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Dec 4th, 2025- Banner, Classic Feedback, and Beta!
a day ago
General
Hey there fuzzies!
We are here with a cozy holiday banner update! ☕
This loafy cuteness banner was made by
nuggetkun!
Be sure to bombard their shouts for this fantastic piece or flood their comments on the original here.
Please use the tag FABanner2025 in your keywords so we can easily locate submissions!
With the end of the year coming up, if you create a banner design meant for after Jan 1st please use the new tag FABanner2026. To be clear- using the new tag will not mean those with 2025 are no longer considered. We may still pick some from previous years as so many wonderful banners have been submitted!
What are community banners?
Our Community Banners are where artists submit banner ideas throughout the year and, if chosen, they will be featured as the site's default banner for a minimum of one week—sometimes longer if it fits a season or holiday. There is no set amount of banners that we choose. We may pick 3, or 12, or even 42! Remember to add FABanner2025(or 2026) to your tags for us to easily locate submissions. We ask that at least one of the mascots is featured, but preferably both of us. Focus must be primarily on the mascots. All banners must meet General Rating guidelines to be considered. Banner sizes are fixed at 1850x300 pixels.
We have some more news we'd like to mention while we have your attention!
Back in 2019 we first announced we'd be retiring the Classic UI, eventually making it no longer available. Classic currently causes many issues and slowdowns for the team as we add new features and update the site. It doubles the amount of work that has to be done as Classic and Modern are different code bases. In addition, Classic just cannot support many of the new updates we've been working on. This has resulted in Classic users being unable to use modern features. Our techs ran the numbers and currently only 4.6% of all active accounts on Fur Affinity still use Classic. On 09/22/2025 we announced that all new accounts after that post would no longer be able to access Classic while it was being depreciated.
Whenever we implement a new feature for the Modern UI, we make a point to remind everyone that constructive feedback is always welcome—especially from the dedicated Classic users—so we can continue to refine Modern. We are going to be more vocal about those reminders. Without constructive feedback, we cannot know what you like or dislike about the UIs. We need community feedback so we can keep making the improvements the community wants!
To make feedback as successful as possible, we have a few ground rules:
1. Feedback and critique must be constructive. Comments like "It's ugly," "I don't like it," or "keep Classic" are valid opinions, but they aren't constructive feedback. We need examples and explanations. An example of constructive feedback would be "I don't like it because the text is hard to read because it doesn't have enough contrast."
2. Scope:
- Features that Classic already has that Modern doesn't.
- Features that Modern already has but how those features could be better.
- If you want to suggest new features for Modern, please submit a Trouble Ticket under the General > Feedback category.
3. Do not plead for Classic to stay. Maintaining Classic is making it impossible for our coders to make meaningful progress on anything else. Classic needs to be retired.
4. Fur Affinity rules and conduct expectations still apply. Remember to be kind and excellent to each other in the comments.
Together we hope we can make some solid improvements for everyone to enjoy!
Some feedback we’ve gotten from tickets, comments, and our official Discord so far:
Note this list is not complete and will be adjusted as needed. Some suggestions might not be possible to implement at this time, but will be kept for future reference.
We will be working on improving Modern with this feedback in mind and have a live beta site for FA+ users to test out before being pushed to all users. When the update is released to all users, an official end date for Classic will be announced. This project is a big undertaking and may take a couple months, so we appreciate your patience and support while we work on improving FA for everyone!
We are here with a cozy holiday banner update! ☕
This loafy cuteness banner was made by
nuggetkun!Be sure to bombard their shouts for this fantastic piece or flood their comments on the original here.
⭐COMMUNITY BANNER ENTRY INFO⭐Please use the tag FABanner2025 in your keywords so we can easily locate submissions!
With the end of the year coming up, if you create a banner design meant for after Jan 1st please use the new tag FABanner2026. To be clear- using the new tag will not mean those with 2025 are no longer considered. We may still pick some from previous years as so many wonderful banners have been submitted!
What are community banners?
Our Community Banners are where artists submit banner ideas throughout the year and, if chosen, they will be featured as the site's default banner for a minimum of one week—sometimes longer if it fits a season or holiday. There is no set amount of banners that we choose. We may pick 3, or 12, or even 42! Remember to add FABanner2025(or 2026) to your tags for us to easily locate submissions. We ask that at least one of the mascots is featured, but preferably both of us. Focus must be primarily on the mascots. All banners must meet General Rating guidelines to be considered. Banner sizes are fixed at 1850x300 pixels.
We have some more news we'd like to mention while we have your attention!
Back in 2019 we first announced we'd be retiring the Classic UI, eventually making it no longer available. Classic currently causes many issues and slowdowns for the team as we add new features and update the site. It doubles the amount of work that has to be done as Classic and Modern are different code bases. In addition, Classic just cannot support many of the new updates we've been working on. This has resulted in Classic users being unable to use modern features. Our techs ran the numbers and currently only 4.6% of all active accounts on Fur Affinity still use Classic. On 09/22/2025 we announced that all new accounts after that post would no longer be able to access Classic while it was being depreciated.
Whenever we implement a new feature for the Modern UI, we make a point to remind everyone that constructive feedback is always welcome—especially from the dedicated Classic users—so we can continue to refine Modern. We are going to be more vocal about those reminders. Without constructive feedback, we cannot know what you like or dislike about the UIs. We need community feedback so we can keep making the improvements the community wants!
To make feedback as successful as possible, we have a few ground rules:
1. Feedback and critique must be constructive. Comments like "It's ugly," "I don't like it," or "keep Classic" are valid opinions, but they aren't constructive feedback. We need examples and explanations. An example of constructive feedback would be "I don't like it because the text is hard to read because it doesn't have enough contrast."
2. Scope:
- Features that Classic already has that Modern doesn't.
- Features that Modern already has but how those features could be better.
- If you want to suggest new features for Modern, please submit a Trouble Ticket under the General > Feedback category.
3. Do not plead for Classic to stay. Maintaining Classic is making it impossible for our coders to make meaningful progress on anything else. Classic needs to be retired.
4. Fur Affinity rules and conduct expectations still apply. Remember to be kind and excellent to each other in the comments.
Together we hope we can make some solid improvements for everyone to enjoy!
Some feedback we’ve gotten from tickets, comments, and our official Discord so far:
- Classic Light colors moved to Modern/Accessible Color Palettes (Being looked at by Tech)
- USER GALLERIES
- Mini Gallery returned to Centered position
- Gallery Folders Changed to Better position or create "See Folders" button.
- "You Are Here" indicator in mini-gallery navigation.
- Minimalist Modern Skin
- SPACING ISSUES
- Verticality/Scrolling Concerns
- Empty Spacing
- Unified Button Sizes/Format (This section includes the buttons in the comment area of FA)
- Font Sizing/Scaling concerns
- Page Stats in-line with Page Profile or similar design adjustments
- Lack of mobile API for functioning mobile version
- LINKS
- Visited/Un-visited link distinctions
- Remove the dotted underline
- Ability to hide Header/Nav Bar
- Thumbnails instead of Full Resolution (You can adjust this already in Account Settings > Image Full View. You do have to input your password to update these settings, we are working on removing that requirement for UI swapping.)
- COMMISSION TAB
- Create/Reset Display/End Comm Edit buttons misaligned
- Mobile: Commissions area is cut off without a way to view it
- Stylistic Mismatch of Input Boxes (users cites Slate Theme this is the most noticeable between Account Settings vs. Site At Large)
- NOTES SYSTEM
- Legend for Priority Coloration/Clearer Coloration
- Overall Style Update
- Adjusting Icons to look clearer in 4k
- Drop-down for Emoticons (Make them easier to find)
Note this list is not complete and will be adjusted as needed. Some suggestions might not be possible to implement at this time, but will be kept for future reference.
We will be working on improving Modern with this feedback in mind and have a live beta site for FA+ users to test out before being pushed to all users. When the update is released to all users, an official end date for Classic will be announced. This project is a big undertaking and may take a couple months, so we appreciate your patience and support while we work on improving FA for everyone!
Which is really weird when they explicitly tell you "link EVERY image you want to report because we don't check their gallery, only what you link".
Also, I never liked it when Yiffstar, sorry, SoFurry, moved to it, and I don't like how EVERYONE ELSE is moving to what looks like the same damn look and layout!
Also, THE LOAFS
THE LOAFS BE RISIN
Missing from the list: a "You Are Here" indicator in the mini-gallery nav thing on the submission view page, so that it's actually usable for browsing.
Annoyance: clicking on "download" on the new UI does that force-file-to-download-to-your-downloads-folder thing instead of just allowing the browser to open the file as it sees fit. I'd really like the option for the latter, like it is in classic.
And actually going back to double-check it, it seems to be doing it site-wide now regardless of template. I was pretty sure that before it was adding a '&dl=yes' type thing to the download link on the modern template but now it seems to just be doing it based on file type without any extra link parameters. So like a jpeg file doesn't have the content-disposition header but a txt file does and gets force-downloaded.
The download button on my end is just a plain hyperlink with no events to the file directly on d.furaffinity.net, which doesn't set a Content-Disposition header. It doesn't even open in a new window.
Picking this as an example: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/58025580/
At the top of the story in the old template or the top-right with the new template, you get a download link like this:
https://d.furaffinity.net/art/jeeve.....-_part_one.txt
Which does not add the content-disposition tag:
% curl -i https://d.furaffinity.net/art/jeeve.....-_part_one.txt
HTTP/2 200
date: Fri, 05 Dec 2025 03:17:06 GMT
content-type: text/plain
server: cloudflare
last-modified: Sat, 07 Sep 2024 23:07:19 GMT
etag: W/"66dcdca7-4d29"
expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
cache-control: max-age=315360000
vary: accept-encoding
cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC
cf-ray: 9a90637c5ef2938c-SJC
But then if you scroll down to the bottom and use that download link (roughly the same place on both the old and new template), you get a different url with '/download/' in it:
https://d.furaffinity.net/download/.....-_part_one.txt
Which does add the content-disposition tag:
% curl -i https://d.furaffinity.net/download/.....-_part_one.txt
HTTP/2 200
date: Fri, 05 Dec 2025 03:18:42 GMT
content-type: text/plain
server: cloudflare
last-modified: Sat, 07 Sep 2024 23:07:19 GMT
etag: W/"66dcdca7-4d29"
expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
cache-control: max-age=315360000
content-disposition: attachment; filename=1725750438.jeevestheroo_the_final_frontier_is_magic_-_part_one.txt
vary: accept-encoding
cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC
cf-ray: 9a9065d2fc1115c8-SJC
But on image uploads, both links lack the '/download/' bit. (well, only one link exists in the old template for image uploads but you get the point)
In fact that ticket records my frustrations almost in real-time as they rolled out updates to Modern that actually made things even worse, and I made note of those problems in the ticket as it got replied to and updated. That's because not only are the visited/unvisited color issues still there, but they changed the way hyperlinks as a whole are styled. They're virtually the same color as ordinary text, and they're not underlined as usually is standard, or if they are it's an underline I lack the visual acuity to see. So, as far as Modern is concerned, I quite literally cannot tell what's ordinary text and what's a hyperlink in spaces like the description boxes for posts, or in journal entries. It all just looks like ordinary text to me, no delineation. I tested out Retro and it uses the same style system, so links immediately became unrecognizable for me in Retro too and I immediately switched back to Classic.
I feel like I should bump that ticket again since this announcement post mentioned the visited/unvisited issue but did not mention the hyperlink styling issue, which personally I find the much bigger problem of the two.
The issues around hyperlinks are in fact more or less the only reason I stick hard to Classic. I mean, I do have other gripes about Modern, but those are mostly just personal opinion types of things. The hyperlink deal is of the "this makes it unusable for me" type.
Like I'm not one of those "phone bad" types, but from an ergonomics perspective, phones are bad and mobile first design leaking into desktop and tablet ui is infuriating
Desktops and tablets have big screens you can put tons of stuff on
for modern mode improvements, an option to hide the huge banner so can see more of the page before scrolling, could make moving over from classic less of a pain (but, again, a blocker extension could solve that right now for user's that bothered by it)
As for feedback for the modern theme, I definitely think the mini-gallery should return to its central position. It makes it easier to tell which works are before or after the one you're looking at, and it doesn't properly signal that it works like that. This latter issue is pretty serious, as it looks a lot like it's just recommended works on the side instead of older and newer works.
well, bye then, I guess
While the front end - that is, the part that users see and interact with - of Classic is better than Modern overall, the back end - the actual inner workings "under the hood" - is a patchwork, spaghetti code abomination from hell that's been holding the site back for over a decade. Adding features to Classic is ungodly finicky, and the more integral a thing you're messing with the worse it gets. You want to know why it took forever to get the ability to change our display names? It's because adding that functionality without making the site implode was an absolute nightmare that nobody wanted to deal with attempting until the devteam shift. There's a reason the Modern skin is built on a separate, more stable code base. Maintaining Classic's code base doubles the devteam's workload (which is a lot to ask if only 4.6% of users even still bother with it), and the inherent instability of it makes FA that much more likely to break every time there's an update.
So as much as it sucks to say it, sunsetting Classic is the reasonable call.
What we must ask and hope for is that the things that make Classic good on the user end be brought over to Modern.
Think of it this way: it isn't easy to code, especially a massive art website with a lot of users. And when you have two code bases, one of which is super old and aging, it's very hard to take care of both when you are constantly updating the site not just with new features, but also exploits and cybersecurity issues (which having a super old code base can make worse, btw).
Classic is pretty at its face, but in the back end it is a complete mess of spaghetti code and decades old code new techs may not know how to work with.
It's nothing to do with user data or efficiency, it's just because in the back end it holds things back.
From what I've been reading on this page, the new site layout is fixed into the software for some reason which is not explained in plain english. Hopefully it's just a template thing where it's not worthwhile to make it look pretty, though it'd be funny if the "new" codebase were just as screwy and broken as the old; just assembled out of more familiar languages to the current crop of mechanics.
This sounds... Unnecessarily hostile. I don't think staff is doing this at all, especially since they are trying to listen to feedback before the change. Otherwise the discord and this announcement would not have been made.
just clobber me over the head with what is meant, only way it'll get through my thick skull and smooth brain
wow. Just wow.
Found this later on in the comments. Maybe this can explain things a bit?
It's like if you opened up a Model T Ford and found, instead of the plain, no-nonsense Ford engine... one quarter of the Ford engine ad-hoc welded to quarters of three different engines from different manufacturers of varying date, each with different cylinder sizes but all somehow jury-rigged to work together... as long as no-one pokes it and disturbs the balance.
https://fossbytes.com/mocas-worlds-.....puter-program/
and even real objects designed in the 1930's and still use today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan#Modern_use
I don't care if it gobbles down two gigs of memory and has all manner of tracking bullshit to block
all I want is for it to look the same on the front end
if I've got to learn a new UI then there's no incentive to stay here instead of learning how to use twitter where seemingly 9/10 of the dead accounts on my watchlist disappeared off to
The people who understand why the plug is being pulled on Classic. Classic is an unstable mess that takes way too much work just to keep running and keep secure, let alone add anything nice. It's better for them to switch completely over to the backend that doesn't fall over in a stiff breeze.
"I don't care if it gobbles down two gigs of memory and has all manner of tracking bullshit to block
all I want is for it to look the same on the front end"
I want it to look the same on the frontend, too, but I understand that that's not in the picture in the immediate term because unfortunately, the codebase that doesn't shit the bed and collapse in a heap when you look at it crosseyed isn't currently flexible enough in how it renders the site (probably because when it was originally made, it didn't need to be - divisions in the dev team that weren't resolved til late last year meant porting Classic over to it wasn't even on the table at the time) and hasn't been upgraded yet because having to babysit two codebases - one of them a trainwreck - slows the devs down when it comes to improvements. They need to pull the plug on Classic to have the time and energy to properly fix Modern's shit.
"if I've got to learn a new UI then there's no incentive to stay here instead of learning how to use twitter where seemingly 9/10 of the dead accounts on my watchlist disappeared off to"
1. If those accounts have any sense, they'd actually be on Bluesky by now.
2. There is an incentive: Gallery sites are much better for actually viewing and saving stuff, especially stories, and the direct alternatives to FA are either lacking in traction (Weasyl), currently still in the shop (SoFurry), or sleazy as all get out (Inkbunny).
Instead of moaning, identify what Modern needs to do to meet you halfway so that even if it looks different aesthetically you basically don't have to learn anything new to use it and it's not an eyesore to look at.
Well okay, so squarespace doesn't offer it as an option. Good to know, but it doesn't change much of anything from the perspective of MrWhinyEndUser (me)
"If those accounts have any sense, they'd actually be on Bluesky by now."
Why? It's the same animal as 'truth social' or that youtube alternative 'rumble' or weasyl/IB, or any other politically motivated offshoot. It'll bumble along for a few years with a small and very 'politically minded' userbase before eventually it quits being worthwhile to keep the lights on.
"Gallery sites are much better for actually viewing and saving stuff, especially stories"
Don't I know it. YS/SF being down has really been cramping my consumption of text-smut. FA has always sucked hard for that though. For images, yeah the familiarity is nice, but the boorus have still got it beat; especially the less talked about ones that are full of pirated content and which ignore DNP requests. So many cleared out galleries on here, again usually due to politically minded tantrums or pressures.
"Instead of moaning, identify what Modern needs to do to meet you halfway so that even if it looks different aesthetically you basically don't have to learn anything new to use it and it's not an eyesore to look at. "
Sorry bro, there's this 'je ne sais quoi' that makes a place feel like the home I've been squatting in for the last couple decades. Getting kicked out feels much the same no matter the justifications given (rental not being renewed, eminent domain being used, building happening to have burnt down, etc)
Yeah it takes more effort than reskinning a couple things on 'smartphone touchscreen hell' but it's all anyone who sticks with the old wants:
the same UI they've been using for the last twenty years
oh wait
And for what it's worth, again, I appreciate a lot of what I've seen the past many months as new management has worked on the site. The fact you're even asking is appreciated. In the past this would have just been steamrolled like everything else. But again, we're not asking for massive back-end code re-writes. We just want elements to be arranged differently, some adjustments to spacing, color, icons, that kind of thing. Trivial CSS tweaks for the most part.
Way I look at it is no more malicious than "if I've got to relearn a new UI and where everything is and deal with touchscreen spacing on everything, then why not learn how to work twitter which is where 9/10 of the dead accounts in my watchlist have migrated over to"
I don't like it, but it's how it ends up working.
Modern has a number of differences that, in the experience of those of us still holding out with Classic, actively make readability worse (and the sidebars have only intensified this feeling) and make desktop users feel like we somehow got locked into mobile view. Which is very unpleasant. Modern Retro does at least offer the benefit of less-harsh dark mode contrast (dark mode on regular modern is very harsh to the point that for some people it's actually harder on their eyes than light mode), but this on its own isn't enough of an improvement.
Btw, have you done any sort of polling to evaluate how many people use Modern because they prefer it vs how many use it because they feel like they feel like they have no choice? That would be valuable data for decisions like this.
but there are other comments lower down suggesting that might be some path to doing that in the future https://www.furaffinity.net/journal...../#cid:61381456
So may as well bring all the features over to modern and improve modern, then retire classic
And sorry if it sounded like I was arguing, didn't mean to come across as rude!
No, it wouldn't be running strong still because it was never the most stable thing in the first place. Classic from what I understand has always been a mess under the hood, and has only gotten worse as more bodge jobs get layered on top of previous bodges. It was also built to very outdated practices, like using someone's initial username as their integral account ID instead of having a unique serial or hash (which is why we've had two decades of people making new accounts because that was the only way to change their username), and between that and the bodged-together nature it's very tricky to add features without breaking the site (and the more integral and rigid a thing a feature touches, the worse it is). Which is why features that people have been demanding for the entire 15 years I've been here have taken forever to be added - and even then, some of them have only been available via Modern because of how finicky Classic is. Others have required hacky interim solutions. Classic's aging code is also a big problem from a security standpoint (probably especially the old PHP code), and as far as stability goes... even when I first joined, people seemed to treat the site shitting the bed as a normal occurrence. And it continued to be one.
"but its because they put that unnecerary pressure on themselves by updating the UI that no one asked for, and then suddenly you have this problem that wouldn't have been a problem if it wasn't for adding a whole new UI."
People were asking for a modernized UI, otherwise nobody would have bothered making it. Hell, the desire for something more modern with more QOL is a big part of why Weasyl even exists. And the very fact that making a modernized UI for FA required building a whole new codebase from the ground up instead of just making an alternate skin+layout for the existing codebase... really goes to show what an ungodly mess the original codebase is to work with.
"you can update to a different codebase and still keep the same site."
Only if the different codebase supports it, which the modern codebase currently does not.
Now, ideally the modern codebase should have been designed from the start with the template flexibility to render both UIs and just had Classic ported over to it sight unseen. But I suspect I know why it wasn't.
I have been informed that for the longest time, FA had an incredibly territorial and stiff-necked lead developer who was resistant to change even when necessary or asked for, and was so hostile to work with that it was hard to retain other developes; crucially, he wasn't given the boot until the staff reorganization after Dragoneer's death. At the time Modern was made (by what was then effectively a splinter team, I believe), porting Classic over to the new codebase would have thus required his cooperation - which was about as likely as a statue getting up and doing the Charleston, so it's understandable that they didn't pursue it at the time. And doubtless this same territorialism was a further factor in needing to make a whole new codebase just to have a UI change.
"So again, until they show that the changes are being made to make a 1:1 of the original using the modern codebase, I am staying here."
Right now, according to the devs, the modern codebase lacks the necessary template flexibility for a 1:1 clone of the original UI and overhauling it to amend that is still a ways off (though retiring Classic will help speed that up). You will likely find yourself forced over to Modern by Classic's plug getting pulled before that happens.
So, the most useful thing you can do right now is send feedback about what Modern can do to meet you halfway. They do seem to be listening to people.
Hell, some time back I was doing some research and there were attempts to rewrite FA and the GUI since 2014 so all the people going "no one asked for a modern UI!" are just wrong lol
I made a detailed feedback comment for what I really want & need to see changed in modern and I have also been submitting the same points in the form of feedback tickets, and I'm really hoping the two biggest problems I have - the stupid sidebars, and the fact that links don't change color - are fixed before Classic's plug gets pulled.
And it sounds like a big part of why they are pulling Classic's plug in the first place is to free up time and effort for fixing and improving Modern's shit.
Probably because the window FA is running in only has half the screen.
Love the banner. ^^
also, if someone blocks us, or vice versa, we should have em removed from our watchlists/us from theirs.
Far and away the most common complaint seems to be about the giant sidebar taking up way too much space, limiting the display size of the images. That would be an obvious priority, if they intend to fix Modern before destroying Classic. ("Sunsetting" is such a pretty word - all red and gold - but the reality is a bit uglier.)
I've only ever used Modern UI for a short amount of time - to use the rename feature, due to it being inaccessible in Classic. While I like that features are being added to Modern, the explicitly, well, modern design language it uses just isn't aesthetically appealing to me, and I'm not necessarily interested in most new features that are in the pipeline.
FA is one of the few sites that has continue to support a fundamentally unchanged UI experience for almost the entire time I have used it, now over a decade - and I am of the opinion that this is not a bad thing.
While I understand the need for the codebase to change, for ease of management, most public-facing UI changes I've seen are rarely for the better. A 'fresh new look' is usually just a bid to bring new features to the forefront that that site management wants you to use, that may not be explicitly necessary, or suit the end user's use cases.
I'm not saying that this is specifically what FA is doing, or that there's some exploitative intention behind it, but I've seen enough gradual shifting of big-name site design move this way to make it...just a generally unpalatable experience.
Discord being the most recent example of 'a good UI only ever getting worse' in recent memory.The Classic layout and colors are perfectly serviceable and familiar. The page layout is concise and uncomplicated. If a 1-to-1 replica of the old layout under a backend, that would be fantastic. But the simple reality is, most 'features' that are being introduced...are probably not things I will want to use, and joining it with the Modern codebase will not make those things optional.
The rename feature is literally the only thing that even got me to try it, and that has been a long, looooong time coming. Any additional features, even if they are not 'not for me' at best, or 'actively unappealing' at worst, still add additional buttons and clutter that are almost certainly not going to be things you can just toggle off in the interface - so it's still sort of a net loss that does not incentivize me to use an unfamiliar UI.
I absolutely don't expect this particular comment to change anything - as has been reiterated over the years, and only grows increasingly louder, you've made your decision to retire Classic - but I can at least try to express my displeasure in a generally coherent way. If there's anything constructive to take away from this, I suppose, it's that 'sometimes familiarity is its own strength', and 'I'd like to be able to toggle off interface features that I'll probably never use' - though I will concede that adding them based on popular requests is not bad in an inherent way.
My biggest overall issue is I *hate* the colors for all the 'new' options. I could muddle through if the 'classic' pale grey/violet color pallet was there, but it's not. All of these dark/light versions are hard on my eyes. The nice grey-ish purple tone makes it nice for me to browse and easy to use. I'm begging, please don't make this be another site I need to recolor with a monkey script to be usable.
I'm not fond of the frankly cluttered and space wasting of the new layouts. I don't like the structure or positioning. Heck, half my screen is void space on 'browse' because of that stupid sidebar options menu... For the love of all, put it back up at the top where it belongs. Once you've selected your options you don't even see it and the art thumbnails are tiny compared to classic. The whole point is to see the *art*, not dead space on a page.
The thing I loved about classic when I used it was that it was function before form. I think that's something classic got right. There's so many design choices in modern that really need a rethink, and we'll definitely be seeing that coming up! <3
It's actually been part of the reason I've not added a custom banner to my own profile - because even that is forced to be gigantic to an extent that just fills up too much of the screen.
I primarily use the website on a 1920x1080 monitor. It's to my understanding the themes don't seem to scale with the user's monitor resolution. Everything on the Modern themes seems better suited for being shown on a 2560x1440 monitor (which I did use for comparison).
EDIT: I should probably file this feedback as a ticket of some kind.
I am looking forward to seeing what improvements are in the pipeline though :D
Classic is good for me because it's not overstimulating and does what I want in as few steps as possible. (also please never add infinite scrolling, it's a plague on memory and data use. I like being able to find art without breaking my browser lol)
Nor are most of us saying classic is perfect. It certainly has its issues. But on balance, modern (and "retro") are far, far worse. They violate basic principles of web design going back ages. FA is already becoming somewhat of a niche site with the rise of social networks, Discord, Telegram and so on. I think it's going to be increasingly hard to pull new users on to the site when it looks...like modern does. Especially artists, who are more visually/aesthetically sensitive than most.
That banner is lovely! Christmas isn't the same without a loaf or two.
Really hope your day gets better, I'm not gonna insult you or try to be rude. I will however say that this is quite... Hostile? I'm not trying to start a fight and I'd rather take a break instead of fighting so I just how your day goes better for you.
"Only" 4.6% of users ? I figured it'd be much higher.
The primary issue with the modern theme is how unnecessarily spaced out the different site elements are. There are less elements visible on a single screen, which requires more scrolling.
Also the positioning of certain elements, like the 'stats' above 'journals'. 'Notes' that are on the bottom of the page, rather than at the side.
And there's the large banners on top of every page, which pushes everything down even further.
To make sure we're actually looking at the same thing, here's classic/dark vs modern/retro: https://postimg.cc/SjDYQMdm
Note how in classic new submissions and journals are visible at a glance without scrolling.
Lastly, I'm not entirely convinced that classic is "impossible to make meaningful progress on".
For instance, Reddit still allows use of their 'classic' theme, despite the newer theme existing for years now:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/ vs https://old.reddit.com/r/cats/
Efficiency is comfy.
Any bolded, italicized, or otherwise altered text is shown in a different type face than any normal text. This wasn't always the case, but somehow happened some time a few months ago.
It could be my browser being silly, but the change in type face when I know the default type face for the Modern UI can surely be bolded without substituting it with Helvetica is a bit jarring.
(*I'm the only dork on staff who refuses to use anything but Opera One, so usually things break on my end only lol.)
Formatted text appears as Segoe UI for me too. Here's my thoughts:
In "override_font_comic_neue.css", as well as "ui_theme_dark.css", there are rules with a ton of specified elements in it that declares the font style for the site:
[pre]
html, body, button, .button, select, .textarea, .textbox, .uploadfield, .avataruploadfield, section.gallery, .header .close-button, .bbcode_left, .bbcode_center, .bbcode_right, #alert-notification-blade, .tags .tag-block, .dragDrop__fileInfo, .c-usernameBlock__symbol {
font-family: "Comic Neue", "Comic Sans MS", "Comic Sans", "Open Sans", -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif !important;
letter-spacing: 0.5px !important;
}
[/pre]
[pre]
html, body, .button, select, .textarea, .textbox, .uploadfield, .avataruploadfield {
font-family: Open Sans, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size: 15px !important;
}
[/pre]
Let's call these Johnson and Johnson.
And in "ui_theme_dark.css", there is a rule for the BBCode elements specifically:
[pre]
.bbcode {
font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;
}
[/pre]
Let's call this one John McClane.
The thing is, for BBCode elements, even if Johnson and Johnson are loaded and located after the BBCode, John McClane is still more specific than Johnson and Johnson, because he's only targeting one selector that's under body. Therefore, the CSS engine lets John McClane apply his styles before Johnson and Johnson can.
Therefore,
https://youtu.be/ILjqife_BnY?t=186
https://www.furaffinity.net/control.....troubletickets
If you run out of characters, a link to your comment also works!
I think it could use a couple tweaks though, namely in the last year or so, the boxes around comments and shouts have had the same color as the site background. They should be a slightly darker grey to match the rest of the theme and stand out a bit more in general.
(An official option to disable avatar rounding would also be nice, I sometimes use a userstyle CSS tweak for that.)
I like the amount of work that's been done to make the theme better over the years, and while I don't browse on mobile, I've heard there's some issues there from some pals. Will play around with it sometime to get a better feel and provide feedback sometime.
For feedback on what I actually see, I'd personally like to see the buttons updated to be more consistent.
The Bold, Italicize, Underline, Alignment, all don't match the same as the 'Post Comment' button, for example in both size and colours, so it feels inconsistent. I'd also like to mention the legend for notes for unread, high, medium, and low priority also could use an update too, if we're matching style globally. Also, I'm on a 4K monitor, and for me, these look a little fuzzy, if that helps.
Radio buttons and checkboxes could also use a reskin at some point to bring it all together cohesively since they appear unstyled to me.
Input boxes, like typing here on the Slate theme, don't match the input box style you see in the settings menus, for example, which is darker than this.
One thing I think might make things easier for the developers would be utilizing some more modernized practices if they aren't already, where they could just work on a single light and single dark theme and allow users to set specific preset choices for colours which influence site-wide changes and allow them some degree of customization to the user's liking, but also provide some samples in some nice colour choices. Would need to pull from the user's preferences to override certain hex/hues, but it'd probably make a good majority of users happy to tweak it to their liking.
When I used to do a lot of UI reskins, a lot of the fields were inconsistent with naming or globalized, so it was a nightmare to figure out all the proper ones needed to include. I've not poked at their CSS these days but I hope they've been working to consolidate the styles down to be more uniform.
Now a days I just run a personal style with some tweaks, mainly distinguishing visited links for submissions and making some things wider for better1440p viewing.
Good luck! Always good to be able to cut off a massive swath of tech debt.
For the curious, the major issue I brought up is that I don't like having a sidebar next to the art. I want the art to take up the full width of my browser or, if it's smaller, have it centered with empty margins on the side. The mini gallery being returned to the center position was mentioned above, which is awesome! The tags and other submission details in the sidebar should be moved next to the submission description, as it is in the classic theme.
im seeing a few people bring up deviantart in regards to classic being retired, and i feel the need to remind people that deviantart took absolutely zero user input on eclipse. FA staff is here trying to meet in the middle and actively trying to learn what keeps classic users on classic, deviantart said "screw you we do what we want". change can suck but it is so not the same situation
I understand the concern that FA might do the same but everyone needs to recognize FA is not corporate in the slightest and continues being one of the few sites that feel like the "old" internet despite all the intrusive changes in the medium of art websites over the years. Sure, there have been tumbles along the way but this site remains by furries for furries.
I guess in the end it comes down to how well some adapt to change. I'm not saying this as a bad thing or insulting said users. I myself have a very hard time acclimating to big changes but staff here has been very communicative on the abandonment of Classic.
The "Commissions" page on userpages is unviewable on Mobile, since for some reason you cannot move the page left and right, only up and down, meaning you can only read half of the page.
With classic, if I am on my phone, I can see at least 48 submissions on the page at once, and just zoom in and zoom out to select a submission from the page. With modern, the layout becomes significantly more condensed on mobile, which seems like a good idea on paper, but it actually makes the mobile version of modern less user friendly.
Secondly, thats why I and allot of people are going to wait UNTIL they make changes and not just blindly jump right in. Its called business.
And of course keep it around for the nerds who actually use it correctly too lol
About the only request I'd like to make is for the CSS classes to please continue to not be obfuscated, and with that, I'm happy. Anything I personally feel needs slight adjustments to my specific tastes I can mod without interfering with the global design for anyone else.
Another set of features I think would be nice are custom colors (like was possible on classic FA using CSS mods) but integrated into the site instead.
But more importantly, I think a custom font setting would also be nice. I think the font has a huge hand in how the website feels and I think ive gotten far too used to Veranda -w-.
One more thing that might help is page-width options? But that one's not that important
Now for some complaints.
Ive only really used modern theme while logged out but I do have a couple.
1. The news banner shouldn't interfere with the content and especially not information like text. Right now the banner cuts halfway into the submission information numbers. I think pushing the content downwards might be a better option.
2. While viewing a submission the "More from [user] area" should be easier to understand chronologically. a 2x3 grid does not convey a useful order unless it's a system you're already familiar with. You might also want to introduce an icon for "currently viewing the submission in this order" like with classic theme. This one's small but it will probably get me a lot once I have to switch over.
3. Is there any useful way of submitting feedback in a useful way that isn't Discord? It's not that I don't have or don't use discord it's just that I think feedback and feedback on that feedback should be easier to access than a place that requires an account to view and isn't easily searchable and as far as I'm aware the bluesky isn't for feedback, so it's either Discord or nothin.
i also just dont want to join another freakin server!!Anyways, that's all I can think of. UI and UX is a little important to me but I know I'm kind of a stick in the mud when it comes to technological change. If you guys want me to elaborate in any way or provide more nuance just leave somethin here. This was kind of a ramble for me.
I will say though, out of a lot of modernizations I've seen of websites, FA isn't the worst I've seen. I would rank it above Steam's initial UI changes a few years ago. The website still seems to run reasonably well which in this day and age is a miracle if your website doesnt use up 4GB of memory.
Jumping in to say yes, you can just file a ticket on this very site. Sending feedback on a journal also works.
I do appreciate Discord allowing for open feedback without having to bug someone in particular or feeling like I'm submitting a full report, though.
I just kinda wish it was on a website that didn't require you to join to view.
(however, i will take this time to grumble that the news banner blocks my beloved in-house ad slots)
[returns to the ad mines]
If it's covering ads instead of content then then I'm a little less concerned and pressing the X button on the banner is a small price to pay for my duplicitous piracy
In all seriousness, though, moving that info to where it is on Classic is something I'd like to see. IDK I've always thought that location looked nicer and more clean?
I will be sticking to classic till its dying breath for now.
The "Edit Submission Info" link will take you to a page where you can edit all of the submission's details.
It is kinda hidden tho.
Reasons I held onto classic for so long were largely because after seeing how deviantart implemented its forced modern ui I was not very keen on trying out modern, and even now as I'm getting used to it, I find it annoying that there's no button for the 'full view' in modern even though yes I did find the thumbnail->full res in account settings and I still heavily prefer to have the minigallery and folders right below the upload instead of far in the bottom right. Please note that these have been the reasons I stayed with classic for so long.
It's also mildly annoying that I can't turn off banners if I don't want to have one on my own profile, and while I'm pretty sure it's just to make it easier to code, I have to ask why can I add tags to my block list on my OWN uploads?
I have to scroll all the way down to the bottom just to access the folders in someone's profile. It was alot easier in Classic because it was basically the same as it is on desktop, but in mobile its far too compressed!
I think a cool solution would be to have a sliding menu on the side in order to access stuff like folders and comments a lot easier.
And the thing for feedback I had is already on the list (thank goodness) so that's wonderful! The mini gallery really is my biggest complaint of the modern layout. It doesn't even show up when I'm using a tablet and I truly hate having to click the main gallery EVERY time I want to go through a sequence. So having it back in the middle, under image like it was in classic, would be fantastic.
OH! And please please please if there is some way to make it to where if you're browsing a folder on someone's page, the navigation buttons ONLY take you through that folder, and not the main gallery.
For instance: Say I want to browse through a comic someone has made that they've been posting over a long period of time, right? And during that time, they're posting commissioned pieces and whatnot, leaving long gaps between the comic. They also haven't linked the pieces together in the description so now you have to either hunt it down in the main gallery, or click back into the folder. So instead of clicking back and forth between pieces and folders, it'd be nice if hitting the Newer/Older buttons would take me to the next piece in the folder itself. And the mini gallery showing what's in the folder would be fantastic as well.
I feel like that would make folders far less cumbersome to use as a viewer ^^
THIS so much. I always forget how much this annoys me
Having an option to scale the font down the font to about 75%~80% will be golden for me.
I am still confused and curious as to what the technical blockers are that prevent a one-to-one replica of classic being made in the modern engine? I've been directed to a post by Yuuk, but short of a migration to using DB Schema instead of hard-coded language and what I assume are more modern JS frameworks, I'm not finding anything that is the metaphorical brick wall blocking that approach. Can someone please explain for those of us that are technically-minded or are in the software development space what the challenge is here? If there was a way for the members of the community that still use classic to help out and help preserve that layout and user experience, I'm sure several of us would be happy to help. I know I'd be happy to help with transitioning it to modern if it meant keeping the classic UI/UX.
Regarding the changes going live on the beta FA site - is there any chance that access could be extended to the users still using the classic theme that may not have FA+? It feels a little cruddy to be told "Hey, we're changing things and getting rid of the primary way you use the site, but because you don't have a subscription, you don't get to see those changes until we flip the switch at some point in the future."
For every feature we add to modern, we've had to recode it *again* in classic. Every single feature add is twice the amount of work.
EDIT: As for opening it up to the community, unfortunately the way the system is designed we can't just give people access. It's a security nightmare. Part of our push to improve development is redoing the entire codebase, which we want to design a way for frontends to be slot in and out. At that point, we can reapproach making something with the classic look and feel, but in order to get there we have a lot of work to do.
I understand there are two separate template engines which run two separate code bases, so copying and pasting CSS, html template files, etc is not possible. I work day in and day out with paying off technical debt and migrating services between languages and frameworks - I understand that is not possible.
What I am asking though and what I would like to know: What features or functionality are missing from the template engine for the modern code base that prevents the classic theme and layout from being remade in the modern code base as closely as it can be to how it exists today?
From a style standpoint: The elements used in rendering different portions of the system are different. The frame for the whole website is different. The layout and location of elements are different. Classic uses a very rigid formatting structure that expects a browser to be no bigger than a specific resolution.
Honestly? I'd love to build a templating engine that allows us to make everyone happy. I want to give people classic or modern and have it be not only compliant but maybe even user servicable or customizable. I want the community to be able to have the freedom to do what they will with the site they use.
Regarding technical standpoint: Several elements of Bootstrap have close equivalents in Tailwind and Material. Template layouts for example - scaffolding and columns in Bootstrap are similar to the column system in Tailwind and fairly similar to the grid system in Material. Yes, it's different syntax, but all three have similar ways to accomplish the same goals and come out with very similar behaviors. It's true that you can't just copy and paste Tailwind style code into a Material project and expect it to work, but you can certainly take something that was originally written in Tailwind and recreate it closely in Material, and vice-versa.
Regarding the style standpoint: Are these layout elements not configurable and able to be toggled by user preference? I was under the understanding this was one of the main reasons the modern framework was developed, so that users could toggle elements and configure them.
I apologize, I know this probably seems like I'm being pedantic or confrontational, but I promise you that is the furthest thing from the truth. I am trying my best to understand why it isn't possible to accomplish what it seems like you already want to do with being able to allow the current modern framework to be customizable to the degree that would allow for both classic and modern to exist in some form. I'm right there with you that user serviceability and customization would be great, it would put the effort to build and maintain that in the hands of the classic users, and again, I think that's what a lot of us would happy to do - to be able to help keep FA in a form that we've come to love over nearly 20 years of it existing.
Edit: I saw your prior update about security with the current code base and I understand, it's not just a matter of someone having access to a git repo with the ability to wreck a branch of development, it's the potential exposure of vulnerabilities. I would say though, that if it's not something opposed of by the team as a whole, a call for volunteers to help rebuild the classic layout in the modern engine to help develop the customization functionality for modern might be worth consideration?
I can't really get into any more specifics beyond what I've already laid out here today, but essentially the fact that things are "fairly" similar doesn't mean that they can just be interchanged with a few swapouts. The components and framework themselves are entirely different!
With the new backend codebase we're working on, we're going to be putting out a call for volunteers to help with development, including even possibly designing an ode to classic in a classic 2.0. I'm super down for that once we get the new system up and running and we can support that kind of endavor <3
Regarding the new backend code base, future development, call for volunteers, etc. I had one more quick question about that, but is it okay if I send you a note about it?
Thank you for actually explaining this. Can you do us all a favor and go poke Fender until he adds this explanation to the journal? The biggest question people seem to have is "Why not just recreate the old frontend on the new backend?" and the answer needs to be front and center.
But if you check the feedback list; this is addressed and being looked at. Please stay tuned!
it's a spaghetti factory.
My biggest gripe with modern UI is how it shows submissions, I strongly dislike the side pannel thing, I find it incredibly distracting when I'm trying to enjoy the artwork.
Honestly that really is the main gripe I have with the modern UI. Change that to be formatted to how classic is (just the image centered, the next/previous gallery boxes under and then the big description/title/tags box with the comments below, and I'll change to modern right away.
"I'm not switching to Modern until they make it look exactly like Classic." That's not going to happen, and when Classic is gone, you will not be given a choice; you'll log into FA, and your FA will be in Modern because Classic no longer exists. The sooner you reconcile yourself to that, the easier it will be.
Specific feedback (i.e. feedback other than "I would like Modern if it looked/functioned exactly like Classic," which is not helpful feedback) is being taken into consideration, but the fact remains: Classic is going away.
There is no solution here that is going to make everyone happy, and the simple fact is that no matter how much outrage you express over losing Classic, they cannot afford to continue maintaining what is essentially two separate code bases for the site. They have to pull the plug on one of them, and since Classic is a deprecated UX that is used by less than 5% of the site's active users, that's the one getting pulled.
They're not going to rewrite the entire Modern codebase to make it match what Classic looks like - that's not going to happen. Switch to Modern, figure out what specific problems you have with it (i.e. not just "it's not Classic," because that isn't a serious complaint), and bring those up. But the simple fact is that at some point in the not-distant future, you will be on Modern whether you want it or not.
Most websites don't take this kind of feedback. When I go to Facebook or CNN or virtually any other website on the internet, I might pop in one day and it will simply look different, and I just have to deal with it. Be grateful this site is taking time to process user feedback, and if you have feedback to give, consider whether it's actually helpful or not ("turn Modern into Classic" is not helpful).
They cannot retain Classic. It's too much of a spaghettifest, and it creates a double workload for the site devs. Nor can they, at this time, recreate the Classic frontend 1:1 on the Modern backend because Modern has its own templating flexibility issues currently.
What they can do at this time, is make feature changes to Modern to meet us halfway.
So tell them what they need to do to meet you halfway.
And my backlog of 78 images can't wait either LMAO
the thing is, there's already been a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and more looks at it. classic's code is outdated and incredibly hard to work with - to the point that certain features are impossible to add but have been requested for a long time, like name changes and display names, etc. it's likely costing staff more to keep the old version of the site around as is.
this is not a choice made on a whim. fur affinity has needed a full recode for a long time, this is what we get.
But to get there, Classic has to retire.
So, you know how you've been advertising Modern Retro for a week? You should have accompanied that with a journal featuring/linking to screenshots of Modern Retro so that people would have some idea in advance what they'd be trying out.
I just tried it out now, and while I appreciate the less-harsh contrast of Classic FA's Dark Mode... that and seeing the banner appeared to be the only benefits. After seeing what viewing submissions, an image, and a journal was like in Modern Retro, I immediately switched back to Classic proper because I found the sidebars completely insufferable. The reason the minority of us who persist with Classic do so is because we consider Modern's design be fundamentally flawed and visually irritating to use.
Here are the major problems I have with Modern that severely reduce the QOL compared to Classic and need to be changed. I was going to go into more detail in my feedback ticket, but I ran out of characters so I'll be wordier here instead:
* Links do not change color to show that you've clicked them. While links changing color may be old-fashioned, it is an invaluable feature on gallery sites (as well as shopping sites) to let users keep track of what they have and have not looked at. The lack of changing link color on modern is one of the major dealbreakers for me. I need to be able to keep track of what I have and haven't clicked on; this is a use and accessibility issue for me.
* I find the floating menu bar to be visually distracting while I'm trying to look at an image. I think the distraction of the floating menu is a greater inconvenience than having to scroll back to the top of the page. But I know for others the floating menu is legitimately more convenient, so this should be a toggle option.
** Elements on the Modern menu bar are bigger than they need to be, and crowd each other too much (giving the feeling that one is somehow stuck in mobile mode despite being on desktop). This and the lack of comma separation results in the different notification types being mushed together instead of being easily parsed at a glance.
** Certain options which are readily visible on the Classic menu bar are hidden in a dropdown on Modern, and this is a hamburger menu instead of under "My FA".
* The sidebars are fundamentally irredeemable and need to be done away with immediately; IMO they should never have been greenlit in the first place. They crowd the page content off to the side (especially since they take up an excessive amount of space, something that I imagine makes them even worse on mobile), distracting from it. This is bad enough for images, where they prevent it from being cleanly centered on the page (having the image centered is something that's always made FA a much nicer viewing experience than Booru sites or e621), and even worse for text stories and journals where the distraction and crowding actively make it harder to read them. This information needs to be below the content, next to the description as it is in Classic. Or if that's unworkable, take a leaf from Weasyl or SoFurry's book - both of them handle this much better than the clunky sidebars. The journal sidebar should instead be a box below the journal entry so that it isn't distracting clutter, and maybe even something that can just be outright toggled on and off. These sidebars are an absolute dealbreaker for using Modern in its current state and urgently need to be scrapped in favor of a solution that doesn't clutter and crowd the page content.
* Alerts should be in separated boxes as they are on Classic, rather than a transparent overlay that overlaps page content. Having them be overlays makes images and stories harder to look at, and can make the alerts harder to read as well.
* UI elements in general should be smaller, at least on desktop
* Specific to the Modern Retro skin, description panes, comment panes, etc. should have the full appearance of Classic FA (honestly, a clone of Classic FA's frontend on the modern's codebase would probably do wonders to ease the transition and maybe even silence the complaining entirely).
There's probably further issues that need ironing out, but the anti-readability sidebars and the links not changing color are such complete dealbreakers that I wasn't able to stand using Modern Retro long enough to find them.
Precisely this! I get that the change needs to be made because of coding stuff, but it feels like the fundamental change of layout is being done for the sake of changing the layout.
So, having the full Classic FA appearance is something that will have to wait. And admittedly I only put that in as an ideal world stretch goal.
They need to get rid of the sidebars and display the information in a non-cluttering way (either how Classic does it or something similar to Weasyl), they need to make links change color so we can keep track of read vs unread, they need to bring over the mini gallery (especially since multiple people have used that as a crutch for linking the pages of comics); I didn't even realize it was missing because the sidebars made Modern too unbearable to keep looking at, and they need to fix UI element sizing or make it flexible.
Those are the biggest things making Modern so onerous to use over Classic, especially the accursed sidebars from the new tag system.
For me personally, Modern is too cluttered. Everything is too large and too close together in a way that is overwhelming to look at and discourages me from ever actually trying to browse. I've given it chances, I've used it exclusively on my art account to try to force myself to get used to it, but it just feels like an abrasive and loud layout. If a toggle could be added to keep the smaller buttons and more simple visuals of Classic, that alone would be a giant improvement to me, but I know that may not be possible.
All in all, I understand that keeping it has been more trouble than it is worth when those using it really are just a tiny fraction of the user base. But I'll be sad to see it go. I see people mentioning a minimalist version of Modern being on the road map, so maybe that will fix my gripes with it whenever it can happen if it happens!
Mobile specific: Keep the file link as part of the submission. The PDF reader is not very cooperative on mobile (for me) to get the font big enough to see and still be able to scroll the page. When PDFs were still a "download only" option they would open in a new tab and were easier to navigate compared to the reader on the page.
1. My biggest complaint, and the number one thing I want changed- I absolutely hate not seeing the previews of users other submissions under the art! I really like that feature, and its the main reason im still sticking to classic.
If you change that, I will happily switch, but until then I will stay using classic.
The other complaints I have are mostly nitpicks, but they still annoy me
2. I don't like having the icon be in the middle of rhe user profile banner, I would rather the banner be uncovered.
3. I don't like having to go to the drop down menu to search, I would prefer that be still on the main page. It's just an additional little step that gets annoying fast.
3. When using mobile browser formatting, I would rather three per row when searching or on the main page, two is a bit too zoomed in for my taste
4. Also, I believe the modern dosent have the feature where you can see what users favorites your post, and I like that feature. I could he wrong, but I don't wanna check.
A lot of folks had complaints about it (myself included). Seems to be good news though, because “returned to centered position” sounds like it should fix the UI problems.
The other problem with the minigallery is that it’s completely gone on tablets. I also mentioned that problem and I know it’s been acknowledged.
You can check this by clicking the number of favorites (which, yeah, pretty unintuitive and it'd be better if there was a separate button for it). Note that this only works on your own submissions, you can't see who favorited another person's submissison.
I'd also really suggest ditching the italics in random things. FA I think is the only site I see now online that uses italics for anything.
Screen real estate isn't being used well
Furaffinity's HTML on modern is fairly well organized (at least compared to a react site or something) - I'd love to see some attempts from community members to do some CSS changes on modern using Firefox's user-stylesheets or through an extension to see how hard it would be to reskin things - in a way that might allow for quicker iteration or experiments than what the staff/devs can do.
I think it's great that FA is asking about issues - I know that not every issue is probably going to be able to be solved (I suspect there's not gonna be a JS-optional version of the modern theme). But for some of the issues that I'm seeing come up really often (font-size, margins, visited link styling) - this is stuff that can be fixed in Firefox today without even waiting for the devs.
I have visited-link styling on the modern theme right now. I just stuck in userContent.css
-moz-document domain(www.furaffinity.net) {
a:visited { color:#faf!important; }
}
It would also be possible to do targeted adjustments of margins, font sizes, etc in there. I'm not saying that's a permanent solution, or that everything could be solved that way (actual functionality differences are still going to remain) - but if users want to experiment with some different layouts that try to address problems as examples of changes that would be good to make.. it might be a good place to start replicating the classic interface and to quickly build some examples for different themes.
However, I am glad to see suggestions that have been suggested being recognized and mentioned in the journal here. Thank you for this!
(Honestly, the mini gallery not showing, journal lists / pagination not showing, and the seemingly random text size varying between comments in journals / submissions for me are the most glaring issues for me, as I am a mobile-only user. Though I also would prefer the font currently used in Classic as an option, compared to the one Retro uses by default.)
This is encouraging. If all of the fixes mentioned in this post are completed (and the minigallery is added back to tablets) then it’ll be usable enough for me to switch.
They take up something like 25-30% of almost every page on the site, and push the main content off center. They also tend to be very busy from a visual standpoint and distract from the main content. This is especially bad on the main submission view page, where all the buttons and text crammed next to the art make it look like a content creation app.
FA is supposed to be a gallery site, not a tagging tool. I want the art to be attractively displayed as the main focal point of the page, not crammed off to the side and competing with a pile of brightly colored buttons.
Many of the side bars take up more space than they deserve, too. The browse page, for example, has a handful of buttons at the top, and then nothing but dead space all the way to the bottom. The old site used a horizontal bar at the top, which was a much better use of space.
It’s also weird that the side bars tend to be on the right rather than the left. All the Big Name sites I use have their navigation and option bars on the left. (And they’re generally much smaller; maybe 10% rather than 25%).
Apart from the side bar thing:
All the text is too big.
The sans serif fonts make it difficult to read, even though the font is bigger.
I don’t like that the SFW toggle is hidden under a dropdown.
The lack of visited link differentiation is annoying.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to input the FA-specific emoji codes.
In general, the UI is too big and obtrusive and blocky. Too much contrast. Questionable color choices. Too many big rectangles with hard edges (The old site used smaller ones, and has outlines to soften the transitions).
The way semi-transparent UI elements overlay the art and banner is obnoxious, too. The News/Updates banner thing covers part of the art as well as other UI elements, even when you scroll as far up as possible. And on the user page, the links and info to the right of the user icon are visually problematic because of the way they are overlaid across the banner and/or a background with a dramatic luminance gradient.
All in all, “It’s ugly.” and I suggest you go look at Amazon or Wikipedia or Stack Exchange or any of the other big name sites and try to copy how they do things. Or failing that, go copy Weasyl, or InkBunny or the old FA. None of them are perfect, but they mostly work and keep the focus on the art rather than the UI.
No one comes here for the UI.
I am also not a UI/UX expert or graphic designer. I just know what I like, and what has worked for decades. I appreciate the admin at least being open to suggestions, but this whole thing seems baffling to me, because the answer seems obvious:
1. Open up the modern theme
2. Open up the classic theme side-by-side
3. Start hacking away at css etc until you have a version of the modern theme that is effectively visually indistinguishable from classic, while making a few minor concessions here and there to accommodate the new features of Modern (although in some cases avoiding those features may be part of the reason people like classic in the first place, but that's a different discussion).
This seems self-evident to me, if you really want to to address the issue. No need to get into the weeds of this design element or that one. Just visually and structurally emulate it as closely as possible. The current attempt is nowhere near this (it doesn't even have a light theme version, the MAIN version of classic people use). If that's the closest you can get, we're in trouble.
But if you REALLY want to get into the weeds, I think people have given you a lot of good feedback here I agree with. Overall, modern looks too much like a mobile site. Everything is too big, bulky, awkward. Text should be simple, small, slim and unobtrusive. It shouldn't scream at you. Don't have a bunch of flashy UI elements everywhere. Consolidate down. When people say it's ugly, this is probably mostly what they're referring to; certainly it's my main issue. Do not make the site look like a large print book for seniors (despite the fact that many of us are getting up there in age :P). But here, let me put it in a list:
1. Smaller everything. Less bold everything. Slim and unobtrusive.
2. Light mode for the love of god. Dark mode is a fad, and it ironically hurts/fatigues my eyes far more that light mode.
3. Simple UI that puts the important stuff forward.
4. Make site banners smaller (thinner) and give the option to disable them entirely. I know you guys love your banners, but I don't come to FA to look at banners, I come to use the site. Taking up 20% of my screen is massively visually distracting and obliterates usability as I have to scroll past useless noise on EVERY PAGE before I can get to anything I actually want/need to look at. And it's extra goofy that you're doing this as a "modernization" effort, as such design elements went out of style decades ago. It's like we're back to the the era of huge chonky 90's banner ads.
Many of your suggestions are actually covered in the current list of suggestions, or will be added to the discord list that is being updated in semi realtome. A lot of it is just simplified as folks are saying the same things in different ways.
I see them doing stuff like that on Star Trek all the tine
In what sense?
Obviously you can't EXACTLY emulate it, you've introduced new features and so on. But I allowed for that in my initial post. But I have a hard time believing that coming within say, 90-95% of the look of the old site is technically impossible. I suspect you simply dislike the old design, prefer the new one and don't want to have to design backwards, which is understandable, but the new design sucks.
Again, I'm not a UI expert. But things like "don't have massive wasted space, don't have distracting elements, KISS etc are basic principles in web design going back decades, and the new visual styling violates them HARD. It's unpleasant to look at, and a chore to use. I love a lot of what you guys are trying to do, and unlike many think a more robust tagging system, for example, could end up being great for the site. But it has to be usable on a basic level first.
It just bugs me how a lot of this is coming down to "Well we have to kill Classic because spaghetti code" and like... I don't think anyone is saying the backend isn't outdated or needs to go. I really just want the site to stay the same visually (at least as much as is possible) and don't really understand why that isn't possible.
1. Shouts should not be half the profile screen. Push them to the right so there's more space for the art. Viewing and browsing art is the point of the site.
2. Get rid of the icons in the top nav bar. They're visually distracting. Text only. Same for av icon. Username is fine. TEXT ONLY. Hamburger and cog menus are the devil.
3. Get rid of the sidebar on the submission/artwork page. Move the tags and preview thumbnails back below the work. Having that sidebar is ugly as sin, distracts from the work, and results in MASSIVE wasted space once you scroll down into the comments. Also, don't have such loud colors on the tags. Too visually noisy, obnoxious, distracting. Tags are not the point of the submission page, the submission is.
4. Don't make the nav bar transparent, and don't lock it at the top as we scroll. Yes it's very slick, but it's unneeded and wastes space. If I need the nav bar, I'll scroll up.
5. For the love of god stop with all the drop-shading under sections. The fake-3d effect looks cheap, it's distracting, and it doesn't even make sense (the shadow should either be on both right and left of an element, or JUST the right, not JUST THE LEFT).
Corrections to my previous post, as I was remembering incorrectly:
1. Massive 20% of page banner only shows on SOME pages, not all. Still obnoxious though.
2. Having taken a fresh look, I modify my original point: much of the text, at least on retro, is TOO thin; I think the kerning is fucked or something. Looks very awkward somehow.
Also, the navigation overlay on the modern UI covers part of the image when scrolling down. Taking up more space that could be used to view the image.
I have a very specific way that I save the file name of images. The first part is the username that I copy from the image's page. Usernames on the modern UI are harder to copy in the title area of the image. In the classic UI, there is a large space right next to the name that I can use to start the name highlighting to copy it. In the modern UI, there is a comma, then text right next to it that means I have to navigate my cursor right between the comma and the name.
Everything also just feels way too zoomed and oversized while simultaneously being cramped by the sidebar compared to the original ui
If its for the better of FA to progress, then its better if classic just gets retired already so FA can improve without being weighed down by an archaic piece of coding. I used to use classic until last year. Now I"m using modern with the retro skin and you can still keep that classic look with the modern one.
If it helps, I also browse on desktop.
When viewing an picture/submission, I don't like seeing all the submission info crammed into the right side of the screen. I liked seeing the image itself front and center. I don't need to see view count or favorites, or tags. If I want to, I can scroll down. Same with the "other uploads".
The plus buttons by the tags being bright yellow also adds to the distraction.
Everything also looks very zoomed in on the modern theme, if I zoom out of the modern theme to 67% on my browser it looks about the same size wise then.
Also no a fan of the rounded icons in the modern layout. It kind of messes with and blurs any pixel/sprite based icons.
It just feels like every part of the modern UI is trying to be very attention grabbing and it comes down to feeling really overwhelming to look at and use.
I do hope the emote bar transfers over, I do like using them on my comments.
I still prefer the OG classic aesthetic/layout wise and having emoticons! The OG classic felt easier on the eyes and less cramped at times. Been using classic since 2009 so a little biased oop.
I simply can't read site with bright text on dark backgrounds. That causes the text to bloom and blur, which is something I have no control over - unless there's a cure for under-developed optic nerves. I use the classic light theme, because it's the only theme I can actually read without pain behind my eyes.
I already tried modern light, assuming it would be the same color palette and intensity as classic light. But, that has a pure white background and there is no way I can read anything on that for more than around 90 seconds, without an optic-nerve induced headache. That's a sort of pain that no painkillers are designed for. It's a sharp and intense pain, so none of the currently available themes are accessible to me, except for the original classic light.
Classic light is fully compatible with my photophobia, and has worked well for me for 19 years. If the same palette and background color were available in a modern theme, I would have switched to modern already. Unfortunately, I cannot use any of the modern themes with their current background intensities and palettes.
If classic light is retired before an accessible modern theme is available, I simply won't be able to use FA any more - the one website I've spent the most time on over the past 19 years. When designing a new modern theme, it will need to have the same brightness and contrast ration as classic light, so it might as well simply use that exact same palette.
I don't care if the layout and placement of page elements exactly matches classic. I mainly care that the theme is even accessible to me at all. For me, it isn't about preference or nostalgia. It's purely about accessibility. I'd be very upset and depressed if I ultimately lost access to my favorite site over an accessibility issue. An accessible modern replacement for classic light using the same accessible palette, needs to be in place, before classic light is retired. I can't use the site if my ability to read it is taken away.
I've changed a few minor things using CSS to match my preferences and needs before. Firefox makes that relatively easy. I did increase the thickness of the borders around the around the favorites previews on my profile page, so I could actually see the red, blue or black borders, but that's approaching the extent of my successful CSS changes. Attempts at global palette changes over the entire site never got me very far. I'm not that fluent in CSS!
https://darkreader.org/
Currently, the palette used for FA's classic light is very readable. The background is lighter than the text, which I require for the text to stay in focus. And, the background is not too bright, which allows long sessions of viewing without painful sensory overload. Classic light keeps the background around 15 to 20 percent darker than pure white, which is ideal for avoiding the sensory issues, while still not being darker than most of the text. The most simple solution would be to simply use the classic light palette, since it's been time tested for 20 years.
Those who can use dark themes have several to choose from, using modern. Those who need a light theme only have one, which is far too bright, using modern.
There is one site with light text on a darker background that I can read without the sensory blurring of the text. That one is f-list.net, when looking at people's overview, info, groups, etc. I'm pretty sure that's because the background is not anywhere near to black. It is sufficiently bright enough to not cause my eyes to dilate much, so the lighter text still remains in focus for me. If the background there were just a bit darker, I probably wouldn't be able to read that site. In other words, if a site's main background is close to pure white or black, I can't easily read it. If the background is at least 15 to 20 percent brighter than black, or darker than white, it comes into the range where I can read it. FA's classic light happens to be within the range that I can read comfortably.
I don't care if a site background has a slight color tint to it, like FA's blueish tint in classic light. It's more about the total brightness. If a background goes above a certain intensity, it results in sensory overload. If a background drops below a certain intensity, bright text in the page starts to blur and go out of focus. Classic light's colors have been time tested for 20 years, so that would be the safest approach for making a modern light theme. If people later want a slight greenish, reddish, yellowish or other color tint, instead of blue, those would probably work as well, so long as the overall brightness of the background didn't go any higher than that of classic light.
Try adding a compact version and testing it on smaller screen like laptops where screen real state is limited. On mobile is a bit more excusable since it need space for the fingers and you have it right in front of your face.
I'll try the modern one for a while longer and I'll probably return back until you get rid of it...
That said I'm not sure what I'd port over to Modern. The emoji and formatting menu are probably the main thing I can see?
I also am somewhat near-sighted, so the smaller text on classic was also harder for me to read.
I also feel like the colors used to designate priority in the inbox are really hard to read. I use them pretty frequently but they blend too much into each other I'm not sure which is "High" or "Medium" priority at a glance. I realize that you can just choose them on the side to see each of them listed in their own categories, but I have a habit of glancing through my whole inbox to compare the amount of each priority I have listed to see what to focus on first. AGAIN, it's totally something I can learn a new method to work around but it's the only really specific thing I can describe that is making me struggle in the inbox!
I also want to note that the dyslexia friendly font added months back has been REALLY nice!! It's my favorite aspect of the Modern theme and it makes reading things SO much easier, including in the inbox!
Wishing the whole team good luck on us all moving over to the new theme- and also a happy holidays!!
The new story embed viewer update changed the behavior of the download button from opening the file on the browser to directly downloading it. A view button to bring that behavior back would be really helpful, because it’s much harder to read some file formats on mobile now, and it was useful to have on desktop.
The behavior still seems to function fine if you happen to have the database-style link (for lack of a better term, the one that end in the file extension), you just can’t navigate to or obtain said url anymore. Images also still behave this way.
I tried modern a few days ago... and have gone back to classic. The feature I missed the most is that classic respects the width of my window, and properly fills it.
On classic, the search page the form is along the top edge, and short. On modern its on the side, wide, and makes the already narrow (because it's ignoring the width of my window) column of images even narrower. These vast expanses of unuseable display are disappointing.
On an artist's gallery page, the links change color when I have already looked at an image. That doesn't work on modern. There are a couple of recurring comics which I am reading, and I keep track of which comics I've read by looking at the link colors.
Classic is also far more functional than modern when one disables javascript. Turning off javascript is one of my favorite security policies, and that furaffinity works as well as it does without javascript is one of the reasons why I am still here.
I also dislike that I can't click journal titles to open them (it's not until I look to the side and see the "View Journal" option. Maybe from a web design perspective it's dumb to have both be clickable, but idk, I don't think it really adds too much.
but yeah
almost 5% classic users after all this time feels like a lot, dang!
The Stats panel of the user page feels too prominent for the amount of information it contains. I think the Classic theme has the right idea, making those numbers small and in-line with the user's avatar and tabs.
The submission previews on the user page are a bit too big for my tastes. Once I'm pushed to the Modern theme, I'll probably get rid of my Featured submission so that I don't have to keep scrolling past it.
Like just about every other commenter here, I am not a fan of the side panel when viewing the artwork. The centered layout with horizontal mini-gallery underneath it feels much more airy and focused. The sticky header is a further distraction from the art. These elements combine to throw way too much information at you at once.
aside from that, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one but not everyone needs to see yours.
The sidebar on art posts is one that really annoys me personally. I feel like FA is one of the last remaining good art sites out there, with art being the main purpose of it. So it feels off to have a bunch of junk off to the side that the majority of people probably don't care about. We come here for art, and that should be the focus.
/ᐠ╥ ︿╥マ
I think it would be good for FA to make an effort to communicate with these authors - if nothing else to let them know that Classic is going away, so they can remove the code that handles Classic from their projects.
Some projects I know of include:
FA Extender - Browser extension to make downloading easier. I thought it was dead, but apparently not. Still published for Firefox and Chrome.
Raccoony - Browser extension to make downloading easier. Handles both Modern and Classic. Only works on Firefox currently, though.
FAExport - Deer-Spangle's scrape-to-API version of an API for FA. A fork of boothale's original.
Sergals - pushes notifications about new art on FA (and other sites) to Telegram.
gallery-dl - Command-line tool to download an artists' gallery, from FA or many other sites.
There are probably more; these are just the ones I know of. Note: I have contributed code to Raccoony in the past.
Of course, what would help a lot is if FA had a real official first-party API; that would remove the need to scrape FA as a user to create downloads, notifications, etc. I also want a pony and a million dollars. :D
(Mostly it gets used for posting art to FA, where it will get noticed, and 20 other sites, where it will get 6 views apiece, but it's probably important to support. :D )
Retro doesn't have that luxury - if JavaScript execution is halted or can't load, image fetching and all the dropdown menus are inoperable.
Commenting more on the style, Retro feels like a bit of a bodge. Submission pages no longer focus on the submission itself due to the way the sidebar is implemented. The choice of icons over text makes it feel like it was made with mobile users in mind, and - in my opinion - should be done via CSS rather than all iconography, all the time.
And - mild personal gripe - the fact that the theme selection is in "account settings" rather than "site settings" has me absolutely baffled, and took me longer than I'd care to admit for me to find it.
That said, text size on modern is a bit big!! I know its "standard internet" size these days, but I assume UI is generally bigger overall now because of smartphones?
Could a text-size-preference toggle be a functional option?
I'd also love to see the submission editing options closer to the top of the page. Even above the tags?
I make a lot of multipage submissions and dance between them to link them all together. That'd make things much easier than having to scroll down to it each time :)
i dont think they should be AS small as they were in Classic UI, but def not big yellow boxes to the right of my screen, and submission editing options should 2000% be ABOVE tags.
and i think the listed folders that submissions are in should be tucked right undeneath tags - the people who are looking at tags are likely the same people who would want to 'see more' and want to go to an artist's folder.
once again, big overall complain is just that the sidebar exists X3 and that Modern UI has that classic flat-yet-bloated look that all modern sites have. though i fully agree that i miss the old fashioned 'gradients everywhere all the time' look, hehe
Could we...please have the "try Modern Retro" thing at least moved into a corner or something? It's pretty distracting, and doesn't quite seem to be serving the purpose that staff hoped...
And it is a bit annoying that it can't be dismissed, although I understand why.
I know its clunky and hard to maintain and that it'll "go away" at some point. But the modern themes have just felt bloated, visually. 1920x1080 desktop user.
And - mild personal gripe - the fact that the theme selection is in "account settings" rather than "site settings" has me absolutely baffled, and took me longer than I'd care to admit for me to find it.
Echoing this. There's a few other settings that hide in random places too, but I can't think of what they are off the top of my head.
The sidebar on art posts is one that really annoys me personally.
I liked seeing the image itself front and center. I don't need to see view count or favorites, or tags. If I want to, I can scroll down.
These too.
You don't need to use the old codebase to make a stylesheet that mimics the classic interface. Sure it means rebuilding a sort of clone but a stylesheet is much easier to manange than two distinct codebases. The old code is obviously crap but modern tech makes it possible with less work to just basically make a skin that mimics the classic look while using just the one codebase. The old code should absolutely be depreciated.
This, so much this. There is no technical reason why you can't style the new site to look like classic 1:1, from a visual aesthetics stand point. Oh sure, some things would have to change, obviously (eg. how blacklisted submissions are displayed, what menus things are under, and so on). But from a purely visual perspective there's no reason why the colors, spacing, and boxy style can't be replicated.
Annoyance: clicking on "download" on the new UI does that force-file-to-download-to-your-downloads-folder thing instead of just allowing the browser to open the file as it sees fit. I'd really like the option for the latter, like it is in classic.
Ok, that would annoy the shit out of me too.
The theme selection being in "account settings" is probably an awkward artifact of Classic, tbh. So that's probably an issue with both.
The booru/e621-esque sidebar that presumably was introduced with the updated tag system (I don't remember it being there the last time I tried Modern) is definitely an inherently bad design decision and needs to be scrapped immediately. Weasyl doesn't do that, SoFurry doesn't do that, even the ungodly sleazepit that is Inkbunny doesn't do that. All of them recognize that it's an unwelcome design and that better presentation of the image or story is well worth having to scroll down to view tags and stats.
"There is no technical reason why you can't style the new site to look like classic 1:1, from a visual aesthetics stand point. Oh sure, some things would have to change, obviously (eg. how blacklisted submissions are displayed, what menus things are under, and so on). But from a purely visual perspective there's no reason why the colors, spacing, and boxy style can't be replicated."
According to the devs, a 1:1 recreation of the classic look and feel currently is beyond the technical limits - the way the new codebases's template system renders the site isn't flexible enough (probably because at the time it was made, porting the classic UI to it would have required the cooperation of someone laughably unlikely to cooperate) and needs to be overhauled to amend that.
But one would hope it can at least implement better default sizing of the UI elements and make at least some things more neatly boxy.
I also agree about it being a big nuisance that clicking on "download" causes the browser to automatically start downloading images instead of viewing them in-browser as happens with Classic. It actually makes image downloads less convenient for me. Because see, when you're directly viewing the image file in your browser and right-click to save it... it doesn't default to the same folder as right-click saving the image when viewing it on the page. So, it effectively lets you have the browser simultaneously remember two different folders to save images from the site to.
Mind you, this wouldn't be so annoying if the "view image" option in a browser's right-click menu still viewed the image in the same tab and required middle-clicking to view it in a new tab. But noooo, someone decided that was too convenient.
Probably why I don't use it, heh.
This too.
I have never used modern long enough to even notice this, as something else generally gets to me and makes me switch back first.
- When tagging my uploads, I sometimes find myself fighting against a client-side script that tries to remove duplicate tag entries. But it's a little overzealous and will delete some tags before I have finished typing them.
For instance: if I wanted to tag something with both "mouse" and then "mouse_transformation", the script will sometimes erase the latter before I have finished typing it because it recognised I had already tagged "mouse". This is felt most severely when using a mobile device or on-screen keyboard where there may a slight delay before the underscore character can be typed. The script should probably check for a trailing space to signify the end of a tag input before taking any action.
JFC, did no one UX test this!?
something i really want implemented that is in classic and not in modern is the TAB buttons. in classic, the buttons on the profile for Home, Gallery, Scraps, Favs, Journals, Commissions, Stats, and Edit Profile looked like browser tabs, while right now they are floating words.
This too.
You moved half the regular access buttons, not just off the page but onto a toolbar where people aren't used to looking for it, and in fact are more likely to be ignored automatically like the cookie banner notification that keeps coming back no matter how many times it's clicked (and no I'm not using incognito to do it). also, white on pale lavendar is rather difficult to make out for the "I consent" button
You changed the color and style of a bunch of things on top of that, making the whole transition jarringly unfamiliar, bolding fonts, simplifying buttons, making things highlight and interact on hover to the extent it feels like it's inducing the page to do things I didn't tell it to do, like expand several menus with just the flick of the pointer, not a click... it feels like I'm using an accessibility mode for the site that I didn't sign up for, and it feels like the ADHD I outgrew is coming back every time I try to find where you squirreled away the specific heading for a setting or feature.
In summary, "it's different and I don't like it", but hopefully that's a better understanding of why. It feels like things have been changed for the sake of change and not utility or function, the way it's not just backend that got updated but the UI as well.
I guess my main feedback would be:
I hate the sidebar. It takes away space from the actual image. The image should be centered, and all that other stuff should be below it.
It seems like everything needs to be made smaller on PC? It's genuinely the only website layout where I've ever had to use the browser's zoom out feature. Someone above said it looks like it was designed for people with vision problems and yeah, I get that
You still have the "older/newer" buttons under an image but I miss the 5 preview images you can just click.
also, related to the 5 preview images from Classic UI, i think that since FA pushed its users to actually use the tagging system a while back, there should be a section, maybe under comments or under that set of 5 previews (assuming everything is in-line to the main image and w/o a sidebar), where based on tags/title/desc/etc, it offers images of other users that might be similar, related, or of your tastes. if the sidebar stays, then it can be popped underneath the "more by username" section that exists currently.
I think it would make FA feel more interconnected. right now FA feels like a vast ocean, and users are tiny islands far from everything else. Once you click on one person’s upload, you get kinda stuck on their page with their images, there's nothing nearby to see or do, you have to go to their front page to see if they have any shouts or visable watches/watchers, and if any of those people’s pfps/usernames catch your eye.
i feel like knowing that your art might get randomly suggested while disconnected from your account would encourage users to tag their art properly or more thoroughly. plus it would mean users can find new artists more readily, as opposed to using the lastest posted lottery, or trying to guess what tags people might use for more obsure or less popular types of art, because it can pull from more keywords than just the tags alone.
(sorry abt the big rambly reply qwq)
the other thing is that Classic UI feels more compact than Modern UI - theres a lot of spacing between everything that causes big voids of space on screen and it makes the site feel 'bloated'. im tired rn so i cant give any good examples but i do feel there could be a way to make various aspects and elements smaller or closer together.
its an issue many modern websites have, and its more extreme in old websites (like FA and DA(damn you Eclipse Update)) that had "old fashioned" site layouts and design choices because we have something more tidy to compare it to. Modern UI doesnt need piles of gradients like its the '00s (though id love that hehe) as that is visual clutter, but i do think things could be a little more... tucked together.
and one more random aesthetic thing between the UIs cus im here - i think where Modern UI is right now, with the mix of elements that have rounded corners and sharp corners, is good. dont- dont make sharp cornered things rounded or vice versa. its ok where it is rn.
i think out of the colour options for Modern UI, i would like Aurora best as its not nearly as dark of Dark where white text becomes too high contrast and hard to focus on and read, but its got some horrid contrasting between things like the tags boxes which are nearly white, and the background of comments where its just a bit too bright and both makes the white text hard to read, and makes the void of the base dark background and sidebar(damn you sidebar) quite painful to look between, expecially because the sidebar EXISTS, that means that theres a big void where one can rest their eyes, but then that means if they look back at the actual content infront of them(or a little to their left), its really jarring. actually, while typing this, the slight dark overlay behind the text box is a GOOD colour.
i also think its oddly that Aurora is kinda... pinkish? i wish it was closer to Classic UI's colour scheme of blue-greenyness, just... darker. i feel Dark is bland and lifeless and has lost its soul because its actually just dark grey and colourless, and not a dark colour. basically im using Modern Retro because it both doesnt burn my eyes and doesnt feel corpo as fuck. theres a piece of a soul in it still. though again it has some slight contrast issues - i think the headers for stuff like "featured submission" should be smaller and darker.
oh, the yellow highlight colour for comments you just posted and tag boxes (still dont like those either) is really nasty. i dont know what a better colour would be, but that yellow is garish and hard on the eyes for any form of dark-mode user. Dark, Aurora, and Retro are all too dark for that.
i agree with many that the site banner is too thick, and that maybe it should have an option to turn it off. theres an icon on the coner i can click if i wanna go to the front page.
i think theres a lot of wasted space on the top nav bar between the search box and our notifications/pfp, i think some of the stuff from the Account dropdown could be put up there, or maybe the news banner can be put there.
i think that various setting and profile customisation options should be turned from 7 pages to maybe like 3 or 4, and maybe reagrange some since ive been reading from others that some setting are in places that dont make total sense. im sure they can be compressed to take up less room on the settings drop down. i think the settings and account dropdowns should be click to view not hover/mouse over to view, and then you click on the setting you want that way. keeps misclicks from occuring.
i like in Classic UI how our PFP, username, title, mood, registered since, profile description thing, and stats are all in a row, keeping everything neat and tidy. please bring this layout back. i like that mood was visable at all and wasnt just a piece of nothingness in our settings.
i like the gallery folders being to the right as opposed to the left, but that might just be because 1) it reminds me of old DA which i loved and 2) i hate sidebar
i think the thumbnails for the main image for 'featured submission', 'gallery', 'favourites', and maybe 'user profile' are too big and could be shrunk. they dont have to be to the size of normal thumbnails but at least smaller than they are now.
if i think of anything else ill reply to myself.
Of course, it might be easier still if you just made all the submission data available in a single JSON file, which would probably make maintaining such a web view much easier. This applies to scrape only, of course.
If modern is the only option, I will have to stop using FA.
After years of trying to push we have reached a point of having to be annoying so we can make progress and get people's attention. There are still many users that claim we *never* told anyone about getting rid of Classic yet we have so many journals people just hit the [x] on without reading. We may change the banner wording but the notice will stay up to remind people.
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August 6th, 2025- "I Was Here" Memorial Page
"(Please keep in mind that this page is only available on the Modern site theme. It will not show on Classic)"
June 30th, 2025- Browse, Search, and Keywords Update
Site page “Banner Museum”: Featuring all previously used site banners with links to artists (for modern AND classic banners)
April 17th, 2025- Display Names Official Launch!
"Reminder that Display Name changes are only on Modern Theme, Classic is not being updated with new features."
Jan 9th, 2025 - Tag Blocking and Policy Update
"⚠️PLEASE NOTE⚠️- Classic theme is no longer being updated. Tag blocking is only available on modern themes."
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None of the above states a sunsetting of classic mode, just that new features are not being actively developed for classic. That's something fairly common with a lot of software that has established legacy user groups. I'm sorry all this confusion has come about but I hope this has helped to provide some insight!
the journal/news banner does this annoying thing where it sits on top of images and the info about images
(even though i've got a lot of sailwind to play)
Functionality/Usability:
- The submission info to the right of artwork on desktop layout takes up valuable horizontal screen space. Some of the information presented within this sidebar is of low relevance to the typical viewer ( i.e. image dimensions/filesize, view/fave count etc ) and could be better suited to a footer underneath the image description. Even tags could go down there. The +Fav, Download and Note buttons are also redundant. I feel like more space could be given to the artwork!
- I like the new image viewer. However, when clicking an image to focus/fit to window, the "X" close button that appears underneath takes up vertical screen space. In some cases, focusing an image like this actually has the image appear smaller than before. The modern convention is to click once to focus an image, then click again to unfocus without the need for a dedicated button.
- The Settings and User Control roll-over menus accessed from the top-right of the navigation bar in desktop suffers from readability issues due to their transparency. Often there is text or other content on the page directly underneath that can be seen through the low-opacity background. For me personally, this is hard for me to parse, especially considering the location of certain settings are unintuitive...
- It has already been mentioned, but the new mini-gallery has some issues. It's not always obvious what position the submission you're currently viewing is within the mini-gallery, which can be awkward when viewing a comic/sequence.
In my opinion, it is not intuitive where "the center" is on a 2x3 grid. You may eventually learn that it displays 3 newer submissions followed by 3 older submissions from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but this becomes inconsistent when viewing someone's most recent (or oldest) uploads.
- When tagging my uploads, I sometimes find myself fighting against a client-side script that tries to remove duplicate tag entries. But it's a little overzealous and will delete some tags before I have finished typing them.
For instance: if I wanted to tag something with both "mouse" and then "mouse_transformation", the script will sometimes erase the latter before I have finished typing it because it recognised I had already tagged "mouse". This is felt most severely when using a mobile device or on-screen keyboard where there may a slight delay before the underscore character can be typed. The script should probably check for a trailing space to signify the end of a tag input before taking any action.
- Some people have enormously long profiles that take so long to scroll past that I wish I had a fitness tracker hooked up to my mouse wheel. I don't think restricting the length would be the right action as some people really do enjoy their massive ascii art dragons and RP thing made out of blocks. Perhaps profiles could be dynamically truncated to a sensible height, with an "expand profile" tab along the bottom edge.
Design/appearance:
- The random assortment of icons in the top navigation bar are all over the place in terms of style and size. Nothing lines up, some are filled and others are un-filled, and they don't look like they belong to the same family. In my opinion, the iconography isn't necessary if the button already has text.
- Rounded and drop-shadowed profile picture frames are inconsistent with the generally flat and angular aesthetic of the rest of the site. I'm glad FA doesn't restrict profile pictures to a circle like every other website these days, so let's defy that completely. It's hip to be square.
Also I love the new banner! And I do greatly appreciate the hard work and continued development of FurAffinity.
Can't wait for this one to get Hidden By The Administration, too.
- When opening new pages, there's a brief white flash before the page loads. It should be fixed, it's very jarring.
- Link style - dotted underline under a link looks bad, visually busy and dates the look by 20 years. In notification panel it creates lots of visual noise and makes it harder to differentiate entries, usernames and text.
- The text formatting buttons should use same box style as other buttons, beveled box looks out of place.
- Speaking of notifications menu - the new (G) tags for journals also add some messy noise. I'd suggest moving them to the front of titles and maybe removing the (), the bold font and some whitespace should be enough separation.
O
A
F
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You should do a one time force switch to modern that is allowed to be reversed and see what the real number is and solicit feedback from those users interactively when they switch back.
I hate it. I actively hate it.
But the forced switch followed by a feedback form would be a good idea. I think that's what this journal kind of is, but it's a bit too... unstructured.
I can tolerate the new positioning of the search criteria to be always at the side rather than at the top of the page and able to be hidden away (though the fact that only the top search bar lists previous searches when clicked or I've started typing the search is annoying, wish that was something the side search bar did like the one in Classic), but the positioning of the sidebar when viewing posts is not good. The post should take centre stage, with the sidebar being like it is in Classic: below the post. I also don't see the point of having two buttons to fav or download a post and two buttons to note the poster.
Just recently noticed after the new update that [ b ], (left space so it doesn't disappear), sometimes doesn't work properly for text file stories which just leaves [/b] at the text. The strange thing however is that it doesn't happen always. Some text are bolded properly, but other times the opener tag for bold text doesn't work right, not bolding any text and just leaving the closer tag [/b] in the story since the opener tag didn't work.
EDIT: Thought of this later so adding on, would also like to bring attention that the new embed system doesn't work as well as the old one when it comes to more unique text colors (this one used to worked fine before the big UI update a few months back) is that colored text that uses more specific hex codes instead of general ones on older text file stories doesn't seem to work anymore. A long story I've been reading during the time of the update that had a distinct shade of silver (platinum-ish) just reverts back to default site colors (white/black) instead.
If a user does (color=red)(b) test test(/color)(/b)
Then the BBCode will bork. The order BBCode is opened with, needs to close in the inverse. So to hopefully keep the bork away the correct format is
(color=green)(b)testtest(/b)(/color).
Well, I guess that will be the date where I will cancel my FA+ membership.
I don't like the new UI at all. It's too cluttered, with the tags and other gallery pictures being right next to main imagine. It's distracting and prevents pictures from being rendered in full size. The buttons for Faving or Downloading being in square brackets make it look like a mobile UIm which the entire new design looks like. The new buttons are too big and take too much space compared to the Classic design. And overall, it looks like you try way too hard to copy E621 (with the new use of tags and where you have placed them) and DA (Gallery preview images right next to the main image) instead of stayinbg true to the classic FA design. The new design doesn't look or feel unique, but like any other website out there with, again, a focus on mobile users and not PC users.
Also, why do you need to maintain Classic? Why can't it be left alone with the danger that staying on Classic may brake features for the user?
I was wondering this too - until fairly recently I was under the impression that WAS what was happening... that Classic was just going to be left as-is in a static, "use at your own risk" state while only Modern got updates. (which I was fine with and understood)
Going off some other comments it seems like that might be a potential security risk though? This sort of stuff is a bit beyond me though. But yeah, this is something I'd like clarification on too, why can't Classic just be left as-is until it breaks for good. If it IS a security thing then that makes perfect sense.
After the new "old" theme was released I gave it another try (it's still eyestraining over longer periods of time, but at least I don't get a headache immediately), and I've decided to force myself to get used to Modern before Classic is ripped away from my hands, but I'm still not that jazzed about the eventuality of a forced switch.
In fact, I was already going to switch back to Classic for a while before seeing this post and I will do that after this comment (I wanted to send a feedback ticket originally but there's a 1024 character limit). I'm gonna enjoy it while it lasts :')
Premises that touch on all points: I often split my desktop screen because I multitask a lot and I don't have a second display, plus I generally dislike wasting space on full windows with plenty of blank space (most sites scale nicely anyway). This applies x10 to the mobile browser experience, since the window is effectively even smaller than my usual desktop split one.
Also I've lived through the dA change and, while I deeply appreciate the feedback request from FA, my experience has been kinda samey (negatively).
Main pain points for me are:
1. navigation is a bit of a nightmare, as everything in the Modern UI feels too big, space-hoarding and overwhelming, while old was comfortable and compact (both on desktop and on mobile). It all feels very "I zoomed in too much and the UI broke".
2. tied to prev point, when the page isn't max size, folders get pushed to the bottom of the page and become functionally useless, along with info and everything else. It's bad on split desktop, but it's ironically worse on mobile. It'd be better if they were forced on the side like in Classic, or at least hidden under an easily accessible toggle. Add the lack of highlighted visited links, and it's a complete mess to navigate them.
3. while the colors on the new theme are miles better than all others, at this point I'd rather get a customizable theme so I can make it eyestrain-proof for me (I'm aware I'm a small niche as far as accessibility issues go, but others might like it for other reasons)
4. [partially reiterating the feedback in the journal] the lack of the little gallery/folder nav bar under submission is sorely missed. The deviantart-like "more from the artist" thing on the side (which also gets hidden when not max-size) should be removed (since it picks the nearby pieces in the gallery anyway) or switched to a random folder.
Additional mix of smaller annoyances that come to mind right now: terrible comment thread readability, no emote picker, long list of general UI arrangements that feels plain bad or unintuitive compared to Classic, plain "I just don't vibe" with the info bar on the side (never liked it in any other site), profile pages are the perfect example of UI issues (they scale terribly and have to be scrolled to get all info that was in neat smaller boxes before), Classic mode's submission edit options were in a more comfortable place (horizontal was better, vertical feels samey), the vertical layout during upload feels congested and is hard to parse, I can't explain it correctly but inbox feels cluttered and scattered and I don't like having Oldest/Newest/DisableTiles front and center instead of the selection/remove options, holy moly to edit this comment I had to scroll all the way down to it.
Beyond that, I really dislike the images being off-center with lots of busy looking buttons on the right, it really detracts from the image viewing experience. I don't need to see the image stats and tags at the same time as the image itself. The mustard yellow "+" buttons on the side clash with the rest of the page as well. Classic theme is much more clean and less visually stimulating and keeps the art the focus of the page.
I much prefer the way classic mode's mini gallery under an image is positioned and laid out, it makes it instantly clear where the image is in relation to the rest of the artists gallery. It says "here's a whole gallery to explore!" whereas the modern one says "here's some random images, I guess"
In classic mode there is a thin line around everything, I think it could be described as a bevel, that looks really nice and brings everything together. In modern retro mode there is also an almost-black background to the side bar and along the bottom that looks worse than the consistent page background color in classic.
The banner at the top being stuck there and always on top of everything is annoying. I don't need you in my screenspace, so why are you still here in the way of everything?
Overall, modern theme just feels like all the worst aspects of modern web design all in one place. It's feels like it's trying to pull my attention in a hundred different directions instead of just doing what it's supposed to do and give me a clean, calm place to view art.
If you could at the very least a "remove banner" toggle that just replaces it with the FA logo, much much smaller like it had on classic that would be grand.
Click retention is a nightmare already, let alone with people being hit with a bio and no art immediately visible. Ad space has been diminished in value too as a result and it was already difficult justifying the cost vs outcomes of buying adspace here!
Not to mention, the news dropping over the banner the way it does causes issues with trying to close it, causing page refreshes instead, and just does generally look jank and unprofessional.
I'd also like to be able to show/hide both the Keywords and Meta Keywords sections.
Or any updates on matching tags together so when you block one, similar ones with different wording also get blocked? I remember this was getting looked into.
even e621 doesn't do server-side blacklist filtering. they do client-side filtering, and if you query 72 items and 62 of them are blacklisted then you'll just see 10 items total, not the 72 your requested.
This is not a BAD thing to ask; but we can tackle things like this once FA is not balancing two codebases.
First big problem I have with the site regardless of layout choice is just the fact that the upload page and submission info page are separated. They should just be on one page, simple as that. Most other websites do this now, and it makes the uploading process so much more streamlined. Having them on separate pages is a little confusing for first time users, especially those who are not experienced with gallery sites and only know social media. Hitting 'upload' on that first page makes it feel like the art will just be posted to the site immediately with no chance of doing things like titles, description etc. I'm saying this as someone's who's been using FA since 2006, and it's always been my biggest gripe even though I'm very familiar with how it's done now.
Probably already been said, but we still need to simplify the menus. They are SO confusing. Even now after so so many years, I still forget which page has which setting toggles and fields! Like why are my block lists in the profile tab? Shouldn't all those other options for profile customization just be on the same page to keep it simple? Account, Global, and Site settings are also confusing ways to categorize, how am I supposed to know exactly what kind of options I will be seeing when they're named this way and have options on each that don't really fit that category very well? Again reiterating that I've been here for nearly 20 years and these menu layouts STILL confuse the hell out of me.
It's no wonder that so many younger people I speak to don't want to sign up around here, the UI is still confusing no matter which layout you're using. FurAffinity has everything people are constantly begging for from other gallery websites, especially now that we have certain curation additions like tag blocking. Yet the younger crowd hates being here because the UI is confusing as hell. Things like this NEED to be updated and improved upon if we want the site to continue growing and thriving.
Edit: Another addition, you have GOT to get rid of that ugly sidebar on submission pages. It is so intrusive and distracting, I don't need the full comprehensive list of all tags and categories when I'm looking at art. Make it some kind of hidden script that only shows if I click, maybe underneath the submission itself, before or after the artist description? It would just make submission pages much nicer looking, and more efficient. We had that nice change a while back to remove the site banner on submission pages so the art itself was the first focus, we should have it again for tags/etc!
overall i thought the tabs looked really cool and fit with the gallery theme, but i understand it looks outdated! just my two cents :)
oh also please bring back the site emojis!!!!
Also agree with the emoji thing!
Fender's post makes the following statement: "Our techs ran the numbers and currently only 4.6% of all active accounts on Fur Affinity still use Classic." Many of the Comments have reiterated this figure, some with resignation: "Well, I guess I'm in the minority, so I'll have to make adjustments"; others with irritation: "This site can't cater to such a small minority; it's time for them to get with the program".
I have no reason to question the numbers, but I have a problem with the attitude - the implication that because a group of people constitute a small minority, they can simply be dismissed, or forced to conform.
There are many groups of people whose description could begin "Only a few percent of people are ...". Many of them are particularly well-represented on FA - perhaps the most obvious, and general, being "Only a few percent of people are interested in furry art in all of its manifestations."
There have been impassioned discussions about, for instance, the gender and sexuality classification of uploaded images. While a few people have been content to say "This is what the majority wants, end of discussion", most users (and the admins) have tried very hard to accommodate the preferences and sensibilities of everyone on FA. That's the nature of community.
I imagine that many people right now are thinking "That's completely different!"
No. It's not.
The people on this thread who prefer the Classic format have been clear and articulate about those aspects of the Modern format which cause them personal distress - just as the people who debated the classification of images were clear and articulate about why they found certain terms upsetting.
I have no problem with the technological argument: the programming for Classic is a labyrinthine nightmare which introduces vulnerabilities into the entire site, and the people working on site improvements could actually make it better even for the people who prefer Classic if they were able to devote all their attention and effort to one single, much more coherent format.
What I find offensive is the "most people" argument; it's a perspective which is almost invariably used to dismiss and marginalize people in the minority.
If it makes practical sense to trash Classic - or if you prefer euphemisms, "retire" or "depreciate" or "sunset" it - that's fine. But please do not justify it with an argument which, in so many other contexts, would get you banned from FA. That's not who we are.
honestly the repeated emphasis on Classic users being a "small minority" bugs me in general when it sure as hell doesn't seem that way from the comments x)
In fact, I think it speaks very highly of FA that they're saying "only 4.6% of our users are still using this UX, but we are taking their feedback for what they don't like about the new view." Most websites don't do that. If basically any other website on the internet wanted to update the appearance of the site, they'd just do it. You would log in one day and things would just be different, and you either deal with it or don't. FA isn't doing that - they're handholding, coddling, and cajoling this tiny minority, practically begging them to switch and give them meaningful feedback.
They announced that Classic was being phased out six years ago, and now they have to cut the cord - and the fact that such a small fraction of the site's userbase is still using this feature is a big part of the practical reasons for that.
it's true that a lot of other websites on the modern internet are machines built to create profit and they ultimately serve that purpose above all others, but we shouldn't expect furaffinity, a site that does not make money, to behave like a site that exists for the purpose of making money. this website was an is a place. it seems to many that there are ways of preserving that, but it has not been clear whether fa is receptive to those options or why they haven't pursued them, and that gives the impression that they aren't likely to accept any feedback that doesn't align with whatever they already want to do. to those of us not intimately familiar with the internal technical workings of the site, given what seems possible, the decisions being made just don't make a lot of sense. it's true that they have maintained classic for a longer than a lot of websites would, but it's not clear that they actually care about it given that they from the outside they don't appear to have considered other measures that might reasonably be taken to preserve it. instead, in the time that they have continued to maintain classic, it has given the impression that, for some other reason, they have not been able to justify getting rid of it. perhaps most users still use classic, or perhaps they are reconsidering and looking for other options. when the "try modern retro" banner showed up, i thought maybe they were saying that they had ported classic (or something like it) to the new codebase. that could have been why they were taking so long to sunset classic. in the absence of information, it was easy to be optimistic.
This isn't about profit machines, but the fact that the team maintaining furaffinity are people too, who have to put in real, complicated work to make this website run so well that we end-users don't even have to really think about what must be going on under the hood. But as someone who's put together webdev and programming projects that, by all accounts, are orders of magnitude simpler than running a website of FA's scale, let me assure you, however complicated and weird you think it must be, it is a thousand times worse. Old internet technology is truly limited in ways that, by today's standards, sound like complete bullshit. It's not so trivial to just "make it work" in cases like these. So, please, take it from someone who's been around the block and has no skin in the game, the call to finally sunset classic mode for good comes from a place of dedicated people who have done everything in their power to find the compromise you want to believe exists, and found that it can't reasonably be done. This journal here, asking classic users what would make the switch to modern palatable genuinely is the best way forward for everyone.
Which I guess is why I'm out here trying to explain it to people. I don't think it's helpful to try and moralize this decision. Because, as i've assured you already, what we're seeing is the FA team trying their genuine best to find a solution that works for everyone still on classic without putting unreasonable extra work on the maintainers. Seriously, the kinds of byzantine troubleshooting and esoteric computer spells that can arise from trying to maintain something ancient like classic mode can just, get exponential in workload and time cost very, very quickly, and often unexpectedly. This switch will allow the folks maintaining FA to put more of their time and effort into making furaffinity a better experience for all of us, including the 4.6% being forced to change their routines after so many years.
"it seems to many that there are ways of preserving that, but it has not been clear whether fa is receptive to those options or why they haven't pursued them, and that gives the impression that they aren't likely to accept any feedback that doesn't align with whatever they already want to do."
This 100%.
Believe me, I get it. I, myself am often fighting against the "it's so few people relative to the whole!" arguments, but it is because of that that I find the pushback against it here to be, and I say this very kindly, in somewhat poor taste. Every step of this process of finally making the push to sunset classic has been done with the voices and wants of those 4.6% in mind, to such a degree that it feels almost crass to me to invoke the fight against marginalized erasure in this context. To put it in internet meme terms: that's a whole new sentence.
I haven't read most of the comment section though. No idea if anyone else around here is making that argument, though I sure hope not. I just want to make clear that I really don't think the FA team is actually committing this particular form of rhetorical negligence. I hope this doesn't read as attacking you, because i genuinely and enthusiastically support your overall point. I really think more people could stand to bear it in mind. I just think it's worth recognizing when something resembling a given form of rhetoric is not actually an instance of it, which i would argue is the case here.
If an argument "resembles a given form of rhetoric", it is important for the person making the argument to be aware of this fact, and maybe even to acknowledge it - especially if they aren't using the argument that way, because it contaminates their legitimate point with an unmistakable sense of dismissiveness which, I agree, was almost certainly not intended here.
It is perfectly true that users of Classic are "simply a subset of a userbase of this website with a particular setting enabled", but if you read the Comments, it is clear that their distress isn't related "simply" to whether a switch is up or down, left or right. The experience of using Modern is causing a significant degree of personal discomfort, in ways which many people have articulated.
Either personal discomfort is something which FA ought to avoid inflicting, or it is not. Saying that one person's discomfort is legitimate while someone else's is irrelevant - no matter what justification one may think one has to make such a distinction - imposes a hierarchy of legitimacy which a site like FA should scrupulously avoid, and generally has. The technological argument about Classic being impossible to work with, and putting the site at risk, justifies the discomfort of ending it without needing to dismiss the legitimacy of any user's experience.
As for the intentions of the admins and tech people:
Have they reached out to Classic users for feedback? Definitely.
Have they actually read that feedback? Clearly.
Have they responded to that feedback? Repeatedly.
Are they actually going to implement any of the suggestions made by users of Classic? Or will we be told "Sorry, the coding of Modern won't support that"? We'll see.
Old Russian proverb: Hope for the best; expect the worst.
I don't know if this is the right place for this kind of feedback, but, I don't like how certain pages (Main page, submissions page, galleries without any folders) occupy the whole width of the screen to display stuff. It doesn't sit well with me, I'd much rather have a more compact interface! That's my only complain about the look of the site, love everything else
I'll still prefer the original, but I can live with this one so if it helps simplify the coding it's not gonna be a hill for me to die on. The comment section does look a little nicer though.
If possible, I'd love for y'all to implement the old emojis into Modern. They're very nostalgic for me, and I love how goofy they are.
#1 priority should be fixing the way links are formatted, though. It's not just that there's not enough contrast between visited and unvisited links; the color is almost identical to regular text. This is such a long-standing issue that it's even present on Classic, where links are (if I recall correctly) just the same color as body text but bold. This isn't a problem for links that are obviously part of the UI, like tabs and menu items, but for inline links inside descriptions, forums, and journal entries I'm always worried that people won't realize I'm even linking to anything.
I did have a look because I was bored, and DAMN has modern changed a lot (for the better)
You can look at its source (it's open source!) for things that have been implemented in it, that you might find useful:
https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery.....urAffiniTweaks
Hopefully this helps!
I don't WANT to but... *closes eyes and clicks Retro banner*
*analog horror reel of HK handover*
I hate it already...
Please add numerical pagination to galleries that allows users to jump to an arbitrary page number. It would dramatically improve quality of life for us longtime users especially who have who knows how many thousands of pieces gathered up in our favorites or what have you over the years.
Aside from that, it would be nice to also have the option to get rid of the sidebar and move all the info there underneath the artwork.
As for the UI, I wasn't a fan at first but it has since grown on me, and all the new updates that have been accomplished because of it (tag blocks, journal maturity rating, commissions tab, etc) far outweighs any issues. I honestly can't even think of any issues with the actual UI I have anymore. The only one being, I do kinda wish hyperlink colors could be customized. As it stands, when you use the [ url ] coding, it can be hard to differentiate a linked word from others, but that's my only real issue I can think of at this time.
A retro theme appeared the other day. It's better than new, but it's also uncomfortable. I spent 5-10 minutes trying to find an image edit. The fields to fill in are inconveniently located in the editing frame.
Which means that the new mandatory theme of the site is not receptive to the eyes, as if I was lost in the jungle.
I will be this 4.6% user until the end.
Hashtag: classic theme, live.
The banner is very cute
- Submissions/Comments/Journals/Favorites/Watchers/Notes (1S/2C/3J/4F/5W/6N)
NOT
- Submissions/Watchers/Comments/Favorites/Journals/Notes (1S/5W/2C/4F/3J/6N; buttons 2, 3 and 5 appear scrambled)
^ Granted, that one set of rearrangements from 2-5 does make things more-correctly align with the order of categories within the page they open. I won't deny that.
HOWEVER, it also goes against at least a decade of visual and muscle memory, making it a decent chunk of why Modern is still an instant Hard Pass for me, especially when paired with the rest of the overall overhaul to the art-viewing experience. For me, "annoying as hell" will never do well.
A basic opt-in toggle for Classic's notification ordering, even, would go a pretty long way in getting me to ease up on the prospect of being forced out of the theme I practically grew up with.
Also don't be afraid to put dropdowns within dropdowns again, for the many whose laptops and/or other monitors aren't TV-sized with 4K resolution or whatever. Looked and functioned perfectly well on Classic, with nothing feeling "too hidden" beyond the general disorganization. But the full list goes past the bottom of the screen on Modern, with everything at/below "Active Sessions" being cut off and unreachable.
Even something as simple as not having the top bar scroll with us (like it doesn't on Classic) might fix this issue, beyond the lack of toolbar being just generally preferable.
I've never enjoyed a view-thinning browser- or site-based toolbar, and I'd like to avoid adblocking the element(s) like I've done with the (in my current opinion, misleading) "New Classic" ad strip, if possible.
Thank you~
This UI design should be stuck within the realm of a professional software suite with many options. I'd hate to see this when trying to navigate website.
THE BUBLÉ IS RELEASED!
CHRISTMAS IS HERE!!!
You Change The CSS Selectors for the elements.
And it breaks my Stylus overrides:
Like:
body {
font-family: Times New Roman !important;
font-size: 20px !important;
}
And:
A:LINK {
color: #a2db90 !important;
}
A:VISITED {
color: #FF6666 !important;
}
Also:
.tags {
background-color: #808080 !important;
color: red !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
}
My problems with Modern Retro.
1) Browse options should be on the top and horizontal.
a lot wasted space on the right side. I'm using a laptop. It looks like it was designed for ultra wide monitors. The same goes for journals. and other pages. The panel on the right side is a TON of wasted space esp for pages with a lot of text like journals. etc.
2) On my screen the fonts are far too large. Need an option to scale them down.
3) Modern Retro needs classic light colors (blue colors) (understood this is in the works.)
4) option to turn off site banners would be nice. I have to use an adblocker for it. (this goes for any modern)
5) center buttons under new submissions. ---- invert selection select all remove selected. nuke
6) Need more spacing between elements.
7) Put back account name in top menu bar instead of account picture (top right)
8) Why is community under support? Community should be its own menu.
Things that still throw me off:
- I use a fairly small screen and (I suspect) relatively low resolution for The Present Day, so Classic using simple text links for most everything keeps it small and tidy. With things like tags and keywords being big highlighted buttons now, that eats up a -whole- lot of screen space. Basically I agree with most folks saying the sidebar feels huge and clunky in comparison.
- Related, it feels very...odd to have all the gallery folders and tags and such on the -right- side of the screen. Not having the folders on the left is weirdly disorienting.
- The big red X button that shows up when you click on an image to view larger without downloading is distracting to say the least, especially since it overlaps the actual art you just zoomed in on. I'm also used to Classic just blowing the image up in place on the page, instead of - whatever it's doing now, I don't know how to describe it in technical terms.
- Somewhere in here someone mentioned actual page-numbered galleries, instead of based on a file ID or something. I'll agree I prefer page numbers.
- My pettiest little thing: if the top menu bar is going to be frozen/floating/always at the top, might there be an option to toggle its transparency?
Thanks for soliciting feedback.
Also agreeing re: page-numbered galleries.
If modern has clear time stamps now I'd switch over with no problem, otherwise it's borderline unusable for me.
So I prefer classic. But I guess if it's going to be forced upon us, then I guess I'm not going to have a choice, will I lol.
So previous/next is still an option right there where it's always been - you just don't get a preview in Modern like you do in Classic.
Maybe this is an issue unique to me, but when I look at the links on the submission page under "Submission Options", none of them are underlined. So, when I'm scanning the page after realizing that the edit submission link isn't where I expect it to be, I never stop to look at the text of the link that takes me there in the modern layout because it just looks like plain text. It also doesn't help that the text is tucked away in the margin on the right side of the page, which is the last place I would look for something that I consider to be somewhat important.
So, it would be nice if the text could get a styling update that makes it look more clickable.
The modern site just looks like every other art site on the web now. There's massive gutters on either side of the page on my monitor, wasting space. I can't widen this comment box even though there is enough space on my monitor to more than double its width. I legitimately thought emoticons were deprecated as well until you mentioned 'making them easier to find.' I still haven't found them.
It's lacking personality and uniqueness.
The gallery navigation from a particular piece is unintuitive; I have no idea out of the box what the 'more from [artist]' means, as well as the 'featured in folders' means. Those two are in the exact same spot as very similarly-phrased features on dA, but my experience with both sites tells me that they are completely different things. This is only going to confuse newbies to this site.
Making the 'block this tag' button a PLUS SIGN feels ridiculous; I thought it was some sort of community voting feature or a way to suggest tags to other peoples' submissions at first. The meta keywords category is a useless duplicate of the information shown just above it.
Like in every other aspect of the tech world I'm going to eventually get used to it because I don't have a choice, stop complaining about it being a worse experience because that's what 80% of UI updates ARE for my workflows and habits. But you did ask for feedback. So maybe this is useful.
- Browser scaling does not seem to work properly with the modern design. Due to the size of the elements being too large to my own taste I'd like to zoom it back a little, however this causes the site's design to become entirely vertical with empty sides as the site is coded as a static image probably to adjust better for phones. Classic design does not have this issue and scales with browser zoom properly.
- I find it odd how the modern and classic designs have different descriptions for quite a few options in the settings. Oftentimes the classic descriptions seem more accurate and verbose, albeit this is a rather minor complaint and more a curiosity.
- The modern design lacks separators between the settings. This makes it harder to read quickly which text is describing which text and which checkbox is aligned to which setting. The fact some of the bolded text inside said descriptions are using blue bolded text which looks similar to the blue text on the left side for the actual names of the settings, doesn't help.
- The search bar looks cluttered. On one hand it shows more information at once without having to click advanced button, on the other hand it has similar issues to the settings pages where everything just looks rather haphazardly placed without separators. It is functional, it just doesn't look clean.
+ Plus points however to the actual settings cogwheel and burger bar being more clear to me than the classic one. I do find it easier to actually find the settings here than the classic.
+ Oddly enough, if not counting the 40% of the banner taking space, the modern design is often capable of actually showing more information on the screen than the classic design.
+ Overall, I do find that the classic design does look pretty and has promise.
Overall TL;DR is that to me, the Modern isn't bad and is definitely usable and I can't myself think of any absolutely critical faults in it as just a regular ol' user. It has a lot of good promise, but is currently held back by some cluttered elements and technical faults such as the browser scaling not being functional. Due to my own preferences and being used to old-school internet I guess where text pages basically looked just like text documents, I would personally still prefer the Classic if I was given a choice. With no choice given, I will do my best to deal with the Modern and adjust it as much to my liking as I can.
Classic for example has full image resolution (if it is really large) to page / display width with post details under it. Whereas modern & by proxy retro has the image resolution scaled to the width of the submission area. While the block that has post details like tags, resolution size etc etc eats up all the free space on the right of the image. Which in turn makes a larger image still look small. Compared to Classic which gives you as much full resolution as it can.
Honestly the whole submission information panel in modern feels like it takes up too much space on a submission page. Whereas with Classic only after you scroll past an image does the information show up. Giving you a chance to look at the whole image. Modern however covers a significant portion of the submission page and you have to look at it while looking at the art. Which can be a distraction.
Classic just has a charm that cannot be replaced. But if it must go then it must go.
Also, is it totally necessary that changing skin settings requires me to enter my password? This is tedious and I can't think of any other site which makes me do it for something that trivial.