New Feature: Support chat and a new 'Clean' theme for experienced members

You have likely noticed the new support chat popup asking if you have any questions. We added this to give new members a quick and easy way to ask us questions when problem arise, or anyone for that matter!

We also realize that we have implemented a lot of new features lately that could be considered ‘clutter’ to experienced members. So to help with that, we have also added two new themes ‘Dark - Clean’ and ‘Light - Clean’. You can access these in the hamburger menu and these themes will remove many of the features that experienced members don’t need to see, this includes:

  • Banners above images giving explanations about critiques
  • Badges
  • The intro banner
  • Category banners
  • Support chat
  • Donate button
  • Instagram icon in header
  • Dark/Light theme selector in header (you can still switch between dark and light clean themes in the hamburger menu)
  • Scroll to top button (you can click on the topic title to go back to top instead)
  • A view count will come back on posts

These new themes really clean up the interface but should only be used by experienced members. Let me know if you have any suggestions to improve this.

1 Like

David,

Thanks again for your continued efforts in modernizing and making NPN a great place to hang out.

I was just going to post and ask how to turn off the little blue “ask a question”. It’s fairly intrusive and distracting on the phone, much less so on the home monitor.

The only other feedback on the “ask a question” feature is the color. At least in the dark theme, the blue just seems out of place with the color scheme. Granted, it’s easily seen, which is the point… but just seems out of sync. Maybe a camo-green, or even the site yellow/orange, a bit more complimentary to current theme.

But in the end though, thank you for the new “clean” theme. that answers/resolves any of my concerns above, so excellent! A great solution.

Thanks, David, for providing the option to go `Clean’. People have different tastes in website design, and this choice means we can choose what we are most comfortable with. Thanks also for replacing the views in the main galleries and the portfolios - it is always interesting to see what people are looking at and what they are not so inspired by.

1 Like

Thanks Lon, lately I’ve been waking up with new ideas to make NPN even better every day! I’m actually excited that I have more time to devote to it now.

I struggled with the color, the problem was that it has to work with the light theme as well with the same color, so yellow didn’t work. I just switched it over to the old school NPN green, which I think looks pretty nice. It sticks out enough to notice it, but not so much that it’s horribly out of place.

Hi David. thanks for these changes. I did run into one issue. I selected the Dark-Clean theme and I got a really weird screen:

This was actually the second screen after selecting the Community tab, but he home page was very similar. I managed to figure out that it had logged me out in the process and when I logged back in everything was fine, but it was a bit disconcerting. I’m running the latest Firefox (at least it updated itself this morning) on Windows 10.

That’s strange, I can’t replicate it and nobody else seems to be having a problem, so we’ll chock it up to a fluke.

Funny how electrons decide to do something different now and then.

Dennis, I think it is common to see issues like that when software changes have been rolled out here. A refresh of the browser almost always corrects issues. It may be due to caching of pages that the browser does. My reasoning is that when you upgrade an application you replace the entire thing but when you do so with a web app you’re changing only the back end software.

I like it David. Seems like the new features gives everyone lot of customizing options. Thanks for doing this.