What do you think about XF's decision to hide user info in postbit?

[RickM]

Whilst I do miss seeing all that info (its fun to see how active a person is or where they are from, and how reputable they are as a member) I can see that hiding it is going to be the way forward.

I just like old school design I guess

 

[Forsaken]

I think its great. I run a competitive video game community, and I've seen many others. Something that is pretty universal in tournament communities is that "old" members always look down on "new" members. They use the information in the postbit; registration date, post count, rank, etc as ammunition against new members. By getting rid of the extra information, this would limit that.

Of course, I will still be adding fields for PSN and XBL usernames, with popout gamercards.

I had the same issue with my Battle.net site; Members would think post count and join date meant something, and would harass others that didn't have as large an e-peen.

 

[Jason]

Thank you for your thoughts on this Kier.

Please keep in mind that polls created here will have a huge bias because most are admins of forums. You really need to ask average users which they prefer and find easier to use.

One thing I noticed as a problem with showing details below the avatar is that search engines index this information. Ideally it would be best if that information would not be indexed along with the post data. I'm not sure what the best way would be to show the information, yet prevent search engines from indexing it.

This reminds me of a conversation I had about XenForo with a co-worker the day we discovered XenForo. We were discussing UI designs amongst forums. Our first impression of most forums we visited was that they were designed from an admin's perspective (i.e., information overload, a lot of unnecessary "tools", etc.). On the other hand, I remember when we both discovered XenForo. For me, it was refreshing. I remember stating something along the lines of "finally, a UI designed from the user's perspective."

If I really wanted to see that information (which, normally, I don't), all I need do is click on the user's avatar to see their hover card.

 

[Kim]

"finally, a UI designed from the user's perspective."

I couldn't agree more Jason, the UX here is unsurpassed in forum software. That alone is going to win xenforo a lot of fans.

Other forum software might offer more currently, and other forum software might be a better solution *right now* for a lot of Admins... but I tells you, nothing beats this software from a pure User eXperience viewpoint.