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HamsterNL18-Opal
18-Opal
June 12, 2019
Question

Colored usernames?

  • June 12, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 99 views

So what's up with all the pretty colors?

 

PTC Community Colors.PNG

    3 replies

    B
    23-Emerald III
    BenLoosli23-Emerald III
    23-Emerald III
    June 12, 2019

    Color to match the gem color? Smiley LOL

    W
    Werner_E25-Diamond I
    25-Diamond I
    June 12, 2019
    @HamsterNL wrote:

    So what's up with all the pretty colors?

     

     

    Pretty? Honestly?

    I'd rather call it confusing, distracting and kittening.

    It has to do with the newly introduced ranking system where you need to study a FAQ to be able to at least estimate the real rank of a contributor.
    Obviously too much colors and font styles can not only ruin a text document, the rule applies to web pages, too.

    The PTC forum did not look like a serious forum from the first moment and there was not done much against it. And there are enough examples for much cleaner, professional looking forums created with Lithium, too.

    In the overview pages the thread titles should be colored slightly(!) differently or be set in bold to make clear where to click to open the thread. The buttons with the various "labels" are much too large and take up too much space. The link behind the ptc logo is still broken and wrong and refers wrongly to ptcuser (which has its own icon to the right of it anyway, .... But I guess gamification is much more important 😞

    H
    HamsterNL18-OpalAuthor
    18-Opal
    June 12, 2019
    @Werner_E wrote:

    Pretty? Honestly?

     

    I was being sarcastic 🙂

      H
      HamsterNL18-OpalAuthor
      18-Opal
      June 21, 2019

      @Jaime_Lee , could you elaborate the different colors? It's very distracting...

       

      J
      Jaime_LeeCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      June 24, 2019

       

       

      @HamsterNL 

       

      Hi!  Colors were supposed to match changes to "gem stones."  We did this on another community I managed.  I can talk about it at the next Community Team Meeting.  The topic and subject matter is more important than the person than the contributor so I understand why you would not want the usernames to "stand out" so much.

       

      @Werner_E 

       

      Thank you for the feedback.

       

      1)  In the overview pages the thread titles should be colored slightly(!) differently or be set in bold to make clear where to click to open the thread.

      Do you have examples of another community that does this?  I have some maintenance hours right now that I can use to make simple CSS Changes.

       

      2)  The buttons with the various "labels" are much too large and take up too much space.

       

      We haven't talked about "labels" for a while.  I assume you are talking about these labels like Windchill for Example.  How would you like to see them different?  "Labels" are the only way I can categorize subtopics under the different products.

       

       

      labels.jpg

       

       

       

      3)  The link behind the ptc logo is still broken and wrong and refers wrongly to ptcuser (which has its own icon to the right of it anyway,

      Actually, the ptc | PTCuser is ONE banner which right now you are correct only links to PTC/USER.  It was swapped out in response to a corporate branding request.  There  used to be two separate icons here.  This was on my to do list.  Thank you for bubbling this up again.

       

      4) We are working on "rank icons" to make easy identification of the more active/experienced folks on the community. 

       

      I am taking suggestions on how this "rank icon" should look. @StephenW had some good ideas here.

       

      https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Community-Refresh/Preview-Message-PTC-Community-User-Ranks-FAQ/m-p/612490/highlight/true#M694

      W
      Werner_E25-Diamond I
      25-Diamond I
      June 24, 2019

      ad 1)

      Look at the attached screenshot from the Siemens Lithium forum you (or someone else?) once pointed to. The layout is much clearer IMHO and this may be due to the distinct font size difference between the first and second line. Poster name , date etc. sure should not look the same as the topic and could be much smaller and lighter..

      BTW, apart from the Admin it looks like we see quite uniformly coloured user names and ... no "funny" names besides the user name, just a bar chart indicating the rank. OK, upon further look there seems to be three different colors for user names - not perfect, but better than the wild play of colors  we have now - why???.

      Another improvement I suggested a longer time ago is to show the size of attached files. When I first suggested it, you asked for an example and I provided it. Could not find the thread now so attached is a picture (Tesla.png) of another forum which also shows what I am talking about.

       

      ad 2)

      The way the Mathcad forum has undergone its various infamous migrations beginning from the old Collab, its my opinion that we don't need any labels any more. I am not sure if some of the constant participants really take care and take notice of the label a specific thread is posted under. At least I don't. The subforums we had served a specific purpose but I think in this Lithium forum we don't need any labels at all.

      If we should stick at labels, they should go out of the way. Its annoying for people looking for new posts on a regular basis to have scroll down every time. Again the screenshot of the siemens forum shows that those label buttons can be much smaller and can be put in the sidebar to the right. At least better than what we have now.

      The siemens page wastes much more space at the top than ours, so thats better here in the PTC forum. But there is still room for improvements. I would put the search field in the sidebar, too, and one can think about if the green bar with the subforum title really needs to be that high.

      Everything which wastes less veritcal space at the top and makes the thread titles bubble up the page to avoid/reduce scrolling is welcome.

       

      ad 3)

      No big deal, simply something a noticed and wrote quite some time ago. I just checked and the two logos are indeed one single graphic. Nonetheless its also possible to link to different pages depending ob where on a graphic you click. On the other hand I see no reason why there shouldn't be two different graphics side by side as they used to be in the beginning of this Lithium forum.
      I used the link to ptc at those times to enter the page for managing my licenses - thats the reason how I noticed that the link was broken.

       

      ad 4)

      I have told many times here at different place what I think about gamification. Its childish, its silly and its unnecessary. Its near to a personal insult if someone really thinks to keep me motivated with such infantile games. Its something which should have no place in a serious forum frequented by adults.

      But PTCs decision seems to be already put in stone(s), so all we can do is ignoring that nonsense and ask for making this gamifications as discreet and unobtrusive as possible!

       

       

       

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