Fwurg

[Mercury]

Currently there's a little arrow to click on the side of the thread page which opens a menu to select a different colour, while clicking the star itself selects or deselects it.

I would propose instead that clicking opens the menu and that the menu contains a blank star icon to unselect the thread. This makes switching colours easier and would be more intuitive (for me at least). Earlier, you'd not change colours very often, but with the new meanings for stars, changing colours is a logical and sensible action.

As a separate and independent addition, having the login block allow you to enter your username and password directly, instead of taking you to the login page (which requires the page be loaded, and which doesn't always bring you back to where you started) might be beneficial as well.

[Brend]

Currently there's a little arrow to click on the side of the thread page which opens a menu to select a different colour, while clicking the star itself selects or deselects it.

I would propose instead that clicking opens the menu and that the menu contains a blank star icon to unselect the thread. This makes switching colours easier and would be more intuitive (for me at least). Earlier, you'd not change colours very often, but with the new meanings for stars, changing colours is a logical and sensible action.

Done and done! (I've also changed the order of stars around a bit to better match their semantics)

People might have to refresh their cache for the arrowless version to show up.

As a separate and independent addition, having the login block allow you to enter your username and password directly, instead of taking you to the login page (which requires the page be loaded, and which doesn't always bring you back to where you started) might be beneficial as well.

I agree. On both issues. The thing is that this way of logging in is really deeply embedded in how phpbb3 works. I'm sure that there is a hack around it somehow -- but none of our current pages are built with the idea in mind that you can actually change user while the page is loaded.

Note that posting also brings you to an utterly useless 'in between' page before going to the actual post. That is also a symptom of the way phpbb3 treats user interaction. This method is so deeply embedded into phpbb3's behaviour that is central to all of phpbb3's user interactions... I'm not touching that one with a 10 ft. pole.

My, totally not safe, solution to the problem is: tick the 'remain logged in' box when logging in with your master account. That way you won't have to log in all the time. (Only do that on machines that you trust!)

[Brend]

On an unrelated note, I got tired of waiting for the starts to load every time I opened the followed page. So I used magic to make them load almost instantly!

Hopefully this improves the user-friendly-ness of the followed page a lot!