@4221358

My awareness that there was a new site coming was via a maintenance page when the upgrade actually happened. I visit Rendo's Marketplace daily. I receive update emails from them. Nowhere was there any promotion for testers. So who were their testers? They needed more than "does it work" testing. They needed "does this meet your needs? Why/Why not?" testing.

Edit: It seems, based on another post in a different thread, that there were such testers and that they gave negative feedback during the testing phase, and changes were not made. Honestly, it would have been less disappointing to know that there was a lack of appropriate testers.

I probably have a leg up here, because I work in software design, but it isn't rocket science to recognize that you need to understand that what your actual users want an application to do is far more important than what the application designers think it ought to do. This site isn't just buggy. (And boy, is it.) It doesn't seem especially fit for purpose. Functionality was removed or downgraded seemingly without thought to how that functionality was used. (I'm looking at search and the gallery, here, in particular.)

Stuff like the image dimension limits on gallery uploads simply should never have changed by surprise. If it was going to change, there should have been a "hey, this is changing" post somewhere at a minimum, and ideally, there should have been some community input on what good limits should be. Long, long before the implementation.

@4221428

Broadly, it looks like the post list is showing page links as if there were (realNumberOfPages - 1) pages. So if there are 3 pages of posts, it will show "[1, 2]" on the post list.

Seriously, guys. I say this as an IT guy, not as a frustrated user. If a money-making application at any of my jobs was this screwed up for this long, someone would be screaming at the top of their lungs for the upgrade to be rolled back.

Your vendors are complaining. I just buy stuff here, but if the vendors get pissed off, what are the implications for your business?

The triage going on here is too slow.

@4221220 - the space taken to achieve that, though is excessive. The buttons are too large and the header has too much dead space. The same thing could be achieved in less space, even on a header that stayed at the top all the time.

Agreed. There have definitely been cases where having renders in the gallery convinced me to buy something when the vendor's own renders left me unsure I liked it enough.

On that basis alone, I'd recommend not dissuading folks from posting gallery images. (Presumably, unintentional dissuasion, but still.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but the link shown below in my activity feed doesn't go anywhere. Clicking it brings me back to my activity feed. (Hovering over the link shows this, so it's not some redirect failure.)

I've stopped seeing those "partial unsecure" flags from Firefox for the site as of this morning. The forums here and the marketplace both seem fine in that regard now.

(I might have just come in after it was sorted out, or perhaps not hitting the broken parts of the site, but I never did get straight-up insecure site warnings like those some folks are reporting.)

I'm not a frequent poster to the forums here, though I am an extremely frequent visitor to the Marketplace.

The fact that I have never felt much need to post here should be viewed as an endorsement, not a failure. I am posting now because I am reporting issues and concerns. I'm the kind of customer I think you want a lot of - I spend fair amount lot of money and don't have much to say otherwise.

I'm also a professional IT person with an extensive background in both web work and, like many here, using forums in many contexts.

I don't find the features of this new forum very impressive. I didn't use the old forums more than a few times, but this forum feels retro and quite limited. No forum software I have used in the last decade lacked support for WSYWIG in-line editing on Windows platforms. Things like CTRL-I for italics, CTRL-B for bold. And yes, you could do both at once. Yes, they have markup modes (usually based on BBCode), and sometimes that's handy, but it's not something I normally have to use any more unless I'm posting from phone or a tablet or something. And even then, they usually have a little palette of icons that insert the markup for you.

So, no, I'm afraid I'm not that impressed. Maybe this forum software lets us do things here the old one did not (drag-and-drop image insertion is fairly neat), but for anyone who uses the web very much, it doesn't feel very powerful or user-friendly for simple text input, which is the main function a forum needs to support.

Just a follow up to my earlier post with feedback on the layout. Related to my comments about the right-hand sidebar on product pages, the site now has a fixed-size width. On my system, this makes margins on both left and right sides of the site (everywhere, not just on product pages) needlessly wide. The old site would flow content to a very narrow margin on my PC browser - almost right to the edge of the browser window.

That the new margins are perfect on my tablet (in landscape mode) does lend support to the idea that the site was, at least partially, optimized for mobile viewing. I agree with others who are questioning whether that makes sense when the site's primary audience is folks who render in Poser or DAZ. We're not your typical content consumers. We have (usually powerful) PCs and laptops. We're not doing this on mobile. Sure, I look at Rendo on my tablet and even my phone sometimes. The old site worked just fine.

In contrast, all the complaints I have with the new product pages carry over to viewing on my tablet. Viewing it on my phone? That's a complete mess. The sidebar flows to the bottom of the page, and the margins are too wide, leaving the main content floating in a sea of blank space.

While not as vehemently annoyed by it as some posters here, I agree that reducing the number of products-per-line shown on things like the "What's New" page was ... suboptimal. Especially with all the changes I've mentioned that reduce vertical viewing area for the main content of pages, making the number of items-per-line smaller is really pretty annoying.

My feedback here is focused on the marketplace.

I have to say, like most responders here, I'm also not a fan of this site redesign. This is not simple dislike of all change; there are specific changes here that I do feel are for the worse. Specific feedback follows.

The large headers and footers are taking up too much space. The very top, dark bar of the header, with the search box, general links and dropdowns isn't bad, because those things are arguably worth having on-screen full-time. Here in the forums, the white bar directly underneath the dark one is quite wasteful, as it contains information that I don't think anyone needs to see full time. On the marketplace, the links in the white bar are useful. However, each of these two parts of the header is too tall. Each section of the header could stand to be close to half its current height. Reducing the height (thickness) of these headers would yield back useful viewing space to the product pages.

The footer with nothing but social media links is something incredibly wasteful of vertical space. These things simply should not be on screen full time. Really, get rid of that. Put them in a static, non-floating element on pages, or revert back to them being simple icons tucked into another element. (The previous site had these on the same non-floating header bar as the account links, meaning they took no extra vertical space.) You have empty space on the left side of the pages - while I find such things on other sites annoying, if you really want these links to stay on screen, make them a vertical bar of icons and let them float over there.

The vertical sidebar on the right side of marketplace product pages is very large and busy. I don't think the info there is bad. Having the product price near the top of the product page is nice, for example. However, the sidebar is much too wide. Comparing it with saved versions of marketplace pages, it's around 1.3 times as wide as the static sidebar was on the previous version of the site. It is also positioned further to the left, with larger margin on the right-hand side compared to the old site. Again, both changes here take away product viewing space.

As an aside, you seem to have lost a lot of promotional content in the new sidebar. Current sale items, "what's hot", etc. were all links that I frequently clicked on, and I don't see equivalents in the current site. If those aren't coming back, I think you're missing out on cross-sell opportunities the old site gave you.

In summary, users come to the marketplace to look at the product images and descriptions, and these things need to be more dominant than the current site design permits. We do need the info in the right-hand sidebar, but it doesn't need to be so large and prominent. We do not need to be constantly provided with social media links. The site navigation links at the top are nice to have floating, but are too tall.

I don't especially like the new layout, but I can deal with it. The colors are horrifying. Looking at this makes me wince because there is far too much harsh contrast going on. As I type this, I have a bright white header with black letters, then immediately below it is a blue section with grey letters. That's awful.

Change up the colors to be more muted and I won't mind nearly as much.

And I agree, all change is not good simply for the sake of being changed. The site could benefit from more tablet friendly interfacing, but it should not have to be painful to look at to achieve that.