Without the advanced-backlight applet I wouldn't be able to read this forum in the morning or the evening.

Well, if you do something for the people, it comes without a saying that you should expect that people will not like it and adjust your work accordingly. In this particular case, the new design does waste lots of space and requires insane amounts of scrolling, so the poster is right. The way to deal with it is not to look offended but to fix the layout, quickly, by reducing margins, removing unnecessary elements, and making it look more similar to the old layout (without sacrificing the new style of course).

You are not really required to read all these threads. I do not.

Clearly you haven't been paying attention as this is exactly what Reggie's been doing. . . .

I was actually looking for real feedback on whether people are spending less time on the site - perhaps i should have made a poll

Why do we need an alternative to maemo.org? maemo.org is our site; Nokia kindly pay the bills and pay for 4 full-time members of staff, and additional contractors for other work we want.

Can you give examples? Theme changes don't count (the theme was designed by a member of the community, implemented on talk by Reggie etc.) Moderators are drawn from the community (who've volunteered). This is no more a Nokia product forum now than it was in October 2005.

Like Tablet Scene? Nothing is stopped new fora being developed, but I singularly fail to see the point at the moment.

Some scenarios:

• Nokia somehow get themselves more moderators, and then start stamping down hard on threads critcial of them/deleting posts.
• Nokia pull the funding plug.
• Nokia take back control of maemo.org
• ...

First thing that'd happen is that the Community Council (our community council) would try to make them realise the error of their ways; but as a final resort, Reggie pulls talk.maemo.org back out to internettablettalk.com, reinstates adverts and possibly asks for donations to cover the costs.

Are there other scenarios you can think of which could be detrimental to this place? (Apart from every other thread being full of theme whining) Is there any evidence in your eyes that any of these scenarios are coming to play?

Yes, we've now got moderators; and yes, they're still figuring out the best way of doing it. But they're not Nokia sponsored, they're giving up their time to do it for free and we - as a forum - have been asking Reggie for moderators since I joined back in October 2005.

I have. It is not enough yet, though. BTW, just tried to access the ITT site from my phone and found that the mobile layout is also gone, while the default one is nearly impossible to browse with a phone (generic S60e3 with its builtin WebKit-based browser). Another small thing to import from the old design, I guess...

I still keep coming to these forums as often as before, but thanks for the minimalistic theme.
Not to repeat myself again, I'll resume my issues with the new theme as pure usability/ergonomics ones.

I find myself coming her less after I found a server to play wow for free.

The people that run this forum messed up when they forced this theme down everyone's throats. I only visit here to see if they've allowed us to use the old theme options again or not. I can't stand the contrast, spacing, colors,etc so yes I do come here less often after the theme change was forced on me. Letting users at least choose the default vBulletin them is a must. I tried limping along with the minimalist theme, but it's too... minimal. Talk about wasting time fixing something that wasn't broken. As if there wasn't productive things around here that could have been accomplished instead.

Sure I'd like a full featured dark theme. And sure I'd like for my eyeballs not to burn even when I set advanced-backlight to 1. But I come here for the content, not the colors. And because of the huge speed increase I'm coming here more often. We have good access to the site maintainers, and if need be, I'll fix things up on the client side like I have to do to make Engadget tablet-friendly. Things could be worse.