I've seen a couple exchanges where users complain about having to go to the new site for certain features because of the layout, and Keith asking why they don't like the layout, and I have my own thoughts about it too, so I thought a thread focused on that could be helpful. So reasons I personally don't love spending time on the new site:

My custom navigation functionality is missing (sidebar and bookmarks) I think the customizable UI is one of subeta's best features, and I rely on it heavily. My sidebar has

• Shop Profits, for seeing how much I've made and easily navigating to my shop
• Subeta: , which I use not only to see my sP and CSC on hand (the only rows replicated on kumos), but also to update my status, navigate to my own profile, see my active buffs, and see how many people are online
• Shop Search, which I use constantly
• The Oracle, which I lean on to notice when I have a quest
• Quests, which I use as a checklist and as navigation
• Friends Online
• Notepad, which IS on kumos but notably ignores line breaks? So it looks like a mess. I could code in some (br)s but that really defeats the ease of using it largely as quick little lists

On kumos, that sidebar has

• User Info, but that just means sP and CSC on hand
• Events, taking up space for no reason when there are none and then stretching the rest of the bar way lower down when they do happen
• Kumos updates, which is a good list to have on like a news page, but not as part of my main navigation. A single link to a page with a list could be chill though
• Notepad, which as mentioned doesn't have regular linebreaks

And that's not even getting into bookmarks. I have 9, I use a few of them daily and like 4-5 pretty much constantly. Again, the customizable nav is SO useful, I would hate to lose any of it.

Other navigation / visual balance I also love the way the original site breaks navigation into a few areas (sidebar, top nav, and bookmarks) - I think this is a big part of why the site feels so balanced, and what someone in the news comments was talking about with how kumos feels like it's leaning to the right. Visually, the darker colours from the top extending down each side with the sidebar and bookmarks area help the balance too - kumos feels big, white, and empty.

Also speaking of the top nav, I think the hover dropdown is a much smoother experience than having to click on those headings. Kumos is missing the stacking dropdowns too - one of my most used links in that menu is the QS link for my shop, which isn't there on the new site. Aesthetically, the top links feel very temporary right now, in that plain box (and especially with the separate plain box with my un just to the side, which is a different size and makes the whole thing look worse). Also not really sold on the way "personal" has been split between "you" and "(username)" - I'm not totally against that change on paper, like pulling the pages that are more about settings out to the un link would be consistent with the navigation on other sites, but inventory is over there too? Inventory should be near vault, cosmetics should be near wardrobe, account search is gone completely... again, just not a great navigational experience right now.

*I acknowledge that some amount of resistance to changes in navigation could be about being set in habits and not used to the new way, but I think right now kumos is objectively clunkier. ESPECIALLY with the reduced customization, but the main default site links make less sense and take more clicks too.

Chaotic scrolling There are too many moving sections on kumos, and it makes the whole site jump around too much. I do think the sidebar scrolling could be helpful in some situations, like on longer pages (ie forums and anything that displays all pets), but with that + the main content as its own scroll box + the fine print links as a reveal when you scroll all the way down it's just a lot to align and feels very messy.

Those are my main notes for now! I know kumos is new and under construction, and this is very much coming from a place of "guidelines along the way" and not "you messed it up." I really appreciate how actively Keith is seeking out feedback and trying to make the new site something users love. And I think moving to somewhere with fresh code that doesn't need to be shaped around what a 14 year old did 20 years ago is a great call. Thanks for all your care and attention!

It really just looks terrible on mobile.

image

Like... What is that top navigation? The little strip of picture is shrunk down onto the little dropdown sidebar and the navigation icons themselves are a mess. And because they're unlabeled you just have to guess which thing leads where. Content overlaps, as shown by the progress bars.

Also dark mode options are useless since half the text stays black and is unreadable as a result.

I would really love if I could toggle from the mobile to the desktop layout. Legacy Subeta doesn’t have a mobile layout and I prefer using the new site that way too. It’s just easier for me to navigate.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that spoiler tags don’t have differently colored headers like they do on legacy Subeta. I would love if they could, instead of everything being white and kind of blending together. Or any other sort of separation that makes them more noticeable.

I also don’t like the lefthand sidebar scrolling in the desktop layout. I prefer if it’d be like legacy Subeta and just be one long box instead of scrollable. On the mobile layout, it is fine the way it is.

Last thing: I believe widgets aren’t collapsible on Kumos. While this isn’t a dealbreaker, it would be nice as sometimes I do like to collapse the ones I’m not currently using and uncollapsing when I need them again without removing them from the sidebar.

When I have time hopefully this weekend, ill try to give more feedback on hos jumps looks and works on a cheap fire tablet.

Right now to sum it up, substance original puts a lot of information and navigation on the screen at once. Kumos feels like everything is zoomed in very little fits on the tablet screen at once, and even a short number of items or forum posts leads to a lot of scrolling.

Oh, and the avatar borders were showing up on top of the head bar image yesterday, on the news post comments.

Edit: apologies for typos, those are all user error :p

Thank you for this thread! I've been struggling to put my thoughts on the layout into coherent words beyond "I don't like it" so here are my big complaints I have been able to put words to (with the caveat that I'm sure some of this is because it's a work in progress).

I want the option to see my HA on the sidebar.

I wish there was more customization with the site themes. I've almost exclusively used the morostide theme since I unlocked it, and I cannot use it on the kumos site because I can't use dark mode type settings. The autumn theme works fine for me but I miss my morostide header.

The You and Username buttons at the top of the page feel redundant and also not intuitive. Why is the vault under You but my inventory under my username?

Regarding the inventory: I initially did not like the layout at all with everything being just in a list of items. I think I could probably get used to that with time (although there are no sorting options or a way to lock/unlock items so the things I have locked are just floating around in there and items don't stack). However, clicking on an item opens an entirely new page which is a bit frustrating (especially since that page at least currently does not have a way to move an item once you've clicked on it. You have to be in the inventory page to do so). The different sections of this page don't stay in the same spot - if an item has multiple uses, the wearable preview will move around the page, etc. Also, I have no desire to see a list of random saved HAs that use a specific item so I would love to be able to choose what options even show up on that page or not. Additionally, when you hover the "move to vault," "move to wardrobe" buttons in the inventory, the text that tells you what the button means cuts off.

The kumos site also loads super slowly for me (Firefox + windows 10).

I also think a lot of areas look too spread out? Like there's a lot of extra space around things and I'm not really sure how to elaborate on that. But the new composting feature for instance, I can see 3 items per row and if I were doing anything but smacking select all > compost selected items that would be a pain to sort through [edit] the compost page got adjusted while I was typing lol

The inventory layout is too, for lack of a better word, vertical for me. Right now there doesn't appear to be a way to have items show as stacks instead of individual, or any way to sort inventory by anything other than alphabet, or for locked items to appear separated from everything else. My biggest issue, though, is the way that each item is its own line: it makes it really hard to see, at a glance, what I've got in my inventory. All the information that's pulled out onto those lines (with the exception of the vault button) is something that is part of the item hover. Rather than having it all listed out on one page, I'd rather just be able to access item hovers from the item use page. That way I can see "Oh, I already have this item in my wardrobe/plushie collection/whatever; is userprice high enough that I want to sell or do I just want to frag it/toss it in the rift".

(ETA: this may also just be because inventory functionality isn't fully built out yet, but kumos doesn't seem to have an item use page like legacy does? clicking on an item takes you to, effectively, its directory page rather than allowing you to do inventory actions with it like feed/open/add to wardrobe)

For mobile, the navigation is my main complaint right now because of its wonky-ness it takes up a third of the viewing window for the site. Because that looks so terrible, it makes it all look terrible. When/if this gets corrected, I may have different feedback. But two problems stem from this:

1. Please don't change how things are navigated to. Where things are in the menus are a little hard to figure out since they're just icons with no text. Someone else mentioned the inventory on Kumos and I had no idea you could get to the inventory on Kumos. I had to search for it and found it somewhere I didn't expect: in the dropdown from my username? This is the same problem I have with Neopets new design. It used to be that you could click on your NP to go to your inventory, now it goes to the bank. The inventory is hidden away in a completely new area and I don't get the change. And then Subeta does the same.

2. Things are really huge and you have to scroll a lot. The navigation taking up a third of the page aside, it just feels really cramped on mobile. When I go to legacy subeta on my phone, yes everything is small due to being a desktop layout on mobile. But I can SEE everything. If I need to see something closer, I can zoom in. But the most important thing is that I can see the whole site at once. Maybe just letting us use desktop mode would fix that, like Jess said.

And I have some design concerns, looking at it on the desktop version...

1. I really hope that the user-coded areas aren't going away. I went to my profile on Kumos and I see that it says under construction but I am very concerned that it appears we'll lose the ability to have custom coded profiles? I don't know what all those "Favorite XYZ" widgets are, but I don't care about those things or displaying them on my profile.

Equally concerned about how pet profiles will be handled, and if we'll still have forum signatures.

I miss my bookmarks! Those little tabs that go down the right side of the page? I have 10 of those that quickly take me to places like the token shop, subeautique, donation corner, and various user-made guides. It was like my own personal navigation. I guess the new idea would be to put those in the notepad widget but that's going to put those things farther down the page than I would like.

I also assume custom CSS is dead in the water. I have miles of custom CSS that tailors the site to my liking, making the smallest QoL changes for me and what I personally need- not something I can or would ask you to add to the site just for me.

2. The color palettes for the site themes are not the best. Take the Morostide theme for example. I like that this seems to be a dark mode, turning the white pages black. Unfortunately, not everything about this theme says dark mode to me. The orange navigation feels extremely neon, some text remains a darker color with little contrast (you can see this on the compost page), and some elements remain a light color (you can see this by hovering on items in the compost page)... And the forum pages seems immune to the color scheme as well.

3. I have my "Last Seen" set to hidden. On Kumos, it very blatantly tells that I was last seen now. I don't agree with revealing this.

4. Will the dropdowns within dropdowns come back? I like hovering on the legacy site to quickly get to individual friends, pets, and my shops, rather than going to separate pages.

5. Hiding the sidebar is really weird, it's not really hidden, it's just bunched up with text spilling out.

6. I'm concerned about the events/notifications being mixed in with my sidebar widget stuff instead of being in its own tab like how it is on the legacy site, and how much room it may take up like that. Sometimes I have more than 100 notifications. I see that you can choose how many you want to display but... why? I'd like to see them all at once without it affecting the rest of my sidebar.

7. I can't even see my own avatar anywhere. I saw there was a button to display user avatar on the User Info in the sidebar and immediately toggled it only to be disappointed. I, and other people, don't spend hours creating avatars just to look at a headshot of it. Please put the full avatars. :(

8. On the Kumos forums, it has the wrong pet of mine leashed and I don't know why or how to fix it. Everyone else's looks correct comparing the two sites.

Overall, there's just something about Kumos that feels... sterile, with an offputting user interface/experience and lacks the character that the legacy site has. I know that this is easier for you now on the backend with the updated code and I'm happy for you. And I know that Kumos is a big WIP. I just can't put my finger on what it is or why it makes me feel this way, but I don't feel like I'm on the same pet site, or on a pet site at all. Hopefully it will grow on me as I know this is your passion project.

[edit] I'm also concerned my edits aren't showing up on the Kumos forums. Testing testing 1 2 3

I have the same issue with leashed pets. I don't have one leashed on the legacy site, I turned that off a few weeks ago, but on kumos I still do. I went to see if I needed to unleash separately on kumos, but the pets page is a legacy frame so there's no way to do it over there.

I agree about the sterility/vibe too. I'm assuming aesthetic details will come after the bones of the whole site have been rebuilt, but I really hope the general look and feel will be mimicked over there. It's hard to describe exactly what that means. I think a lot of it is in the overall scale/balance of the site, the tones of colours used in the themes, the little 1px borders on things, the binder tab look of the top nav links and bookmarks.. not to say every one of those things needs to be recreated exactly, but yeah the feel they carry is important.

What's weird for me is it picked a pet I haven't had leashed in about 9 years, so it's not like it's pulling from recently outdated info.

I think the Kumos site could use some more colours and some themes definitely need some more contrast.

Right now, I'm on the autumn theme. I would have loved to use the Morostide theme but since the forum posts have light grey text on white background, it's unusable. It kind of feels like you didn't test out the Morostide theme before you let us pick as an option. Also, the sidebar colour and the background (I guess?) are pretty much the same colour. Almost black and a little lighter than almost black. It just kind of bleeds together and it's hard to parse anything.

This is less of a problem on like, the default or autumn theme, where at least it's white, light grey, and the inventory box is a slightly darker grey, but there is still a lot grey. I see a lot of the pretty colours in the banner! Even the buttons in the header have a nice, pretty red in the background! The rest of the sight is shades of grey, black, and maybe a dash of blue. Where are the colours? Where is the contrast? Like, header text could be a different colour and it would at least add a little pizzazz. Making text bigger and bold isn't the only way to attract my attention.

And speaking of text, it's too big the inventory. Like, all the items names are cut off because that font is too big for those boxes. I would like both full use of pictures and full use of names to help me organize my stuff.

Overall, I think Kumos just feels a little... sanitized.

This is getting me to utilize Kumos more! Great idea to offer input as the site is shaped, hopefully will be helpful!

Sidebar I'd like to have the same options on the Kumos sidebar as the legacy site sidebar - my quests, my HA, my "current user info" (don't care that much about users online though) The sidebar is so wide, it seems to be wasting space. When it is collapsed it's too small to be helpful and the text runs off the boxes.

Inventory ATM the item names on the new site are cut off. I'd prefer to see the item name over rarity and user price!

General The site feels very "busy" and overstimulating, while at the same time having strange "gaps". For example, the inventory has a "overwhelming" amount of info. I'd much rather be able to see just the item and name and then use my hover for the additional things like user price and rarity. The use of soft colors to "box" the site page-to-page is so helpful to my brain. I hope Kumos uses this!

Forums Same concept as the "busy-ness" with the inventory. I'd like to be able to hide the recent activity box and recently answered (also not 100% sure what would fall into that header), forum groups list, and staff section. These being collapsible would be so, so nice.

News I actually really appreciate the "Check Out" and "Upcoming" boxes on the news page and hope they are present on Kumos! idk about anyone else but I use them often!

walks on stage, taps microphone to see if it works

Ahem: Clock.

drops the mic and walks off stage

Working dark theme. Or better contrast.

With my vision issues, dark themes just work better for me and let me read things easier. I feel like a broken record when it comes to dark themes.

where do we change the theme on kumos? places where we thought it would be was just leading us back down to the legacy site. we have the autumn one on legacy but kumos shows the (we assume) welcome to subeta green one

it's at the very bottom of the site, in the bottom box on the left hand side. I'm glad I'm not the only one who got confused about that.

thank you for the assist! we had to go onto desktop to find it, we didnt even think to look there and the mobile is so scrunchy. Deceptively hidden and in a quite weird area for it being a theme change!

Hard agree on there needing to be more contrast since everything is so grey and flat and as others have said, very very sterile. def going to be sticking to legacy as long as we can ahaha, its so cozy compared to kumos

let me just preface with the fact that i've worked in graphic/web/digital design for 10+ years so if i sound a lil nitpicky, that's probably why. obviously some things are subjective and not everything i think is automatically right or best (i have been wrong before i will confess) but that's where i'm coming from, in addition to having played subeta for more than half my life. so i am very invested in continuing to be a part of this site, but i fear the inevitable (albeit probably far-off) Full Switch to the new layout, namely that i will find it so uncomfortable and impractical that i end up spending a lot less time on subeta. especially as i get older and busier, consistent & convenient "playflow" and ease-of-use features (like the quests widget, bookmarks, the quickstock shortcut links, etc) are very important to me.

i heavily agree with pretty much everything that's been said so far. another complaint i have about the sidebar is the little X to remove a widget. that should not be accessible directly from the sidebar! already multiple times i have clicked the X on the Events widget thinking it would clear all my events at once, only for the whole widget to disappear.

i then struggled to re-add it, as the menu for doing so was non-functional. first because the Manage Sidebar Widgets menu claimed the events widget was still there, which it obviously was not. so i had to refresh the page and re-add the widget. then the arrows to move things up and down in the list wouldn't work, so i had to refresh the page again. then there was a long delay on the arrows, causing me to keep moving the wrong widgets, and i could move stuff up but not back down, so they got scrambled and i had to refresh the page again to remove and re-add everything in the right order.

all that said, i don't think events should even be in the main sidebar in the first place! it works best as a separate tab like it is now, so we can have a clean feed of JUST our events that never interferes with our other sidebar info.

other feedback:

sidebar

• does the subeta logo need to be down here? shouldn't it be up top on the header? maybe you could add like a semi-transparent soft glow/shadow behind it so it stays legible even over the header image? or give it a snazzy little shape to sit on à la seinfeld (sorry idk why that was the first logo that came to mind lol)... idk it just looks like a mistake that it's in the sidebar and not the header.
• the sP count should link to the sP vault and the CSC count should link to the cash shop. maybe the other info like status, active pet, buffs, and users online can also be re-added to this widget, or to other ones. would just be nice to also have those visible as an option.
• i also want the option to see my full HA (not just a headshot) in the sidebar! i made it and i like looking at it!
• i don't like the sidebar and the page content being separately scrollable. the nice thing about the way it works now is that as i use the site and scroll down pages, i also get to see all the content in my sidebar. with the new layout, i have to go out of my way to check both separately. i know this means pages with less content (like the tickets page) will have extra whitespace on the bottom as you keep scrolling to see the rest of your sidebar, but this only happens on such a small subset of infrequently-used pages and has really never bothered me.
• collapsible widgets, please! (yes, the widgets themselves, not the whole sidebar—which, as already mentioned by others, doesn't even collapse properly but rather just gets weirdly smushed and glitchy-looking.)
• also agree that the sidebar feels slightly too big, but i don't think it needs to be THAT much smaller (especially if you get rid of that excessive padding between the sidebar and the page content).

header

• having "in-universe" navigation (namely the INVENTORY LINK) under the "my username" bit all the way on the end makes NO SENSE. traditionally that type of segment is for macro options like viewing your own profile, settings, and logging out. nobody will think to look for regular navigation there; i straight up could NOT find my inventory and was horrified when i realized that's where the link was! it should probably just stay under the "personal" tab—which, btw, i am not onboard with renaming "you." why is the website talking to me in the second person? I'M the one looking at the menu; if anything it should say "me" or "my stuff"! but honestly "personal" still makes the most sense.
• would really like to see instant access to the quickstock page brought back.

main layout

• like i mentioned in my news comment, i HATE that the main content of the page is basically contained inside its own little box, with a bunch of empty gray space around the box. you've trapped it in jail and i get legitimate anxiety every time i'm forced to look at the new site because of this. padding is fine (though ideally less than is currently present—like, 20-30px is MORE than enough imo), but then don't contain the content in a visibly discrete box! let it look like it's taking up the whole main body of the page! because it should be!
• i'm sure this will be added at some point by why tf can't i edit my headshot on the cosmetics / borders / wardrobe / SOMETHING page?
• already mentioned but god the inventory layout still suuuuuucks sorry. again not helped by the claustrophobic page design. i'm assuming this is heavily in the prototype stage? misaligned / overflowing text and buttons, everything segregated into these awkwardly-sized and spaced "tiles"? like, the tiles are vertically-oriented (taller than they are wide) but the contents are split into COLUMNS instead of ROWS? forcing excessive text wrapping and dead space under the item image? straight-up opposite of how space should be used.

am i tripping or is this seriously how this is supposed to look rn

• will item hovers be coming back? that was another problem with the composting page, especially when looking through the massive list of compostable items and trying to figure out if i had any of them. with no "item hover > account search" option, am i really meant to go scouring for them one by one? when i'm about to compost something, i can't just pop up the item hover to see if it's super valuable and maybe i'd rather sell it instead?
• the recent activity & trending stuff takes up way too much space at the top of the forums. literally pushes the actual forum content below the fold of the page, so this really oughta be cut down by at least half. and/or just let us collapse/hide it altogether.

i know it's a lot and there is a lot to do and everything is kind of being chunked together just to get all the components in place before we can worry too much about making everything perfect and beautiful, but i do think it's good to establish this feedback now so it doesn't end up going by the wayside like "oh i'm sure everyone else knows that's an issue so it will obviously get fixed later" and then it never does because no one can read my mind and maybe i would have been the only person to articulate a certain point if i bothered to open my mouth so. you know. closed mouths don't get fed or whatever they say.