CAG Site upgrade - thread 1

[WebMaster]

Hello everyone. For the past 24 hours we've been rushed off our feet (feets?) sorting out all these little (and not so little problems).

 

A few people have asked if this is how the forums will stay, and the answer is pretty much yes. There will be lots of minor changes though - someone mentioned stickies not standing out from normal threads, and I completely agree. Quite a few people have mentioned font sizes too - hopefully they're ok now (I've increased them a little).

 

I'm aware of the navigation issues: jumping to last post, showing new posts, viewing user profiles, and these will be getting sorted out over the weekend. We're also getting reports of problems on hand-held devices - again we'll be sorting that out.

[WebMaster]

The site only seems to look ok on my monster 1920 x 1200 res home 24" pc monitor, most desktops use 1440 x 900, and laptops 1366 x 768

 

I'm surprised about that. Pretty early on we decided that weren't going to design for 800x600 displays. Even though that's often considered the lowest common denominator to design for, it was just too restrictive. Instead we chose 1024x768, and the site should look fine at that resolution or higher. I've tried resizing my browser to 1024x768, and it does seem ok

[WebMaster]

Stickies are now a different colour, and clicking the username in a post shows the user's profile (was broken before)

[WebMaster]

Ouch, Where's me sun glasses - can we have more subtle colours PLEASE

 

Which colours are you referring to? The yellow notices at the top seem the only bright ones to me. If anything, the general opinion seems to be that the colours are a bit too dull

[WebMaster]

If it's not broke.........Why break it?

 

I know a lot of people are feeling this way. These are the main reasons:

 

vBulletin 3.x is nearing the end of its life. At the moment they're still bringing out security updates, but I imagine those will stop in a year or so. So the upgrade did need to happen, it was just a case of when.

 

The site was also in need of a facelift - it had become quite messy with notices, announcements, links to sub-sections scattered all over, and we wanted to do some quite radical stuff behind the scenes with the CSS, JavaScript and images to improve performance. It seemed pointless putting in weeks of work on these if we were going to need to upgrade (hence lose all these changes) within a year.

 

With the new version in place, we have the potential for quite a speed increase (don't forget that slow loading of pages was an ongoing problem). At the moment it looks like pages are loading a couple of seconds quicker on average than they were in the past ... but we'll be looking at that more next week, once these other bugs are sorted out.

 

If someone would be kind enough to paste a couple of links that no longer work (eg to threads/posts/whatever) that'd be great. Hopefully we can get these working again, and people won't be left with dead bookmarks

[WebMaster]

Could you give us customizable colour themes? (probably a bit much work right now)

 

That's a great idea. It may be that we go with a WAP version of the site for handheld devices too (it'd really just be a set of stripped down templates).

 

I wasn't aware that the Chrome problem was an issue with vBulletin 4 - I'll look into it. Hopefully others have experienced it (and solved it)

[WebMaster]

There's now a link to 'New Posts' at the top right, in the dark blue bar

[WebMaster]

I did read something (I think it was on wikipedia ) along the lines of chrome, safari and v6 and older IE doesn't support a lot of features as theyre not wysiwyg .

 

Yeah I took a quick look and found something along those lines. You'd expect it to gracefully downgrade in those cases though - in the same way that the old site still used to function if you had javascript turned off.

 

Anyway,

 

letsdothis: give me a minute and I'll get rid of that warning message

[WebMaster]

Yep yep, 'Mark Read' is up at the top there now too

[WebMaster]

That "New Posts" link is actually today's posts, which is wrong.

 

Whoops, you're right - fixed

[WebMaster]

Is there a possibilty of the threads layout being something like Penalty Charges, which is so much clearer than the present muddle?:

 

Are you referring specifically to the list of threads in 'new posts' ? That's something that had got overlooked. I'll tidy it up a bit - certainly would be helpful to have the forum name in its own column

[WebMaster]

My posts have disappeared here????

 

In what way? (that's not meant to sound confrontational, just checking exactly what you mean)

[WebMaster]

Can we have a Full Forum Index tab up there too, nice Webbie?

 

Which shows all forums? At the moment the 'Consumer Forums' tab shows all forums*; 'Debt Forums' just shows the debt forums, 'Bank Forums' just the banking ones.

 

*Actually that's not strictly true. The media forums aren't show in that list.

 

We were trying to move away from the monolithic approach - having all the forums on one page makes for a lot of scrolling, and a lot of html for people on low-end machines. Given the confusion it was causing, we've come up with this compromise

[WebMaster]

This whole 'hovering' business to see a post before you click? It doesn't work my side of the fence! Running IE8 - any ideas?

 

I didn't even realise we had that. You mean in the list of threads, hovering over it should bring up a preview? I'm not seeing that in Firefox either

[WebMaster]

The text is too large when I'm on my laptop (1280x800), it's fine on my desktop though (1920x1080)

 

Knocking it down an increment with Ctrl+- makes it fine but then makes most of the internet look silly :S

 

Any particular text?

[WebMaster]

I've fixed that centre alignment - some had forgotten a closing tag. Also those 'object expired' javascript errors are gone now

[WebMaster]

display ok on IE7 1680 x 1050 x 2 dual display, but main problem I have found is with new posts ,

 

 

That does look a mess doesn't it. Any better now?

[WebMaster]

Yeah, basically the post text :s

 

Just checking, I thought it'd be that. We could potentially go round in circles all day with this one. The reason I increased the font sizes was that a lot of people were complaining of the fonts being too small. Of the two (too small or too big), I think too big is the lesser evil. I think we'll probably end up creating some alternative themes off the current one - eg one with large fonts, one with smaller, one with higher contrast etc

[WebMaster]

yep sure is except the first 1 in new threads a bankfodder one, reply to thread not working yet , and how the heck do you start a new thread , get that long blank page on both, and advance still the same , common fault or link going wrong places

 

Which browser are you using? I know someone using AOL 9 is having problems starting a new thread - I'm wondering if it's a browser-specific problem

 

"Reply to thread" should open a reply box at the bottom of the thread, and scroll down to it. Could it me that the box is appearing, but you're not being scrolled down to it?

[WebMaster]

Another couple of little moans from me, if typing a post in advanced mode and you click a smiley, it appears to the right of your cursor and you cannot scroll right to type after it.

 

Hmm I'm not seeing that. Which browser are you on?

 

and still no spellcheck in edit post... and thats the reason I normally edit my post!

 

Are we talking about the spellchecker which some browsers now have built in? I don't see a spellcheck in the advanced mode editor

[WebMaster]

Kip, I'm on Chrome, and this is where it is for me, pretty much where it always was:

 

 

How different is that to yours?

 

I think he's found the button - it's when he clicks it, it brings up a partially blank page

 

(that bit between the forum name and the stickies looks a bit messed up in Chrome)

[WebMaster]

 

HTH!!! (says she, imagining in fact the curses Webby is currently uttering under his beard)

 

Yeah you're right there (except the beard bit). Still, it *is* fixable, and it *will* be fixed

[WebMaster]

Are we happy now Bookie?

[WebMaster]

Sorry everyone. I was trying to fix the Chrome issue, and it caused the page navigation links to disappear - they're back now

[WebMaster]

from my limited knowledge of web programming - is the popupbody style missing?

 

Looking at this site & the vbulletin forum (which works fine in Chrome) the inherited style for a popupbody is missing on here

 

I can see the popupbody style in our css - line 1306 of pete_common_headinclude_v1.css . I see what you mean about the difference with vbulletin.com, I'd been working more on the idea that we had a missing 'display:none' to hide the menus by default