Small Site Header Update

Hey duders,

First I want to officially say hello to you all! Brandon here, for those of you that may not know who I am. I have been the one working along side Alexis for the past year and a half and have mainly been responsible for GameSpot's site design. Now that cool guy Alexis decided to leave us, I will be the one taking over design over here at CBS. If you guys notice any display bugs, you can go ahead and ping me directly @brandon

I also wanted to give you all an update on a code push we just had, some of you may or may not have noticed a slight update to the sites header. Probably also wondering where your theme switcher disappeared too (if you're logged in). We've made some changes to clean up that area of the site and you'll now find it underneath your avatar dropdown, along with most of your commonly used navigation elements. Other than that, should be nothing too notable but wanted to give you duders a heads up.

Feel free to hit me up regarding any problems you may be experiencing.

Brandon

I got a notification and instead of it saying I have 1 it said 99+.

This doesn't have to do with the header, but with the new little tweaks everything on the coming up table has a premium tag to it.

@crono: The number will show blank if you have no new messages.

@corevi: You may have 99+ unread notifications. Could you check? if not then something else is up

@monkeyman04: Thats new too, not everything will be premium in that pod. Looks weird right now because everything at the moment coming up will be premium.

@brandon: I definitely do not have 99+ unread notifications.

@brandon: Even the new quick look? When did they start becoming premium?

@brandon: There is no longer a counter for new notifications?

I used it all the time to see at a glance if anyone replied to any of my comments directly or followed posters made any blogs. Nor do past notifications that have been read grey out. A significant bit of functionality I used on the site is gone? Kind of upset right now tbh.

Edit: Ok i see it was answered above while i was typing this up. nvm

The header changes look sharp. This is nitpicky, but it's a bit too easy to accidentally dismiss the messages/notifications popovers when mousing down from the icons. This is consistent with the old header too, so it's nothing new.

I did notice a small CSS issue on the profile page:

This was in Safari 8.0 on Yosemite.

@monkeyman04: The logic is busted, we just found the bug. It's not premium.

Thanks Brandon!

Not a fan of the spacing on the envelope/flag part of the header, otherwise it seems good to me. I especially like the yellow premium icons on videos.

like the changes and the even more clear sign of premium stuff

@hassun said:

Not a fan of the spacing on the envelope/flag part of the header, otherwise it seems good to me. I like the yellow premium icons on videos.

Feel the same way about the spacing between the two. I think it should be just a bit wider apart from each other, but other than that, the new design looks slick!

@butano said:

@hassun said:

Not a fan of the spacing on the envelope/flag part of the header, otherwise it seems good to me. I like the yellow premium icons on videos.

Feel the same way about the spacing between the two. I think it should be just a bit wider apart from each other, but other than that, the new design looks slick!

I didn't feel the notification and mail icons needed to be adjusted at all. Don't like the new layout and size difference. The yellow premium icons are okay though. It's hard to find a suitable color that goes well with black, white and red.

I'm noticing a weird issue with latest Firefox beta on win7 x64 the Giant Bomb logo is gone

Hello, Brandon! I like what I've seen of the new layout so far, though I haven't seen any different permutations of my mail/notifications yet.

After this update I started having a problem getting any drop down menus to show up in chrome. I tried restarting chrome and clearing my browsing data with no luck. It worked fine in IE but not chrome. Anyone else having this issue?

@pimblycharles said:

@butano said:

@hassun said:

Not a fan of the spacing on the envelope/flag part of the header, otherwise it seems good to me. I like the yellow premium icons on videos.

Feel the same way about the spacing between the two. I think it should be just a bit wider apart from each other, but other than that, the new design looks slick!

I didn't feel the notification and mail icons needed to be adjusted at all. Don't like the new layout and size difference. The yellow premium icons are okay though. It's hard to find a suitable color that goes well with black, white and red.

Yeah, I prefered the way it was before too.

Hey, Brandon, just wanted to chime in and say really like the new signage on items, first thing that caught my eye was the yellow subscriber podcast mark on Alt-F1.

I took me a confused moment to find the change colour scheme button though. Aside from that I'm liking it, thanks.

I had the same issue, although mine was PMs. I checked the inbox nothing showed up as new and it went away

What is your Chrome version and OS?

@puppies4life: Chrome Version: 38.0.2125.111 m OS: Win 8.1

@corevi: I remember after the last site redisign a lot of people complained the header saying they had unread messages when they didn't. Turned out that the very first messages they had were now marked as unread, and since they were only looking at the new messages they weren't seeing them. Have you tried checking every single notification to see if old ones are showing up as unread?

A good example where the spacing becomes a problem. The flag gets nearly completely obscured.

EDIT: I guess it doesn't matter as much since the 99+ belongs to the flag part but the spacing still doesn't really seem optimal.

@mosespippy: I have. When I got the notification that you mentioned me it showed up as 99+ then when I clicked it it went back down to 0.

@hassun: we'll look into it. you should still get the dropdown, do you not?

Yeah this is screwy, sorry guys, fix coming.

Just noticed the black/white theme option is gone now too. Was that moved somewhere else?

EDIT: Found it in the drop down under the avatar.

You have to hover over your picture in the top right and it will open a drop down menu where the theme selector is.

@brandon: It seems that I just wasn't able to hover over the flag. They work when there is nothing covering it I just didn't aim at the right spot I suppose.

Looks good! A bit strange to see PMs and Notifications switched around, but it's no biggie.

@hassun: thanks, that's good to know.

@puppies4life: I know you're already aware, but just thought I'd let you know I also now have the 99+ notifications bug.

@brandon: Just some feedback. The cleanup of the header seems incompatible with the fact that now the text within the dropdown box is now smaller. Seems antithetical to making the buttons themselves bigger, no? It's far less readable and useful. Cutting the number of notifications in half and increasing the pt size of the text to fill the same size would be much better.

@jeust said:

@pimblycharles said:

@butano said:

@hassun said:

Not a fan of the spacing on the envelope/flag part of the header, otherwise it seems good to me. I like the yellow premium icons on videos.

Feel the same way about the spacing between the two. I think it should be just a bit wider apart from each other, but other than that, the new design looks slick!

I didn't feel the notification and mail icons needed to be adjusted at all. Don't like the new layout and size difference. The yellow premium icons are okay though. It's hard to find a suitable color that goes well with black, white and red.

Yeah, I prefered the way it was before too.

Important stuff.

I think this looks super good. Using latest versions of Chrome and OSX.

@blue_cube: Yeah it's been like that for a week.

I have never been popular enough to have 99+ unread notifications.

The notification icons in the drop down menu are huge. Ridiculously huge.

Wait, I just checked, and it's fixed.... never mind.

Hey @brandon, everything's working fine over here. Appreciate the work you do.

Thanks for the heads up, you shouldn't be seeing the 99+ icon anymore (unless you have a ton of notifications of course).

@puppies4life: @brandon: Drop down menus are a no-no for me. Chrome 38.0.2125.111 m Win 7 SP1

@puppies4life: Seems to be good now!

@Brandon: It's somewhat jacked in IE9 (which I'm stuck with at work).

The general layout issue isn't the big problem though. The real issue is that the menu hovers activate if the cursor is anywhere within the area where the menu would appear.

This means that if I try to watch any of the site's videos, I can't click play as the forum menu activates and obscures it.

I can work around that by resizing into the mobile view first, but wondered if this was fixable.

EDIT: Playing with it some more, the forum menu takes focus when I'm trying to select any of the profile dropdown - meaning, I can't switch styles or log out.

I'm old and fear change... but I can probably get used to this.

Not a fan of the avatar pic or whatever it is called being squished down to fit the size of the envelope and flag. Makes mine look weird, minor gripe though.

@brandon: As a side question, are there any future plans for overhauling the mobile version of the site? I know that it's meant to scale from a full browser version but maybe there are some plans to get the forums working a bit better with quotes and better replies etc?

Is there any chance of us finally getting the return of the login behaviour that keeps us on the page we were viewing rather than kicking us back to the front page?