OK, just for the record I'll sum up my own feedback here, although much has been mentioned already.

I have refrained from doing this earlier because I wanted to allow some time to get past the initial "change trauma", get used to the new look, and see how things would evolve.

So here is what remains true after a few day's use of the new forum theme, as it stands now. I should also mention that these impressions are in comparison with the blue "Classic" theme, which I'd always used up to now. I was never into the dark "N810" theme, neither on desktop or on the tablets (where I still use Minimalist) -- and was happy I was not forced to use it :-).

First, I must say that (quite apart from the ongoing debate on providing user options or not), Reggie has been very responsive and reactive to specific comments and suggestions about the new theme, and many small but effective tweaks have been made. The pages we see now are both similar to, but quite different than, those we had initially.

Specifically, I now realize that the "thread view" pages are something I can get used to, from a readability point of view, even though I'm still not a fan of the "maemo orange-and-white" dogma. The sidebar with menu and "active topics" is a useful addition (although it'd break the display on the tablets if I were using it there).

However, the *other* page I use all the time (New Posts), because it's the only way I've ever kept up with things on ItT, is another matter.

I like the way the "next unread" link had been moved to the post count on the right, because it beats trying to hit that tiny icon on the left, and is consistent with the Minimalist theme.

The problem is, that page's content is by definition made only of links (topic titles), and thus almost exclusively orange-on-white. Do as I may, I still find it an assault on the eyes, and hard to endure for any length of time.

In all cases, and readability aside, what probably bugs me most is the general loss of information density in this forum view compared to the previous ones. I still stand by my previous remark : on the Web, there are news sites, content-heavy sites, blogs, wikis, forums, etc. And they all tend to have their own specific layouts because their contents are created and evolve differently, and accordingly their readership comes at their content differently.

What we have here is the result of taking a theme that was originally conceived for the contents of maemo.org, and imposing it (for, let's say, well-meant "philosophical" reasons) on the contents of a community forum.

I find it's not working that well, for me. A good forum is a fast-moving, fast-scrolling beast. It's all about keeping in touch, daily, with a frenzy of activity coming in from all sides. It's all about taking in the best possible snapshot of all that activity and information in one go, to get a feeling about how and where things are moving, and choosing where you're going to invest your time and attention. In short, it's all about information density, whatever the size of the screen.

For me, filtering ItT's activity and bluster through the low-density display of its maemo.org sibling sites definitely lowers my ability to stay involved as I've been, through ups and downs, since 11-03-2005.

The waste of horizontal and vertical screen real estate is simply galling (even if there has been progress on the latter). It's almost impossible nowadays to buy a monitor that is not an LCD and does not have a wide aspect ratio, so using both dimensions intelligently is even more important than before.

On my 1920x1080 desktop display, almost half of the width goes unused. On the "new posts" page, that means that a lot of the thread titles uselessly wrap around in their boxes, thus reducing even more the vertical information density... right now, my PC shows me about the same amount as my 800x480 tablet using Minimalist ! And in thread view, that means a whole lot more scrolling for the same amount of posts...

Again, this doesn't trouble me for content in the other parts of maemo.org, but for a forum it's definitely counter-productive.

I'm not optimistic concerning the better use of screen width, as it would mean an exception to the maemo.org theme for the Talk section, which seems clearly out of the question ATM.

I believe there's still room for some more damage-control tweaks regarding vertical density, however. Here are some suggestions (if technically doable, of course) :

* on the New Posts page:

- put the the page selection list on the same line as the "breadcrumbs" list ?
- put "Search: New Posts " + "Showing results 1 to x of y" + "Search took 0.0N seconds." on a single line ?
- delete the useless "Results" line ?
- reduce the vertical/padding spacing inside the individual thread title boxes ?
- or even turn the list into one single box, with just lines as separators ?

* on the Thread View page:

- reduce space between breadcrumb+topic title and "post reply" icon ?
- move the "The Following N Users Say Thank You to X For This Useful Post:" to the same line as the "Quote & Reply | Quick Reply | Thanks!" ? block ?
- (readability) slightly tint the background of post header and footer to better focus on the content ?


Oh and Reggie, if you can find a fix for the all-orange New Posts page, I'd be really grateful :-)