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mashton One thing I'd love to see is a way of making lists that don't just use up loads and loads of comments. It just annoys me when I see that there have been laods of posts on a thread that I am following, just to scroll through 20 posts of list additions...
- mashton
- BringMeMyFix
- mashton
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i like the idea of pulling all photos linked 'londonfgss" or something and having a picture page with tumbnails that you click on and it takes you to that persons flicker.
also would like to be bale to post 3 or 4 pics in my accounts page and put a bit of an about me, some thing small like the velospace idea
a list on the right side of the page for rides would be ace.
opening links in new tabs +1
more sex, every website needs more sex.
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to talk to (internet) god you just whisper VB, but hes not a cunt...
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I think you should keep the forum very clean and tidy, like it is. Nooo not vBulletin! It just seems so bloated. Vanilla isn't. I think it suits the 'feel' of lfgss.
One thing that has been briefly mentioned that I've thought about before is a wiki. Just a little link on the tabs at the top of the pages. It'd be a good place to put everyone's collective knowledge on things that repeatedly come up.
Don't see the point in galleries, because there are good ones already like velospace.
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eeehhhh I think you should keep the forum very clean and tidy, like it is. Nooo not vBulletin! It just seems so bloated. Vanilla isn't. I think it suits the 'feel' of lfgss.
Vanilla is too sparse when it's out of the box. I've added 37 extensions and you still can't upload images and avatars, it still doesn't know how to do a 'right arrow' (>) and I don't know whether you've noticed but the "read" functionality is flakey, and now that we have some large threads like the 'spotted' thread it is failing to calculatue the number of pages correctly (I'm assuming wherever that functionality is, that it's including the number of whispers that exist in the thread and that throws the page numbers out of whack).
All that, and it takes a second to load a page.
Lightweight and clean Vanilla is not (this server has 1GB of RAM, for just this one website... it's a bit excessive), except in terms of the visual style.
vBulletin isn't as pretty out of the box, but it can do avater uploads, image uploads, correct embedding of HTML, faster page rendering, lower memory usage, better private messaging (like, you can actually CC other people!), better alerts and subscriptions, and it can actually be extended easier. Oh yeah, and you get polls, and the ability to put events in the calendar and then have people say they're attending it (solves the lists thing).
My big gripe with vBulletin is the visual style. But I'm happy to consider working with some of the designers on here to get that to look nice. It can be done.
The thing that people mentioned about compartmentalising... well you can use click "New Posts" in vBulletin and it looks just like the Vanilla home page. So it's a bit redundent... both can look like each other, Vanilla has the categories page, vBulletin has a "New Posts" page.
Anyhow, the Vanilla core code base obviously has problems. For an out of the box forum engine it's good, but the sheer volume of extensions required to get it to work in a good way is nuts. The extensions are pretty low quality too, lack of pagination on the members page and search functionality will lead me to remove that soon.
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just had a look at the bikeforums site, seems like there's alot more functionality on the site, more buttons to press, more sub categories, but it looks kinda cluttered, it feels like the forums that I click through to and find really ugly to look at, with weird avatars and too long signatures, facts and figures on membership etc. Could you keep the simplicity of this site and marry it with the functionality of the bike forums site.
Feel like there are too many button clicks to get to stuff, folders within folders, that sort of thing. I quite like the randomness of different threads appearing in the thread list rather than having stuff organised and having to look into a specific folder to find a particular thread. Is there the possibility of keeping like the latest ten or fifteen threads on the top page, for a day or two and they then get organised (automatic process or manually initiated, would be better being automatic) into seperate folders. Also it would give people the chance to subscribe to threads that they are interested in, at the moment I don't I just pop back and keep hitting refresh to see how many new comments are added to a thread.
Assume because this forum is just about one aspect of cycling, that it won't have to be as exhaustive/comprehensive/complicated to navigate as bikeforums. -
Well if it makes your life easier as the admin / tech guy I think it is fair enough to change over it seems from what you are saying we can just set the new posts page as a book mark to keep the same non-compartmentalised (spelling? z or s) system of vanilla. Maybe run a little competition for the designers to do the visual tweaking you are on about.
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cornelius blackfoot just had a look at the bikeforums site, seems like there's alot more functionality on the site, more buttons to press, more sub categories, but it looks kinda cluttered, it feels like the forums that I click through to and find really ugly to look at, with weird avatars and too long signatures, facts and figures on membership etc. Could you keep the simplicity of this site and marry it with the functionality of the bike forums site.
Feel like there are too many button clicks to get to stuff, folders within folders, that sort of thing. I quite like the randomness of different threads appearing in the thread list rather than having stuff organised and having to look into a specific folder to find a particular thread. Is there the possibility of keeping like the latest ten or fifteen threads on the top page, for a day or two and they then get organised (automatic process or manually initiated, would be better being automatic) into seperate folders. Also it would give people the chance to subscribe to threads that they are interested in, at the moment I don't I just pop back and keep hitting refresh to see how many new comments are added to a thread.
Assume because this forum is just about one aspect of cycling, that it won't have to be as exhaustive/comprehensive/complicated to navigate as bikeforums.I think what vb is referring to is maybe set up the NEW POSTS option as the default page so we get the random new threads thing we get here, but you are right bikeforums is a little busy but I guess that is partly to do with how they have set it up.
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Bike forums setup is horrid. The owner was looking to sell the site a couple of years ago, and I wanted to buy it but couldn't raise the capital. So much potential I thought, let down by the really horrid colours, busy screens and stuff.
If we went to vBulletin or something, I would still keep a clean and minimal look to things. There would still be no signatures, the "new posts" clutter will still be the front page. There would still be white space around things.
In my opinion it's about offering functionality in an understated way. To let you discover it when you need it, rather than there be this mess that's always in your face. I'd simply strip out all of the clutter from vBulletin and clean things up, and get a designer or two from here to give me a hand in making it pretty and usable.
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velocity boy If we went to vBulletin or something, I would still keep a clean and minimal look to things. There would still be no signatures, the "new posts" clutter will still be the front page. There would still be white space around things.
Reading what you've written it seems that Vanilla is a pain in the arse for you to maintain, but very good as an end user. Good that there wouldn't be any sigs, I think they're unbelievably pointless.
In my opinion it's about offering functionality in an understated way. To let you discover it when you need it, rather than there be this mess that's always in your face. I'd simply strip out all of the clutter from vBulletin and clean things up, and get a designer or two from here to give me a hand in making it pretty and usable.
If you managed to sort it all out, I reckon it'd be pretty good.
You wouldn't struggle getting designers either!
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eeehhhh [quote]velocity boy If we went to vBulletin or something, I would still keep a clean and minimal look to things. There would still be no signatures, the "new posts" clutter will still be the front page. There would still be white space around things.
Reading what you've written it seems that Vanilla is a pain in the arse for you to maintain, but very good as an end user. Good that there wouldn't be any sigs, I think they're unbelievably pointless.
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It's not terribly hard to maintain. To say that would be dishonest. But there are lots of little problems with it, and the extensions are frequently buggy. Fixing those things would take more effort than I care to give (as in, weeks and weeks) and I'd have the problem that unless I could get my changes into the core codebase (theorhetically possible, it's open source) then I'd have to re-apply changes everytime there was an upgrade.The vBulletin thing just doesn't have those bugs in the first place, higher level of maturity (it's been around years) accompanied with more eyeballs finding bugs and currently more devs working on it to fix bugs.
I guess it just frustrates me when bugs slowly surface. It's pretty shoddy of Vanilla to not be able to work out how many pages to paginate over. It hurts my pride in delivering a quality website when the tools let me down.
I'll investigate both fixing Vanilla, as well as what it might take to use vBulletin.
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Does the server need a drink after it's recent move and upgrade?
http://londonfgss.co.uk/discussion/1223/donations/#Item_27
button on the left…
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Slight aside, is it possible to replace thread titles "bike pr)n" etc. with a numeric code? There's some things I'm not going to look at on this site whilst at work, cos the title would send the IT monkeys into apoplexy (well at least the ones not reading this board themselves).
dogsballs
BringMeMyFix
jonny
chris_crash
addie
hael
eeehhhh
cornelius_blackfoot
TheBrick(Tommy)
big_daddy_wayne
snowy_again-
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What do you want to see on the site?
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@Velocio
just a thought how about making the tool libary database/thread/thing more of a searchable database and maybe like the thoughts on the stolen bike thread, tell people just to post the tools and location in their not any other comments.