Yours,
Hyrum Graff
edit: 3:19am and I'm too tired to read any more. I promise I will read every one of your comments, and reply to most of them, though!
Hello Rito staff member, as a web developer of 7+ years who runs my own business I believe I can help you with some free design consulting. So here is my professional as well as personal feedback, I will separate the two:
Professional Feedback:
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Your page loads, then each post loads through javascript. This is a very poor design decision for multiple reasons.
1a) It makes caching systems difficult. Instead of being able to cache an entire page, and deal with one request for that page and the images/css/javascript on that page, you have to make caches for every ajax call or simply leave them uncached.
1b) This increases load on the server considerably, making your site scale worse, which for a high traffic site like yours is a bad direction to take.
1c) It confuses the user who loads the page and sees empty comments that suddenly appear.
1d) It is slow to load the thing people most come to see, the post content itself. It should be reversed, if anything, people want the content not later, but now.
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Aesthetically, as some form of art or medal or cool graphic, the boards look freakin sweet! But unfortunately for you, it's not a cool graphic or medal or strictly art, it is a web page and as such usability, readability and most of all functionality take precedence to looking great. Here's where you go wrong on that:
2a) Dark backgrounds with light text are scientifically proven to be worse, your reading rate goes down, your conversion rate in ecommerce goes down, your share rate goes down and thus your overall popularity plummets too. A poll here: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/08/the-dos-and-donts-of-dark-web-design/ says that 47% say the main cause of concern is readability. And it's true. With all the bad things about dark backgrounds with light text, you'd be best to stay entirely away from it at all. You can have dark elements, dark backgrounds, etc. But where there is text there should be light backgrounds with dark text, and the more they contrast the better. That said if you are entirely set on having a dark background with light text, that article I linked has some good pointers you could follow. For one you could have more whitespace for each character and make the contrast greater between the gold text and dark background. But as a professional if you were my client I'd highly recommend you shelf the current design as an alternative theme for those who enjoy it and rework it so that there is at least where there is text, a light background with dark text. Even if that's the only change you make it'd be well worth it.
Personal Feedback:
I don't think I'm alone in saying that the "best" view is not the best at all. I get that as a company riot wants to be able to go through posts and read only what is "best" to save time as you have a lot of busy people. And rather than hiring internal people to read it all and show only the best community responses you'd like that to be determined by the community. But this poses several problems to me as a user and it is significant to me, tho maybe not everyone. I don't like the best view, and even having chronological view... "best" is the default. Meaning only me and a few others will see my post in a long thread and even if it is a good comment/post, it likely will never be upvoted, let alone read at all. Which makes me either have to wait to be one of the first to post in a thread or just be discouraged from posting altogether, which isn't good for riot or me either, to be discouraging posting. Boards should be warm and welcoming and even a bit hectic, not hostile and a competition upon which your every post is judged and sorted by mob rule. Mob rule isn't very effective governing in real world scenarios. And this is much more mob rule than democracy.
