New forum software - need your help testing & input

[sfr1047]

New Format

The newer font size is much better.

The white and grey column contrasts would be better with the grey being a bit darker.

Of the color choices you now have I prefer the lighter Cyan. I think any color you choose should be a fairly light version of the color. Dark versions create to much contrast and are hard on the eyes.

Great job, thanks for the effort.

 

[DBoyd]

I like the new forum also. Very easy to read and easy on the eyes.

Thanks Steve.

Don

 

[John - K5AWO]

Steve, on the blue color I mentioned earlier. This one is real easy on "my" eyes.



0099FF

AAC

Azure-Azure-Cyan



The current dark blue is a fairly hard contrast for me.



-John

 

[RADdodge]

I noticed that the windows don't use IE's View->Text Size control anymore. Too bad. On large screens with high resolution, the text is too small. I tried changing from Largest to Medium with no change in the page.



The only color that wasn't too bright was the Dark Cyan. The others (except the gray of course) were way too bright. Looking at the old pages, I see the difference seems to be that there is more real estate colored which makes the colors too intense where the old pages, same color are just nice highlights. BTW, when one subscribes to a page, can the software simply take you back to where you were instead of back to the Discussions Forum page? It would be nice to put the directory buttons from the top of the page at the bottom too. I find myself scrolling to the top at the end of the posts a lot to get to the User Control Panel button.



I know it's a lot of work, but the TDR still has the best format that I've seen on the www. Good work. I just hope the new software will allow for Personal Control over the font size. After all, isn't that what PC really means?

 

[nickleinonen]

Please click one of the Quick Reply icons in the posts above to activate Quick Reply

that is the message in the quick reply box, but i can't find/see a button anywhere to activate it... i really like the quick reply function and i don't really want to loose it in the new version

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It's the last icon on the right in any of the posts - looks like a piece of paper with an arrow swooping out of it. If you point at it, it will tell you it's a "Quick reply to this message" button.

 

[thejeepdude]

OK, here's my biggest gripe. Quite often I am checking the TDR from the road over a sometimes REALLY slow cellular internet connection. As it stands, sometimes I have to wait several seconds between each message in a thread popping up. The new format with the graphical message seperators is kind of ooh-ahh flashy, but to me provides no purpose, requires me too scroll more to see the same amount of content, and takes longer to download over my wireless link. I like some of the new features of the new software, but I'd prefer to keep the look of each thread a little more "plain jane" for the sake of efficiency.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

The graphics are adding VERY little to the size of the page. I do take that into consideration. On the forum home page the new site has 27kb of graphics, the old page has 22kb of graphics - VERY little difference. 5kb takes 1. 4 seconds to load on a 28k connection - and it should load from the cache the majority of time. The entire forum home page on the old site (without the banner ad) is 133. 19Kb, the entire forum home page on the new site is 205. 9Kb. The majority of the difference is in the menus and additional features that are on the page. The javascript for the vbulletin parts of the menus are 30. 9kb of the difference. Not switching to the new software wasn't an option (details of why will be posted after the switch is made). The javascript for the TDR part of the menus (up at the top) is 11kb. Those menus should also load from your cache the majority of the time. I did the best I could to keep the size of the page down while still offering a good looking page. An extra 5kb for the graphics doesn't make much of a difference.

 

[SKaye]

The font size is a bit small for my tired eyes. I know the colors can be changed, can font size be changed as well?

 

[thejeepdude]

I kinda knew that's what you were going to say, which is why I didn't mention it earlier. However, your welcome message at the top of the page convinced me to speak up! At any rate, I know it's not a HUGE increase, just adding the graphics, but I had to throw my opinion out there. It's not like I'm going to quit reading the TDR because of it! It sure would be cool if we could each set up our own customizable views or style sheets to make our interface as verbose or as terse as we'd like, though.

 

[MRickard]

Seems to work okay. Readers Rigs link seems to go to homepage. Also, menu dependant on javascript enabled and completly missing with it disabled - I would add in a <noscript> tag giving a menu, or some other means of getting to topics.



Menu bar was not aligned completly, probably programed for IE by vB (?).



Browser: Mozilla build 2004060421

System: Linux v. 2. 4. 24

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Could you take a screen shot and email it to me MRickard? I can adjust where the menu is displayed for different browsers. Many different browsers render locations slightly different. The menu generation software I'm using allows for me to change it based on different browsers. The readers rigs links will work properly once it goes live. They aren't there now because the readers rigs software isn't on that test page. I didn't want people to make changes to it and lose it when it's moved over.



Right now the font cannot be changed by the users. I'll be keeping an eye out for a hack that allows that down the road. Thus far I haven't found anything to allow a variable font size. That is a change from vB2 to vB3 as well it seems.

 

[RThompson]

Will take a little getting used to, but I like it. Thanks for your work on this site...



r

 

[John - K5AWO]

Originally posted by thejeepdude

if we could each set up our own customizable views or style sheets to make our interface as verbose or as terse as we'd like, though.

The Jeep Dude;



Does your cell phone browser offer an option to turn OFF the graphics? I haven't tried my cell browser yet <they want money!> so can't vouch for how T-Mobile does it.



I know that IE and Opera have options to turn off the image downloads. Text loads FAST that way.



I think Steve missed what you said about using the cellphone to browse with. He mentioned 28K connnections which is four times as fast as cell phones.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

I have an even better option for you for when your on a slow connection. Go to http://www.dieselregistry.com/forums/archive/ . You can get to it by clicking on the archive link near the bottom right of any of the forum screens too. It will give you a raw text version of the forums. If you want to reply to a message there is a link at the top that takes you to the full version of the page. Can't get any faster than that.



I didn't miss it. I read it as a cell phone connection though, not using a cell phone browser. I've used a number of cell phone connections and the slowest I've seen personally was 28k.

 

[thejeepdude]

Yeah my connection is usually at least 28K, but the problem is the latency... usually about 1000ms roundtrip ping time... so every time a packet is dropped, there's a delay... kind of a pain. I have started using Mozilla Firefox instead of IE, which is a LOT faster so that helps. As for my cell connection, it's actually a Sony/Ericsson GC83 EDGE PC Card, not a link through an actual cell phone. When I'm lucky, I can get up to 200kbps throughput, but that's only if the moon is at the precisely correct angle, and a bird is flying overhead to reeflect the radio waves off a tall building with a convex window pointed at my house.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

In researching the font size issue I discovered that this is an IE bug. IE will not resize fonts that are defined in a . css which is how vB3's styles work. Netscape resizes the fonts fine as does Opera. So if you are having trouble with the font size you can try just about any other browser other than IE most likely and resize your fonts.



I did increase the font size on the pull down menus 1 size. The buttons themselves are the same size (can't make them bigger because of screen fit issues) but the drop down menus themselves are bigger.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

BGiles came up with a great idea that we went with on the colors. Dodge offers the Ram in 10 different colors. There are now choices for all 10 of those colors plus the default. In those 11 colors there should be something for everyone.

 

[Jdonoghue]

Originally posted by Steve St. Laurent
In researching the font size issue I discovered that this is an IE bug. IE will not resize fonts that are defined in a . css which is how vB3's styles work. Netscape resizes the fonts fine as does Opera. So if you are having trouble with the font size you can try just about any other browser other than IE most likely and resize your fonts.

Nice to see someone admit this instead of caving in and making it work for IE only and broken for all other browsers, like many other sites do. IE is chock full of bugs, anyway. We quit using it here at work quite some time ago.

 

[jaybigboy34]

new website

I think you should add a picture and video post for the website. They do it over on the SVT Mustang website and it is a BIG sucess. Everyone can post their pics and vids right there! Think about it please.



Thanks

Jason