Upcoming Forum changes - Phase 1 of 2

Good morning space friends, and in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening and good night!

This is CCP raRaRa from Team Webster. This dev blog will introduce a few upcoming changes that we are making to the EVE Forums.

We've received many great ideas on how to make the forums a better place. One of the biggest problems with the forums today is the user experience using them on various devices, such as on mobile and tablet.
My experience using the forums on my Samsung S4, which has a big 5-inch screen, is far from adequate. Navigation is bad, I have to constantly zoom and it's really hard to click on links! Not cool! So what changes are we making?

The first is to make the forums responsive. What do I mean by responsive? Here's a good description from Wikipedia:

“Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop computer monitors).”

You can read more about Responsive web design on Wikipedia.

In order to make the forums responsive we needed to clean up the HTML, CSS and JavaScript in several phases. This is something we've been working on for the past months, without affecting the look and feel on the forums. However, now we're ready to do something more drastic, in two phases.

Phase one

The first phase involves a major clean up. We are going to remove the giant EVE Gate header and move most of the EVE Gate links, such as the link to your EVE Gate Profile, to a new drop-down menu in the navigation bar. The new drop-down menu will also display all of your characters, where you can easily switch character without having to go to EVE Gate.

The new drop-down menu.

The quick search has been moved to its own drop-down menu.

All forum related settings have been moved from EVE Gate to a single settings page on the forums.

The signature editor has also changed, it's now using Markdown editor which gives you more control to format the signature with live preview.

Bug fixes

• Adding links to GM, ISD and CSM badges bringing you to the next relevant post
• External links containing ampersands should now be correctly parsed, following an external link warning
• Links containing parentheses should now be parsed correctly in cases where the URL tag isn't used
• Clicking the name of a character containing an apostrophe should correctly display the option popup
• The forum login should now correctly redirect users to the page/topic they were viewing
• RSS Feed bug fixes by CCP Avalon who just created a Twitter account
  • The topics feed should now display threads in correct order, with newest updates at the top. As opposed to having only displayed threads from 2011 – 2013
  • All feeds should now contain an author and datetime where applicable
  • The syndication feed (viewed from Chrome) now displays author and DateTime of last update, having been the only feed/browser completely without either

Phase two

Phase two is the final phase where we have fully implemented responsive design. Once preparations have completed, we want to launch a beta forum in parallel with the current forum in order to get feedback. We will talk about phase two in more detail later.

We would love to get your feedback on the forums. If everything goes as planned then phase one will be launched within the next two weeks.

Thanks!