Hide or downsize icons

Some feedback from fellow Dutch mappers (including me). Several Dutch mappers find the user interface way to large and to busy. The old forum looked more simplistic (of course, it is a new system so you can’t fully compare but still). On discourse, the start page icons are way to large and to much information is provided. On the contrary, the links to the sub forums for all the countries are really small.

This makes the looks of Discourse really unpleasent.

Edit: the same applies to the sub communities. That logo is way to large. 2 or 3 post can be placed in the same space.

Edit 2: This also looks like a nice example: https://foodshift.se

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Thanks for the feedback, there are still just a few communities created, but as soon as there are more coming, a proper analysis should be done to see how to accommodate everyone’s experience.

In my opinion this should be done from a user experience lens on what issues there are with the current UI, why and what do users want to accomplish in a better way.

This can be easily disabled (category logo) if the Dutch community prefers, let’s comment any Dutch-category specific changes on the request topic.

Thanks!

Thanks for the reply. I indeed saw that but I just wanted to provide this feedback already on behalf of some Dutch mappers.

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This obviously needs a bump.

The “rather large” icons need to be max. a quarter of their current size. As a rule it shouldn’t be necessary to scroll to see the top level categories.

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A quick easy fix would be to set the category logo images to a 60% width:

.category-logo.aspect-image img {
  width: 60%;
}

Note that no css changes have been made yet because the technical time has been invested in other fronts. @Firefishy might be able to comment on his though around css improvements to the forum, since he is the one maintaining the whole technical aspects of the site.

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What about disabling the icons entirely? Take a look at this example: https://foodshift.se

I really like this design. A nice, short description at the top. Also the colors on the front page are much more balanced. The front page is not so busy as ours.

Especially the community part has to much color.

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:+1: :+1: :+1: 
 Youah, much better than the oversized Icons here 


Agreed, I even added a uBlock Origin filter rule now to disable them:

##.category-logo

Result:

image

Getting rid of suggested topics was next 


##.suggested-topics

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:+1: well done 
 so I would just have to install uBlock Origin to make use of this 
 :upside_down_face:

Why not create two themes?
One Theme with the icons (a little bit smaller please) and one without the icons. Every User could change it by him or herself.

That is of couse also fine if that is possible. I can imagine though that in terms of maintainability 1 theme is preferred.

We plan to discuss icons downsizing this week at the @forums-governance and I’ll come back with a decision.

Thanks everyone!

This css change has been applied to reduce the size category logos to 60%.

4 Likes

This doesn’t fix the problem reported here. The site still looks rubbish compared to the nice clean layout of the old forum - there are massive pictures filling the screen that add no value, it looks like a four-year-old has gone mad with some crayons. Why can’t we just get rid of those altogether?

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I am afraid I have to agree to that. Looking at the relation between useless icon and valuable information here

Screenshot_Icon_Cat_Com

one must admit that this is quite ridiculous indeed.

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We only display 3 latest topics anyway, so there’s a lot of white space due to the icon size. Compare these two below:

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Ummmm, are you sure it has been applied? Or has it been reverted in the meantime? Because I’m not seeing it.

This is what I see currently (even after numerous force-refreshes):

And this is what I think I’m supposed to be seeing (if this CSS change was really implemented):

(Note that I’m changing max-width in Developer Tools, as width seems to be auto-calculated to preserve aspect ratio - at current version of the community.osm.org website?)

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The change was applied and reverted, because new in new discourse versions it was messing with some browsers.

If someone has the time to come up with a css that works in desktop and mobile, happy to apply.

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Thanks for your explanation. It would have been great to get this information immediately after the revert so we could have used the time to come up with the necessary CSS 
 :wink:

At the time no css seemed needed because mobile view was already re-sizing the icons, please see: