New skin?

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Mr. Bane
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New skin?

Post by Mr. Bane »

Can we get a new board skin option that is less...Clunky and space wasting?
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

What's that now?
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

cthulhu
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Post by cthulhu »

Did you use the old boards? If not, the hosting budget in terms of available technical skills here is pretty skint, so historically we've been using whatever is available solutions on a best effort basis.

If you contribute software, technical expertise hosting and bandwidth, I'm sure fbmf would be happy to help out, but the reality is the skills and committment to do significant upgrades just are not there.

So we're pretty stuck unless someone personally does it, and that someone would have to be you.
Last edited by cthulhu on Fri May 29, 2009 2:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
Surgo
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Post by Surgo »

Don't bash neilhuiz's skills, he has them. He's just a pretty damn busy man.
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

So we're pretty stuck unless someone personally does it, and that someone would have to be you.
As a Server Administrator I have no problem doing this...But server administrators are notoriously stand-offish about people asking to improve some service they provide.

Where geeks are normally socially inept Server Admins tend to be doubly so.

This most certainly includes me.

Edit: Hell I wouldn't even mind hosting if it's a burden on this N guy. I have tons of large space high bandwidth servers I can pick from.
Last edited by Mr. Bane on Sat May 30, 2009 10:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

I know what skinning is. I just fail to see the need to migrate again, or to implement changes for the heckuvit.

So far you're whole argument is "it's clunky and space wasting" You want to maybe explain how for those of us who that's not intuitively obvious to?


More than half of the board "upgrades" I've seen lately involve turning a functional forum with minimal options into a piece of web 2.slow bloatware that now takes 30 seconds to refresh a page and a couple months to run a search. Fuck the pretty pictures and advanced colorschemes, I'm already on the internet I can jolly well google "artistic masterpieces" if that's what I want. I come here to read what folks have to say and to write a few posts of my own.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

" I just fail to see the need to migrate again, or to implement changes for the heckuvit. "

If you know what skinning is...Whhy do you think it requires a migrate or upgrade?

But hey, if you're going to strawman my argument... ;)
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

Ah fuck it.
I come here to read what folks have to say and to write a few posts of my own.
This sir, is the damn problem.

Say we look at SMF, one of the modern open source freeware Bboard services out there. Runs on PHP, Javascript, and MySQL.

I click the Bold B button once and it creates the start and end tag with the curser in the middle, ready for me to type my bold word.

On here? phpBB2? I have to hit the button, type what I want, then hit the button again.

Or I can hit the button twice, click the curser in the middle, then move the curser out when I'm done.

That's fucking annoying. That's beyond fucking annoying and goes into the useless twit category.

phpBB agrees with me, though, because they removed this bug.

Oh, and hey, guess what? phpBB3 and SMF don' have Emocon buttons that take up 25% of the posting screen and therefor have less images for your scrawny little modem to download.

Here's some comparisons, since you can't take the five damn minutes to actually research your opinion (It's a pretty well documented fact that both phpbb3 and smf2 are faster loading than phpbb2).

Image
Image
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Maj
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Post by Maj »

Do the alternatives you recommend come with auto image shrinking so that the annoying scroll bar doesn't show up at the bottom of my screen?

:tongue:

The current board skin is the standard plain-ass skin that comes with the software. To the best of my knowledge, fbmf has done nothing to change it.

If indeed it does take you 30 seconds to reload the page, it's probably one of three causes:

1) Your computer is sucking.

2) A url linked to on the page is sucking.

3) The server is sucking.

Chances are pretty good that it's not #1 because just about everyone has a better computer than I do. But I've had pages take long to load because they were stuck on someone's avatar or sig image. I've also had pages take a while to load because the server's slow.

If you're having problems with searching, it's probably #1 or #3. Using either search function on this board brings me results in about 2 seconds.

But really, the reason we have this board software is because the old board software (bbboy.net) was compatible with nothing in a reasonable price range. Back then, Neil had more time to help out with the boards and thus wrote a script to convert the first software into phpbb.
Last edited by Maj on Sun May 31, 2009 4:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Mr. Bane wrote: Here's some comparisons, since you can't take the five damn minutes to actually research your opinion (It's a pretty well documented fact that both phpbb3 and smf2 are faster loading than phpbb2).
Well, in my defense, if the guy asking for changes couldn't take five minutes to make such a well-documented argument in his request, it's really not my responsibility to do his research for him, however brief it may be. If you can't convince the lazy, ignorant and belligerent of your point, you will never get anywhere in life.




[/b]
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa »

We'd need to migrate to something that does skinning.

I don't like skins.

This is pretty light, lighter would be even better.

-Crissa
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa »

We'd need to migrate to something that does skinning.

I don't like skins.

This is pretty light, lighter would be even better. I don't use smilies, unless they're customs - like Majs'.

-Crissa
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

Do the alternatives you recommend come with auto image shrinking so that the annoying scroll bar doesn't show up at the bottom of my screen?
phpBB3 and SMF2.
If you can't convince the lazy, ignorant and belligerent of your point, you will never get anywhere in life.
Well this link might help ;)
We'd need to migrate to something that does skinning.
Not true, phpBB2 does have skin ability.

Migrating is just a better option all around.
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

Ok, so if this gets decided about then here are my two votes:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=390315

and

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=367289

Both of them have screenshots, although small, and the demolinks are dead but the downloads are still good.

Simple, clean, and monochromatic.
cthulhu
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Post by cthulhu »

Surgo wrote:Don't bash neilhuiz's skills, he has them. He's just a pretty damn busy man.
I didn't. I said we don't have available technical skills. He's definately got technical skills, but yeah, as you say he is a busy person with a job and a personal life and stuff - thus he's not available.

Just to clarify that position!
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

Getting really tired of the small, unexpandable, message body box, and it failing to do simple tasks like remember the last post I read.
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fbmf
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Post by fbmf »

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
I happen to like where we are and what we look like. So do most of the regulars. Get over it.
[/TGFBS]
Last edited by fbmf on Thu Jun 04, 2009 12:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mr. Bane
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Post by Mr. Bane »

See what I mean? ;)

In spite of all logic, proof, and general common sense (Why would you avoid making it easier for a group of writers to write?) it is much simpler to ignore all that fuss and simply do less.
Last edited by Mr. Bane on Thu Jun 04, 2009 1:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
name_here
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Post by name_here »

Logic = I like it better that way?

Seriously, i have been on this board, and i have been on a board that uses phpbb 3. I only notice the difference because the tag "bugfix" is really annoying because i'm not used to tags working that way.

Now, if the other types of forum software offered an improvement that i cared about even slightly, I might possibly side with you.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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Absentminded_Wizard
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Post by Absentminded_Wizard »

Getting really tired of the small, unexpandable, message body box....
I'm pretty sure there's a Firefox extension that makes all message boxes expandable. And if you use Windows, Google Chrome has that functionality built in.
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