can we go back to phpbb please?

I sympathise with your confusion over the new layout, but in case you don't remember, when we were using phpbb3, people would whine about some odd bug/feature/structural issue that came with it just about every month.
I agree with jarada that having the forum well-integrated with the rest of the new website is a big bonus, while this system seems to have some more good features accessible like connectivity with social networking sites, and perhaps the layout issues that we are having right now can be resolved.
It'd be helpful if you point out specific problems that you're having, for instance I think the signature field is too short now to get a couple of useful links in, and some of the buttons seem to cross over each other in Firefox.

I'd like to hear from someone who joined the movement since the webite was updated this month and find out what they think of the system.

It's not confusion at the new layout - it's outright disgust at not only the layout but the whole user interface. I'm a software developer (video games and front-end UIs for mobile apps mostly) so perhaps my critical view on bad user interfaces is more active than other people's, but I have a strong belief that computers should be useful and friendly, and it's the interface that makes them this way. Bad interfaces make people hate computers which is a bad thing.

I sent Jarada a PM about some of the issues, but I'm happy to discuss openly too. The problem is that there are so many issues it's difficult to enumerate them let alone prioritise them. If I could work out what the feature set was supposed to be (i.e. what functionality is present/not present and what is simply hidden away somewhere in an obscure/unintuative place) it might be a starting point.

I'll give it a go to point out some of the more obvious issues:

1: Layout:

The navigation bar should be at the top, not on the right. The current layout squeezes the forum posts into a narrow vertical column making it take up more vertical space and more difficult to read. It also creates a large area of dead space on the right below the navigation box thing.

The headers of each post take up far too much vertical space, breaking up the flow of posts and impeding continuity when reading. The per-post information should be on the left or right taking up a small amount of width from the post and avoiding as much as possible adding any additional vertical height that the post would otherwise take up.

The timestamp of each post should be more prominent within the per-post information.

The user status is not relevant on a per-post basis and should not be present at all. Ideally any user-info beyond their name and picture should be put into an expanding pop-out or left on their profile.

Each reply contains a footer with top/quote/reply buttons that could be easily integrated into the header/user-info area instead of wasting further space.

Each reply is presented as a separate "comment" on the original post, even going so far as to have a #1, #2 comment number, and putting it in a separate/distinct box. This approach to presenting a discussion forum is fundamentally wrong. A forum is for ongoing discussion/debate between members/peers so the threads should be presented as a continuing discussion. The post + comments layout is more appropriate for a blog where one person makes a post and then many others comment on the original post (they sometimes break into discussion/comments on other comments, but this is not the intention of the layout).

2: Visual Appearance / style:

There is not enough contrast in text, colours, image-buttons, and between rows/backgrounds. The colours are all very light and de-saturated so even on good quality screens it's not easy to distinguish different areas of the screen. Most of the text is the same size and style so it's difficult to focus on the relevant bits and everything just blurs towards a homogeneous mass of text. There is no distinct separation between table cells, they are almost the same colour and very light with a white border between them.

"Mark all forums read New posts Unanswered topics Active topics" <- This is supposed to look like four separate links, the only indication of where one ends and the next begins is the capital letter. Separators between the links is vital, even underlining the links would help.

Text in table headings, comment boxes, footers all looks just like the links - in some cases headings which are links look identical to headings which are not links.

The thread icons don't indicate threads in which you have participated

3: User Interface:

The forum images (new posts, no new posts) should be clickable.

The new post indicators don't count new posts in sub-forums. In fact they are very confusing and clicking them doesn't really help as it takes you to the top of a page with a load of sub-forums listed instead of the new posts.

The new/updated flags don't seem to line up with new/updated threads/posts, or at least it's not at all clear what context (since last login/read, or something else?) is being considered for such status.

Sub-forum links don't have an indicator to show when they have new posts.

The "my posts" or "my replies" feature appears not to be present.

I appear to be able to edit other people's posts!!

----

Most of the above applies to the forum sections, the other features are also poorly presented/explained/implemented...

What is a heartbeat? it appears to be a status-update feed but why is it confusingly named and why is there a separate "statuses" feed with basically the same information?

The tabs above your account are a big mish-mash and not distinctly grouped, also it's not really clear why some things are presented as tabs and some as sub-sections of your account in the navigation box on the right - there's not really an obvious structure to the features.

Is the concept of groups within your user account the same as the forum regional groups or not? it seems to be as you have a "my groups unread", but why is this confusingly presented in your account rather than as a quick-search link within the forum pages where it would make more sense (i.e. has some context/structure).

Is "signups" really supposed to be "events" or "calendar" or something? It's really not clear what this feature is supposed to do.

What is a "my follow link"? "Please copy and paste urls for each service you would like to display in the block." what block? what are you talking about? This and other features completely fail to explain themselves, in regard to what they are supposed to do and how you are supposed to use them.

I'm a computer person, I get computers, I understand software, and I just can't figure out what half of these things are supposed to do, what they are for, or how they are supposed to help the movement, I hate to think how non-computer people will get on with this stuff.

This kind of crappy user experience is why people say things like "I don't get computers, I'm rubbish at computers" - no, you're not, you just had a crappy experience because some shitty UI designer didn't really know what they were doing and chucked a bunch of stuff together in a hap-hazard way and then pushed it out as a feature rich product and made you feel that it was your fault you couldn't use it.

When you spell it out like that, I reckon I agree with just about everything there. I've probably just been too busy with uni work to really get in and notice all the problems on the site.

I would put making clearly distinguishable link buttons and reducing the text homogeneity as top priorities, but the having the navigation links on the right-hand side looks right for all parts of the site other than the forum to me, so perhaps the layout just needs to be re-arranged for forum pages.
Personally I would make the BBCode guide a drop-down section of hidden text, or a popup (new window) link, with smileys placed nearer to the top. That's just me guessing what people might find more useful, but we still need to hear from them.
I don't like having a bright-white central background with black text and would prefer the middle of the site looked more like the outer background, although I don't mind it that badly and people often seem to have conflicting preferences on that.

Still, it's only been on a couple of days, so I'm still giving dave the benefit of the doubt that this system can work better with some tweaking.
I reckon... keep the rope, torches and pitchforks put away for about a week, at least.

*lol* yeah - certainly no pitch-forks and the like for anyone who's put the effort in to run and maintain and update the site, quite the opposite, it's much appreciated.

It's more the selection of the site software that I don't understand. The concept of "integrating" a forum with the other features is way over-valued, in reality the only thing that needs to be integrated is the user authentication and the user-profile, so you can have a common login and identity across the site. Separate features should be kept separate and distinct, a forum is certainly something that should be kept separate so that people can choose to use it stand-alone from the other features, or not to use it at all and just use the other features if desired. In my view, phpbb is the best forum software out there, simply because it's the most mature and has had the most fixes/changes over the years according to user and administrator needs and desires. It also happens to look quite nice and is friendly and easy to use - my only gripe with phpbb from a user perspective is that the forum icons are overly complex and difficult to understand for new users (though personally I quite like them). There are more gripes from an administrator perspective, because it is *very* configurable and the UI for this is difficult to learn, but that's more indicative of the wide range of features and configurability actually being complex and difficult to learn than the UI being bad.

I find myself well in agreement with jhabbott's comments here.

I'm not sure what else I can add, other than my experience of asking others to fix things generally falls on deaf ears, which is why I'm coding my own forums, though hopefully I will remember to listen to users demands and not fall into the same trap!

... and think the forum is absolutely SHOCKING!

There's no navigation at the top, most pages are displayed with errors, header isn't displayed and there is a large blank expanse at the top of each page, buttons aren't displaying either. Having run a phpBB forum in the past I can personally vouch for it's user-friendliness, stability and good support (via forums).

However, having checked the way this forum SHOULD be operating (over at Drupal - http://drupal.org/forum) then I can only concurr that this forum is so pants due to shoddy setup/admin.

I agree with jhabbot that the forum should be the best part of a website, as it's where its members interact. This is very offputting and demands URGENT attention if you ask me, and you did!

C'mon admin... get the finger oot!!!!

There seems to be a LOT of support available over at Drupal. Having a bit of IT experience myself I could probably get this forum tweaked and running to perfection with a little bit of time and effort. It doesn't reflect well on the Zeitgeist organisation or encourage new members to stick around when the forum and community elements are so obviously not working!

... credit should be given where it's due so, well done on the work you've done recently. Certainly seems to be working (and looking) a lot better than it was before!

Still think it's a bit counterintuitive, the forum/website integration, as there seems to be things that are hard to find while others are redundant. But maybe a lot of that is down to it all being a bit new.

Anyway, keep up the good work!