i know it's all still very much a work in progress, and i understand that functionality takes priority over aesthetics right now. but kumos has been in development for some time now, and the more we talk about permanently transitioning major features from the current site to kumos—with the end goal of course being kumos fully replacing the current site—the more anxious i get.

first, i and other users have explained that kumos is too heavily reliant on code that is not compatible with slightly-older browsers/OSes. my browser (firefox 115.23.1esr) renders all other sites without issue, but none of the styling on kumos works for me. from a usability & accessibility perspective, the correct move would be to add fallback styling with standard CSS so things that are supposed to have a background have a background, things that should be a color can be a color, etc.

right now i have to manually override everything with my own custom theme, and every time something on kumos gets changed, i have to go hunting through the source code to figure out what's overriding my settings so i can fix it. not all users know how to do this, so it's not fair to expect them to take it upon themselves just to make the site visible & usable.

additionally, many people have repeatedly expressed frustration with the excessive padding and oversized page elements making inefficient use of the page. the average page on the legacy site fits about 2-4 times as much content as a kumos page, simply because kumos insisits on having everything inside a card inside another card inside another card, and also the entire top ~600 pixels (which is two-thirds of my screen height) has to be taken up by a lengthy explanation for whatever is on the page, and page heading / micro-navigation elements are inexplicably stacked when they could easily be inline. pretty much every single page layout currently on kumos needs to be deeply rethought and redesigned from the ground up.

and you know what, honestly i would volunteer my time for providing in-depth design input page by page (i worked as a digital designer specializing in usability principles and information architecture for 10+ years)—but i also recognize that leaving this kind of labor to user volunteers may not be the business model subeta wants to employ.

i've included screenshots (taken with my custom theme disabled) to demonstrate some of the issues i'm talking about:

screenshots

first, as you can see on the home page, nothing has any color, not even headers. i did some digging and it appears to be "webkit text fill color" set to transparent (not sure what the intention was there). additionally you can see the excessive padding and the problematic layering on the navigation dropdowns.

main shops page. not really sure why this entire novel feels like it belongs front and center here; surely there's a more sensible place & way to convey this information. as you can see the shops themselves have been pushed fully off the page. makes no sense.

the individual shops also display this same strange use of space, pushing the actual shop content fully off the bottom of the page in favor of a lengthy (albeit currently invisible) paragraph about the shop, a wide gap for padding, an oversized sorting menu (with the apply button on its own line when, as mentioned before, it could be inline) with, again, more padding, and then the items themselves inside their discrete (and quite big imo) cards.

inventory. even ignoring the invisible text, surely you can see the issue with putting every individual item in an unnecessarily large card. 4 items per row compared to the legacy site's... what, 9-10 per row? and when i fixed the text color, i can see there's not even any additional information in those cards justifying the size, just a lot of empty space. at least fill that space with extra item info like rarity, type, whatever.

reiterating the problem with lack of fallback styling and buggy item hovers. namely, they have no background, and on the outfit pages specifically clicking an item further down the list also always opens the hover for the first item on the list, causing them to overlap and be even more unreadable than before.

again the entire top two-thirds of the page is cluttered up with an excess of information that should really be shunted inconspicuously off to the side somewhere. meanwhile the quests go off the side of the page and i can't even scroll horizontally to see the rest of them.

same horizontal overflow with no scroll problem on the individual quest page, with everything inside this box that's been pushed way over to the right for some reason, contributing to the claustrophobic effect that plagues kumos. and again the important part (the option to start the quest) is off the page. also, even when i fix the overall colors with my custom theme, the reputation progress bar fails to actually show any progress and always appears empty due to the use of tailwind gradient styling with no fallback.

so about a third of the forums page is taken up by this big box telling you that... you're on the forums... and then the next third is taken up by this broken marquee. the next section is actually the "trending topics" box which i guess i had collapsed because it takes up another ~1200 pixels of vertical real estate for what i consider little value. and only then can i see what i came here for: the actual forum categories and topics. also, the headers for forum categories that no longer have any forums in them post-forum-squish (like commerce and social scene) are still present (both on kumos and the legacy site).

this one was so absurd it actually made me laugh. i've been having a lot of fun with the new avatar contest feature, but this is what it looks like when you try to view the entries. again everything has to be prefaced with a million miles of padding, a button all on its own when it could have been inline with some other content, an explanation of what page you're on even though i already know what page i'm on because i intentionally navigated to it on purpose using my eyes and fingers... and only then do you get to see your own entry just barely peeking above the fold, to say nothing of anyone else's entries.

obviously that's not comprehensive, just a small sampling of what i've noticed in my hesitant forays into using kumos. all this is to say, i love subeta and have been an active user for more than half my life. i know the current site has a lot of issues and is outdated in very fundamental ways, so big change is inevitable, and i'm okay with that. and i appreciate all the hard work singlehandedly undertaken on building kumos and its features, and trying to rethink various aspects of the site.

but the fact that the issues with kumos have been consistent, unchanged, and continuously perpetuated or even exacerbated as new pages and features are added makes me worry that, by the time we're expected to actually be using these features full-time—let alone fully replace the old site with the new one—it will still be so uncomfortable and broken that i just won't be able to bring myself to use it as much as before.

thanks for this—genuinely appreciate the time + clarity here. i want to be super clear up front: i do take feedback seriously. sometimes i act on it right away, sometimes i wait, and sometimes i disagree. not acting on something doesn’t mean it wasn’t heard.

re: browser compatibility: afaict, kumos uses tech supported by 97%+ of users visiting subeta rn. that said, i will dig into 115.23.1esr and see if i can shim some fallbacks or at least make the stylesheet override process less miserable. it’s not about ignoring older setups—it’s just that i’m trying to balance reach with sanity.

on the styling stuff: yeah, some of this is just a fundamental difference in taste. i like whitespace, i like cards, i like visual breathing room. but i’ve been reducing padding where it feels right, collapsing text where i can (see: shops), and continuing to iterate. i’m always adjusting based on feedback. just bc i don’t go all the way toward your preferences doesn’t mean i’m not trying to meet folks halfway.

custom css + shared themes exist because i know i won’t get every style choice right for every user. if you’re already making overrides, i’m happy to coordinate there and see if we can stabilize a baseline that’s less breaky going forward.

tl;dr: keep the feedback coming, i really do use it, even when the changes aren’t 1:1.

i'll clarify i have no problem with padding / whitespace / breathing room in general—i just think it needs to be applied more evenly and proportionately. for example some pages have more padding / margins on the left than the top or right, or vice versa, or there's too much extraneous stuff at the top of the page which in turn has all its own margins and padding, pushing the actual page content below the fold, which is just not as much of an issue on the legacy site. so this ends up creating a very smushed and lopsided effect that makes the site uncomfortable to look at and use.

Tagging on to the end of this wonderful thread - I also wanted to reiterate the sentiment of “I just won’t be able to use it [subeta] as much as before.” I’ve mentioned similar before and recently seen others saying the same.

Kumos is SO different from the legacy site, we are getting fundamental changes for pretty much everything. I’m not sure how many users actually want this. I know it may be necessary, but the legacy site is what has kept us here for 15 years+. It all feels a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. New subeta is unrecognisable, even if the aforementioned design elements are fixed.

I don’t mean to be a drag, or minimise all the effort going in to the new site, but I am sad for legacy subeta and indeed sad for the legacy I have with the site.

imo it's not even that it's different, it's that it's very... messy and haphazard. it all comes across super unfinished and uncomfortable to look at & use, and yet we're being told shops & quests are imminently on their way to being permanently transitioned to their kumos versions. like... girl sorry but this is not a real website yet, you can't be cutting limbs off of subeta and replacing them with like some sticks you taped together 😖

I agree. Plus out of all the things I’ve thought ‘hey, it’d be great if these were changed’ - quests and shops ain’t one of them. I’ve really tried with both, completing 100+ of the new quests per NPC and trying to restock over there, but I just can’t get into it. I’ve mentioned before that the concepts behind are good, but in practice I am already mourning the legacy site and it hasn’t even gone anywhere yet.

For me, it being so different (and broken) means that every time I go over to Kumos, I don’t want to stay.

Looking at the Gut Mugged shop today, the stock is a lot easier to find (8 items across, no pagination). However, when I sort it by price then buy something, the sorting reverts back to the default alphabetical (any chance that could remember the sorting we've chosen, please?)

Not too sure why on the main shops screen the Spells Galore box and the other shop boxes on the right-hand side keep moving up & down (that's really annoying!!)

^ the code in the welcome box isn't displaying properly either (not a big thing, but thought I would point it out, as it makes the page more confusing for anyone who doesn't know coding themselves!)

Chrome 137.0.7151.56 (Official Build) (64-bit)