How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

[TheCotMan]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

I just man-handled the editor buttons t make them load as the same color as when they are left in a "normal" state.

Hopefully Neil won't want to throttle me for such a horrible color contrast, but this is the road I've chosen to work towards a fix.

Step 1:
Would those of you that have been experiencing this problem described by Devant Ollam please see if these editor buttons:
1) Load with the same color you see once you run your mouse over them
2) Mostly don't suddenly "resize" themselves after you have hovered over them, causing their neighbors to move to the right

Step 2:
Once it appears to be working without the color swapping problem, I can then set the colors as desired.
If you like the present high-contrast color selection with them using the gray background, then we are done.

Step 3:
Apply the desired color change.

Step 4:
Burn down the office because someone took my stapler as this will also destroy any evidence of my having altered Neil's new Style for the forums. (He'll never catch me! Of course you all have to keep this a secret, too.)

[BackatchaBandit]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Dark buttons fixed. Thanks.

[TheCotMan]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Dark buttons fixed. Thanks.

Ok then. What else?

[xor]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Ok then. What else?

A million dollars would be nice.

xor

[BackatchaBandit]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Ok then. What else?

This is in no way a criticism or complaint, but since you asked...

Any chance of adding a style that uses a sans serif font?

Basically, exactly the same as this one, but with Arial/Helvetica instead of Times New Roman.

Absolutely no problem and totally understandable if you'd rather keep things simple, though. I can continue to use a greasemonkey script to the same effect.

Is this the latest vB*** version, BTW? I only ask as my 'vB image resizer' script seems to have borked.

[neil]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

I just man-handled the editor buttons t make them load as the same color as when they are left in a "normal" state.

Hopefully Neil won't want to throttle me for such a horrible color contrast, but this is the road I've chosen to work towards a fix.

Step 1:
Would those of you that have been experiencing this problem described by Devant Ollam please see if these editor buttons:
1) Load with the same color you see once you run your mouse over them
2) Mostly don't suddenly "resize" themselves after you have hovered over them, causing their neighbors to move to the right

Step 2:
Once it appears to be working without the color swapping problem, I can then set the colors as desired.
If you like the present high-contrast color selection with them using the gray background, then we are done.

Step 3:
Apply the desired color change.

Step 4:
Burn down the office because someone took my stapler as this will also destroy any evidence of my having altered Neil's new Style for the forums. (He'll never catch me! Of course you all have to keep this a secret, too.)

You will pay!!!

Just kidding ;-P If it works for everyone else, I'm fine with it. Burning down office not required. All I would say is if there's a way to make the entire box that color, I'd go that route...

[TheCotMan]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

A million dollars would be nice.

You all read that? xor is going to give all forum users a million dollars to improve the forums. Winners!

This is in no way a criticism or complaint, but since you asked...

Any chance of adding a style that uses a sans serif font?

Basically, exactly the same as this one, but with Arial/Helvetica instead of Times New Roman.

Absolutely no problem and totally understandable if you'd rather keep things simple, though. I can continue to use a greasemonkey script to the same effect.

It is possible to include a style that does support another font, but supporting two styles causes significant problems during upgrades and force us to track down customizations in Styles & Templates to bring them current. It is tedious. If I had more man-hours, the 3rd style I would support would be a "high contrast" style for people with vision problems, and then choose a font which made text the most readable. If I get time to create a high-contrast style, I'll consider using the suggested font and see what users think of it. (Such a 3rd choice would be an alternative to what is presently available.)
You could try the "Defcon Legacy" style (settable from your UserCP, if I recall correctly) and see if that provides you with what you desire. (I've not looked at that in detail lately.)

Is this the latest vBulletin version, BTW? I only ask as my 'vB image resizer' script seems to have borked.

Ah! Who says we are using vBuleltin? ;-) Seriously though, we are on the latest stable, but not the latest up-rev. Latest uprev hasn't been tested very long and is a new minor-release. Frequently, minor-releases break plugins, and require re-visiting styles that have been updated.
An item of note: we are using the old images from a much older release, because the newer images make the forums look, "stupid." (Designed for idiots, with large icons and buttons.) By using the older images, we have a much more condensed vertical view, with a primary focus on the *text* and content. The only new version images we are using are the ones that come with plugins like the blog software and the project software, as it helps to draw attention to those as different, and available.

You will pay!!!

Gah! I need protection!

Just kidding ;-P If it works for everyone else, I'm fine with it. Burning down office not required. All I would say is if there's a way to make the entire box that color, I'd go that route...

I can check that if people say they want that too. (If they don't complain, then it must be ok.)
(BTW, I tracked it down to a customization css which appears to have been removed as a default in the forum software during one of the upgrades. Assuming this is the case, you didn't create it this way; it just broke this way during one of the many upgrades.)

[TheCotMan]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Forum Task 28

So today, I saw the new search boxes. Unfortunately, that's not how my brain saw them. It saw them as a login box. I guess I interpret two relatively short text boxes, stacked one on top of the other, as a login box. Somehow I wasn't thrown off by my password showing up in visible text. Maybe I'm just an idiot.

You might consider making the search boxes longer. Dunno...

Resolution:
Added default text for each field, which disappears when you click for the first time, assuming your browser supports javascript and onclick for text field like it should. Also made the field 15 chars wide instead of 10. (Please let me know if this harms any 640x480 screen resolution people.)

[TheCotMan]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Security Token error when using the top search form for searching with the forum search engine is fixed for users that are logged in.

If you are not logged in, you can't use the forum's search engine, but google should work for you.


What else?

[BackatchaBandit]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

..supporting two styles causes significant problems during upgrades... It is tedious.

I feel your pain.

I've not played much with vB since the last major revision, I hoped perhaps they might have done *something* about that. As I said, no worries, the minor 'clunk' I get (script only parses the page once fully loaded) is of no consequence and only really occurs when bandwidth is constrained. I had tried the legacy theme, but the colours in the main (new) one are so much easier on the eye. I know what you mean about those new buttons (ugly) - on other vB forums I frequent I killed most of them with Adblock for precisely that reason.

Incase anyone's interested, I fixed that image resizer script problem, too...

It uses precisely the string you chaps expunged... I understand that this is also the precisely the string a certain company crawl the web looking for when hunting for 'extended evaluation period' installs, so I've altered the spelling (just in case, loike! I found that out the hard way).

	if (dtag[i].innerHTML.indexOf('Powered by veeBollocks') > -1) {
			vB = true;
		}

Being a lazy idiot (who can't code for shit), I just changed the the var vB def to 'true' and added the url(s) to the include (deleting the global '*') and dropped maxWidth to 600 while I was at it (790 was still too high on a 1440x900 for some reason).

It was streaker's post (here) that triggered it, btw. Looks, erm... lovely, now.

[theprez98]

Re: How can the forums be made better? [Q1 2009]

Just to provide an additional bit of info, there does not appear to be any related problems when using the Legacy theme.