BDv3 is the new style, whereas "Bordersdown Style" was like the "At Work" style, but with avatars and the site banner. I preferred the smaller text and layout!
I turned it off yesterday as I was working on the themes and couldn't have certain ones active. It wasn't meant to be active, I thought it had been disabled months ago.
New betas looks clean but poor use of screen space. Takes up a lot of space, mostly filled with nothing. More scrolling needed to see threads (about 20% more space used at an estimate). At work ones are good because the lack of gfx shrinks them down. Any way to keep the styling but make them more efficient?
To me it looks an awful lot like a copy of another company's style, which isn't a terribly inspiring thing. Especially a style that has been as contentious as Metro, it's had a lot of negativity from some quarters, some of it based on very strong held ideological stances that has polarised its audience. Might give the impression of a Microsoft bias to content as well.
Don't get me wrong I do think it look's clean and minimal, but to me it looks very similar to the new Windows UI:
-At the bottom of the page the two boxouts, with chat and links, are done in the same style.
-The usage of lowercase throughout the controls, that's the top row with user's controls, the boxouts, the bits at the bottom of the page - very WindowsPhone-y. Looks a bit untidy if you have capitals in your username too as then the drop down menus don't look like controls.
-The "Reply to Thread" button, it's all one control, whether you click the Text or the + portion it does the exact same thing, but it's been split in two so that the + portion can be turned into a square tile with the white graphic-over-block colour look. It's confusing the functionality to the user who thinks they have to click just the Plus button for the sake of carrying on the rectangular Tile aesthetic.
-The solid blue line bars that run across every post and every control, such as Quick Reply for example. The usage of solid coloured rectangles, without using detailing such as separation identifiers for different portions, fits the Metro tile theme. Running the bars across the top of each post adds nothing but pushing the rectangular, bold colour aesthetic while meaning there's a huge bright bar dominating the content of the post. By itself it wouldn't look like a copy but it's when all the bits are combined they all build to that look, at least to my eyes anyway. It's like the Calendar tile in this picture, huge block of rectangular colour for no other reason than statement :
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