inconvenienced for the sake of mobile phone users, The air is always blue here when Microsoft / Facebook etc. do that to me, but I trust that WP is essentially a not-for-profit thing, so my pride doesn't get so much in the way of accepting that mobiles are the way the world is going......I might find a mobile device useful for such things myself one day if the world doesn't go for my preferred alternative of setting up universal wifi so that my Samsung N150 will be truly mobile.

I noticed that too, don't know if I'm right or not but it does seem a step down for efficiency, and I don't quite see how anybody could fail to have spotted that.

Low-res avatars being made laughably large, I suppose for me it's a very minor problem, I don't suppose anybody would have done that on purpose, hope they fix the bug soon.

I'm sad to think that WP wasn't aware of the now-obvious disability adjustments that could have been made for us - e.g. keep the background colours the same, don't mess with our beelines, keep topic reply notifications supported across the upgrade, and above all, if any of that can't be done, that's OK but please warn us in the biggest letters you have. But I know little about the problems of doing an upgrade, I appreciate that it's not entirely within WP's control because WP has to deal with the outside world, and because WP is no more perfect than I am.

I was delighted to see a user still using Win98se. It reminds me of a time when I thought I could use that forever, but fewer and fewer websites are supporting it, and modern software and hardware can be horribly incompatible with it too. But it works fine as long as you keep it isolated in a bubble.

From my point of view, I was content with the old software and haven't yet seen any benefits of the new. It wasn't too slow for me before. I hope I'm right in thinking that the change is likely to safeguard WP's existence and allow more people to use it. If so I'm thankful, and I hope that the problems reported on this thread will provide those in control good feedback on how it can be done better next time. I still feel very good about WP.

apparently there is a minor schism between those who need bright and stimulating versus those who need muted and calm.

Yeah...

Am I the only one who didn't have speed issues on the old site? I guess I did on my phone, but I hate using the Internet on my phone anyway.

I see no reason why each user couldn't have a choice between the two. Multiple color schemes and skins have been around on forums a long time.

I hope we won't have to change the avatar sizes. I like how big mine is now, and the pixelation gives it a charming 80's look that suits those of us who remember the good old days of early console games.

I am easily disoriented, so I have Hacker Vision: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... j?hl=en-US

m8, I love you and I don't even say that to my mum.

The oversized, pixellated avatars still crank me though. I'll go and fix mine right now, but how many won't know how to or won't bother?

EDIT: Blinky wasn't in the gallery, so I had to reupload him. And he's off to the right, instead of the centre. Please fix the avatars, for crying out loud -_-

The answer to all this is within your observation. That is, there needs to be a mid point, a balance between the two, a sort of compromise...
Now apply that idea to the colour scheme, it too needs a compromise. Some light is ok, but balance it with darker. As it is, you'll find it sways on the end of high key, that is bright on the tonal scale. Bright is not smart in this case. There is nowhere to rest your eyes on the page. It is switch between the high key white and high key pale blue. There is no-where to rest your eyes, hence people are forced to shift focus away from the screen. Hardly productive for a forum.

I just notice that the Wrong Planet shop is missing.

Will that be relinked and maybe improved, too?

I was able to get the green and blue into the modern layout by adding the Stylish app to my Firefox toolbar. I did that because blue and green are my favourite colours. There are many different types of themes from all over the Internet that people can use.