I find it harder to read now that the visual indicator is gone. That's my opinion, based on my observations of comparing it against the previous and current situation, and other pages. And in my situation, as many others (and regardless of quality of eye sight) I can experience and imagine, that being a less of an improvement over the previous situation which had that addressed.
If the devs decided to drop the star, that's fine. I can always manually add it back via a template. However my argument is: If people don't want the star, they can do that too, manually remove it via a template edit.
Small font is fine, but differentiate between content_type in the row, such as change of color of the timestamp vs the forum name. But it seems to be even lighter now, I have asked around and others said they find it hard to read too.
User Experience meeting User Interface is always difficult. But combining elements together, or increasing white space too much, results in situations that in the long run (I like to believe that at least) to be either ignored by the end-user because they can't comfortably see it anyway, or an annoyance.
In this case, lack of visual indicators.
) for this purpose, and consider using it for a new purpose-- to designate "hot" threads (threads with lots of recent activity), like vB3 did with the normally blue thread icon to an orangish color. (
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/offtopic
