New UI Issues

Another first-time poster here adding my voice to the complaints about the recent UI update and why I think it's bad.

I never really noticed the message dividers too much before, but now that they're gone I'm missing them a lot. They significantly improved the readability of chat- in comparison, the messages look more jumbled together now without them.

The message highlight when mousing over messages is rather distracting and annoying, but it's not as big of an issue.

A second somewhat minor quibble is the change to the red "New!" bar- it seems much more eye-catching and obtrusive than previously.

My biggest complaint along with the lack of message dividers, however, is the new emoji bar. It's by far the worst part of the update. The highlight as I move my mouse over messages is somewhat distracting, and the "New!" bar shares a similar problem, but even those pale in comparison to the emoji bar, a big burst of color on the opposite side of the screen from where all the content tends to be and where I want to be looking. If I want to add an emoji to a post, there was an emoji button I could press that would do the trick. In addition, the emoji bar only holds three emojis- most of the time when I'm reacting with an emoji to a post, I'm still going to have to click the button to bring up the full menu anyway, so the emoji bar doesn't even add any convenience, just distracts from the chat itself (and even more annoyingly, hovers over and blocks messages that are long enough to reach the right edge of the window.)

Ending on a somewhat lighter note, however, there is one part of this update that I liked: the timestamps that show when you hover over posts that don't already have their own timestamps. This is a very nice feature that I had been hoping for for some time!