Sorry!  Didn't notice the flags below the WW weekly software.

I had created a thread about this, but it got locked for some reason (?). ioi, if there's something wrong with the following, please let me know. I love the new layout, just trying to share some info that I thought might be helpful. Keep up the great work!

Disclaimer: I ALWAYS surf this site with ALL ads turned on, and everybody else should do the same. This is how ioi makes his money and keeps VGChartz running!

I ran a few tests by disabling certain flash elements to see the effects on processor usage. This was done on a somewhat old machine, AMD Athelon XP 2600, 1GB RAM, Windows 7, FireFox 3. Processor usage is 20-40% less using IE7/8 on any machine I've tested with vs FireFox.

For comparison, IGN uses about 5-10% idling with spikes to 30-70% when switching between news stories on their flash news ticker, animation, whatever on the same computer.

Step 1: All elements turned on

What I found was interesting, the processor usage was pegged at 100% when the front page is idling and scrolled all the way to the top. As soon as I scroll below the top flash elements, the processor usage drops to 5-10%. This leads me to believe that the flash elements at the top are to blame for the incredibly high CPU usage.

Step 2: Ads turned off only, Recent news on, Charts on-

Processor usage was between 94%-100% with the ads turned off. No significant difference.

Step 3: Ads off, Recent News flash animation off-

Processor usage dropped to 80%-90% while idling. Notable difference.

Step 4: Ads off, Recent News on, Charts off-

Processor usage dropped to 50%-60% while idling. I was very surprised, the charts flash object seems to take a ton of processing power, even more than the recent news animation.

Step 5: Ads on, Recent News off, Charts off-

Processor runs at 5%-10% while idling.

Suggestions (my opinion only):

In my opinion, performance is more important than eye candy. I would suggest turning down the effects on the news ticker to make it more like a simple slide show, with maybe a simple fade effect between news stories. This gives you the same function without killing everybody's processor (hopefully). Also, the charts take up a high level of CPU usage for their function in my opinion. The animation should be simplified as much as possible on this one. Another option would be to have the option to choose a 'Simple Chart' instead of the full blown chart. Those two items are where I think you should focus your attention for performance improvement. It may be a good idea to test this on a somewhat slower system as well (older P4, 2.5GHz, Athelon XP, etc), as it's important that any website run reasonably well on processors such as these.

These are just my opinions! I love the site layout, just think it could use a few tweaks performance wise.

Glitch report:

The news item "Nintendo sells 50 million .." is not displaying for me. Get the headline but not the article, and the page is shifted a couple of inches to the right.

Using IE7.

The only issue I have is a spelling one. If you hover the mouse over the "Chart Tools" tab up top, I notice that the Hardware Table is spelled "Harware Table". You forgot the d! D:

I have another issue with the forums. For some reason, the "last post" column is displayed much wider than normal whereas the column with the thread titles is much narrower than normal, causing the titles to take up multiple rows.

Can someone fix it please? I had this problem when using IE.

Sometimes when I highlight the upper menu or quick links, the sub-menu hides behind the banner ad

I know I'm probably beating a dead horse here, because site administration has already made it clear that if an issue affects 10% or less of the site's users it's acceptable. (I'm not saying they don't care, but the attitude seems to be "we're moving forward, if there are some casualties it's unfortunate, but we're going ahead.")

But, the current color scheme of dark colors on a dark background is nearly impossible for color blind users to read. The red on black is especially bad, but even the orange on black is difficult for me (red/green color blind).

Now, CB affects some 7-10% of men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Prevalence

And while gaming demographics are reaching an equilibrium of male to female ratio, the majority are still male. (I'd also wager that the userbase of this site is even moreso predominantly male.)

So, even if we take the low end of the %, halve it, then round it up a bit to compensate for the male/female ratio, I'd say we're looking at at least 4% of users who are colorblind.

Now, I may be in a further minority because my eyes are very bad, but a change in website design that renders the site unreadable to even 1 or 2% of the userbase is not only poor web design (this is not the 90's, webmasters should know a little bit more, and care a little bit more, about ergonomics), but also representative of a very cavalier and condescending attitude when the site adminstrators basically say "so what? These are the changes and we're sticking to them."

I understand the idea of color coding headlines to make it easier to tell what forum/system they belong to, but is it really that hard to figure out? Couldn't there be other ways to present this information? Could you maybe, set up a customizable front page where hot forum and news topics could be sorted by system, or presented in different "boxes" depending on what the individual user wanted to see? (Maybe I want to see hot topics in three categories: Wii, 360, and PS3, but don't want to bother with handheld articles?)

One more note: I'm a horrible speller, and I can no longer see the underlined highlight on misspelled words in firefox (dark highlight on a dark background), a new annoyance of the new site that I just now discovered.

Bug update: It looks like all of the SlimFast ads stay in front of the drop down menu, making navigation difficult. Not sure if this can be fixed by you or if it's a problem with the ads themselves.

Bug report: I copied an article to a thread I was making, and the article ended with some text which was italic, and I couldn't change what I wanted to write after the article to non-italic. I had to copy paste in something that wasn't italic, to continue writing like normal.

I'm using FF3.5 Beta 4 on Windows 7 RC

try using the cleanup messy code button (the broom). I've seen similar things happen, and it is always because of copy/pasting some hidden html type code the text reply doesn't like.

The other way I've gotten rid of improper formating is to hit ctrl+a, then add the formatting (so italics in this case) then remove it from everything. Only downside is that it is now gone from all text.

obviously this doesn't fix the problem, but it may not be easily fixable either.