Changes to forum layout / startpage

Changes to forum layout / startpage

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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abma
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Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by abma »

Forb slightly adjusted the forum layout so it works better on mobiles.
http://test.springrts.com/phpbb/posting ... e=post&f=1

most visible change are the buttons, see thepull request

also i've merged community news and engine news:

http://test.springrts.com/

https://github.com/spring/spring-websit ... 8c7e119b7f

Thoughts about this?
gajop
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by gajop »

abma wrote:also i've merged community news and engine news:
http://test.springrts.com/
This is a good change. Later on you may consider modifying the way it displays "game:", "engine:", and general news (maybe some color information, icons or similar), but this is already a step in the right direction.
Hm, is there no way to view older news?
abma
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by abma »

ok, applied / updated to phpbb 3.1.4
abma
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by abma »

Later on you may consider modifying the way it displays "game:", "engine:", and general news (maybe some color information, icons or similar), but this is already a step in the right direction.
Hm, is there no way to view older news?
replacing categories with icons is on the todo. atm you can only view older news by visiting the forum...
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Anarchid
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Anarchid »

The new buttons and links styles are abhorrent on aesthetical, practical, and technological grounds.

They make text harder to read, irritate 99% of respondents, and overrides.txt opened in an IDE is now as red as communism, as red as blood, as red as mars - due to nearly EVERY SINGLE LINEbeing !important.

This is the type of style that fits with epilepsy-inducer flashing gifs, cornify.js, and <MARQUEE> and <BLINK>

I kindly suggest that these changes be reverted by their authors, seeing as cleanly reverting them is no longer possible. Please, just no.
gajop
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by gajop »

Also this when searching:
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 4 characters and must not contain more than 84 characters excluding wildcards.
I thought we allowed 3 char words (and even 2 char words would make sense to search for)
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Forboding Angel »

Anarchid wrote:The new buttons and links styles are abhorrent on aesthetical, practical, and technological grounds.

They make text harder to read, irritate 99% of respondents, and overrides.txt opened in an IDE is now as red as communism, as red as blood, as red as mars - due to nearly EVERY SINGLE LINEbeing !important.

This is the type of style that fits with epilepsy-inducer flashing gifs, cornify.js, and <MARQUEE> and <BLINK>

I kindly suggest that these changes be reverted by their authors, seeing as cleanly reverting them is no longer possible. Please, just no.
Editing css in an ide? <confused black girl>
overrides.css wrote:/* 1.0 - Responsive fixes */

/* Important is bad mmmk? Unfortunately a lot of these require it and in this particular case it's not so terrible of a sin, but try not to use important unless you really really have to (says the guy who uses important like it's going out of style below */
It's called "Overrides" for a reason. !important isn't necessary for a chunk of it, but it's 1 part laziness and 1 part dealing with the interesting things that phpbb does with dynamic style generation on certain things. But mainly born out of the desire for it not to be overridden by the parent theme every time they change something.

That said, I will clean it up a bit. It hurts my ocd as well, but phpbb is a very complex (and crappily put together) beast.

https://github.com/spring/spring-website/pull/40

In fact, the links standing out more makes things a lot more readable. I was aware that it might cause some controversy, and the merge stayed on the test server for somewhere around 3 weeks before being made live.

I'm not sure what your deal with the buttons is, as they are far nicer than the default buttons. Additionally they are color matched with the main navigation links. That said, I have to go around and find all the ones not done yet. I have already taken care of pagination on topic lists.
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Anarchid
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Anarchid »

It's called "Overrides" for a reason. !important isn't necessary for a chunk of it, but it's 1 part laziness and 1 part dealing with the interesting things that phpbb does with dynamic style generation on certain things. But mainly born out of the desire for it not to be overridden by the parent theme every time they change something.
Grudgingly conceded.
In fact, the links standing out more makes things a lot more readable.
Disagree. They feel like they break out into a whole new dimension, not being part of the text at all. It sure makes spotting links on the page visible, but reading the text which contains links is like blue on red.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Forboding Angel »

Anarchid wrote:Disagree. They feel like they break out into a whole new dimension, not being part of the text at all. It sure makes spotting links on the page visible, but reading the text which contains links is like blue on red.
https://github.com/spring/spring-website/pull/40

^^ This pretty much illustrates my point and makes the argument in the best way possible.
abma
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by abma »

its not possible any more to put some link into readable text. the highlightning is imo totally overkill, a different color for a link is imo enough.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Forboding Angel »

Perhaps?

Image
Image
abma
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by abma »

applied the changes, links shouldn't look this different any more.
gajop
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by gajop »

It's indeed a lot less shit now.
Thread numbers are still bad. It's really unclear what's your current page.
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AF
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by AF »

The dark buttons with the background drop shadow would look better if they used the same background colour ( background-color: rgb(236, 241, 243); ) as the forum itself and had just an outline, and half the border radius/margin

Code: Select all

  color: #000;
  background-color: rgb(236, 241, 243);
  border: 1px solid #aaaaaa !important;
  margin-right: 5px !important;
  border-radius: 5px !important;
The current style is too complex and has such a high contrast with the rest of the theme, I think the buttons and links look a lot nicer with a much simpler style:

Image

Image
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Forboding Angel »

AF wrote:-screenshots-
Ew. Very 1980's mac gui (Awww shizzle simcity ya'll!).

Well phpbb uses 2 classnames for buttons on the forum, and they are interchanged randomly (I'm not kidding), so as a result, both have to match (either that or I do a lot more work than I care for).

Ideally it would be a very google-esque material design call to action. That being that you highlight the buttons that are most important on a page (Like "submit", with save draft and preview being lesser).

But for whatever reason, the bold italics, etc buttons use the exact same class as save draft and preview and submit use a different class.

So yes, I would like to do very neat things with this, but without gutting the phpbb theme (which ain't nobody got time fo dat atm), I am stuck with mostly macro changes. In this case, I decided to make the buttons stand out and obviously responsive to hover.

In a perfect world, I would give the forum a complete makeover using material design guidelines because it makes things very attractive and extremely readable, but this isn't a perfect work and phpbb themes are awful (dude... there is a reason why I am using a file called overrides instead of multiple files like colors, gradients, icons, etc etc).

Look, I am working towards an end goal. It is getting done in stages. At the end of this I will have it in a format that will make the forum super easy to change around to whatever anyone likes. In the meantime, have a little faith, and understand that I already dump a lot of time into this, and that time isn't unlimited, so sometimes an end goal takes a little while to reach.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Forboding Angel »

gajop wrote:It's indeed a lot less shit now.
Thread numbers are still bad. It's really unclear what's your current page.
Awww shit, I didn't realize that was live. Yeah it was on my todo... Lemmie go ahead and fix that now.

Edit: https://github.com/spring/spring-website/pull/45

Edit2: Fixed some other crap too cause I happened to notice some stuff.
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Anarchid
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Anarchid »

Pagination buttons still seem to stand out ~5mm over the page. It's ok for actual major buttons (submit etc) but not there.
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Forboding Angel
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by Forboding Angel »

Just because it's merged, doesn't mean it's live. The recent merge they are more or less the same size they were before (comparable at least), they are spaced about 2 pixels farther apart though, because it looks better and is easier to read.

Oh NM he hasn't merged it yet. Patience grasshoppa. Something with my fork and a submodule is for some reason messed up. I have no idea wtf, but imma run the commands recommended by abma as soon as I get home and see if that sorts it out.
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smoth
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by smoth »

I don't know what changed, but I am happy quotes lost that ugly scrollbar.
abma
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Re: Changes to forum layout / startpage

Post by abma »

merged + applied: needs force-refresh to see the changes, else browser chached files are used.
smoth wrote:I don't know what changed, but I am happy quotes lost that ugly scrollbar.
what scrollbar? there is none on this page...
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