I've opened MATLAB Answers this morning and found the new design.
The field for typing the "Body" does not consider the font settings of my browser anymore, such that my preference of sans-serif fonts is ignored. In addition the text color is a medium gray, which is hard to read for me due to the too light contrast.
Blank lines in the code let two separate code boxes appear. This makes almost all code, I've posted in the forum, invalid. It has been discussed repeatedly, that blank lines in the code confuse the indentation of the display in the forum and that this is a really bad idea. But instead of improving this, it is made severely worse now.
The new design contains even more white space, such that standard questions cannot be answered without extensive vertical scrolling. It is a very bad drawback, that I cannot see the question while I type the answer.
There is still no suggestion to use a proper code formatting, such that I have to spend 20% of my forum time typing corresponding comments as before.
But I'm coming back to the most important problem for me: It is a physical problem for me to read the low contrast grey on white text. Does anybody know a tweak or CSS trick to increase the readability?
TMW, please take into account that this new design is physically hard to read for people without young and 100% perfect eyes. This is very annoying for me.
Splitting code blocks at white lines is simply a bug. I cannot imagine why this error has not been detected before the new design has been published. The argument, that TMW is extremely conservative with changes in the forum to ensure a stability does not convince me anymore.
[EDITED] The box around the thread, the preview box, the boxes for preformatted text and code have a grey background now. So some text is even medium grey on light grey.
I'd be glad if the designers refocus on the purpose of the forum. Whatever this purpose might be, the optical reception of the characters is fundamental.