'Post new topic' + 'Post reply' + 'Quote' location - heat maps

Heat maps are just heat maps.

Most forum softwares have action-buttons on the right side. This is sort of convention: they are clear, users are used to it, and they work. PunBB dev-team takes advantage of conventions.

You must be forgetting that quote links are attached to every single posting. They all just can't be closer to "Post". Quoting makes sense after reading a posting, they should be located below each posting.

DavidONE: Your post actually isn't clear in regards to the quote links. As Taimar said, they exist for every post. Thus, you can't simply move them to the blue bar, as you advocate.
And the blue bar isn't meant to be used for that stuff, it's why we have a bar above/below it.

Plus, one would assume, seeing as only a proportion of the people on the globe actually write/read in a left to right, top to bottom fashion, that the heat map data is skewed and biased towards English and other languages which use that layout.

I don't understand the reference to PunBB's layout. Unless you are going to be viewing the forum in a text browser it doesn't really have any particular layout. If you are referring to the way things are presented in the beta release, thats just one possible layout suggested by one stylesheet. If you want the post links postitioned to the left then just float them left and the pagingation links right to swap them over. Its just a change to one or maybe two lines of css thats required. If you turn off the stylesheet you will see where things really are, apart from the main data tables everything else is just stacked vertically and can be positioned and styled however you like.

In fact most of the comments I've seen so far which are markup and layout related are actaully nothing to do with either the markup or the layout, they are just comments on the Oxygen stylesheet.

Of course PunBB has a layout - we're all viewing the layout now.  Most of us as a result of the CSS, but even screen readers 'see' a layout based on the markup.

And of course we could all change it however we want - I was simply suggesting what I saw as an improvement to the default presentation / layout / visual / design / treatment / whatever you prefer to describe the combination of HTML + CSS used.  I never imagined it would be such hard work!

FFS.  What a dim argument - "if you don't like it, change it yourself".  Is that how applications are improved?  Is this forum not for discussing how PunBB *might* be improved?

Yes, bottom to top languages are also a minority AFA PunBB usage is concerned.  Unless you're going to astound with evidence to the contrary?  Either way, it's irrelevant to what's been suggested - as already explained.

So, because I'm the first to make this suggestion, it's automatically invalid?  You're satisfied with the strength of your argument, are you?  Fair enough. 

Settle down, folks. No need to argue over the placement of a link

Personally, I try to go on feeling as opposed to what other developers do or what the results of a heatmap test predict to be true. I prefer the post links on the right, at least with the current theme. The reason I prefer them on the right is because this is where all "action" links are positioned. Post reply/Post new topic, report, delete, edit, quote, the moderation controls, subscribe etc. Everything is on the right.

Good point, although I'd counter with "not all action links are of equal importance", which was part of my thinking behind the suggestion.  Anyway, we can step down from DEFCON 1 now that we have a definitive answer .

I think we're talking past each other, and also maybe struggling with semantics .  There is a *default* style - it's the one we all see immediately after install.  The few PunBB installs I've done required nothing more than changing some colours and maybe adding a logo to the default design ... because the default design is 'just right' IMO.  I'll bet that applies to most installs.

I know what's possible with CSS (I've been building with it for >8 years), but I thought my suggestion would benefit most users, particularly new ones, for the reasons I've already (badly??? ) explained.

Cheers.