But now more visually clean software is being developed, and that's a big challenge. At least for visual-kinesthetic people like me, cluttered space feels "heavy".
Look at this:
Aren't some unnecessary info elements there?
- Two buttons "New Topic". (Two is meaningless.)
- Two lines "Mark all topics as read * 1 topic * Page 1 of 1". (Two is meaningless.)
- "Mark all topics as read" is meaningless at all because they all are already read / marked as read.
- BTW, not on this picture, but in general the block of Statistic (how many users & topics) is not interesting for many (probably most) of users.
...
Which one is better?
People feel intuitively that they want less clutter but more functionality.
I like phpBB, and I think that's important for it to flourish.
And it can be done very easily:
1. Check in JS if there are double buttons/lines seen on screen. It's easy - just a couple of lines of code.
2. Check in PHP (I think) whether all the topics are already marked as read - then remove that line at all. It's a couple of lines of code, perhaps.
3. Make "Statistics" go into option "Show new users AND STATISTICS" or not. It's couple of lines of PHP & HTML.
And we have modernized cleaner look for now and future: