Forum Upgrades

Found another minor issue: Clicking the post names in the Latest Activity window doesn't go the last post in the thread, but to the original post.

You need to click "Last post" for that.

This isn't the case for the thread titles in the main forum window, so there is an inconsistency here (although, I'm glad the "Last Post:" button was removed from the main area).

That is true. I am afraid this behavior of the Latest Threads box is a MyBB issue that we don't have much control over. This Latest Threads box originally comes from the portal page (in the Default theme it is only visible there AFAICT), so at least in that theme it is consistent within the page it appears in. The revoxono theme on the other hand mixes that portal element into the forum list, hence the inconsistency.

That is true. I am afraid this behavior of the Latest Threads box is a MyBB issue that we don't have much control over. This Latest Threads box originally comes from the portal page (in the Default theme it is only visible there AFAICT), so at least in that theme it is consistent within the page it appears in. The revoxono theme on the other hand mixes that portal element into the forum list, hence the inconsistency.

Yeah, and for what it's worth I tried doing that loop servers-side but the same variables didn't work on the forum index, so I kept the same silly AJAX hack, but made it display the table correctly.

No SSL yet? This might be a good opportunity to add it.

No SSL yet? This might be a good opportunity to add it.

That is next. We didn't want to do both at once, and while I agree that one change (forum upgrade) calls for the next (SSL), from a technical point of view there was no reason to do both at once.

Stay tuned, though

Yeah, and for what it's worth I tried doing that loop servers-side but the same variables didn't work on the forum index, so I kept the same silly AJAX hack, but made it display the table correctly.

The list of latest posts displays just fine on the portal without javascript on the default theme, though...

Yeah, and for what it's worth I tried doing that loop servers-side but the same variables didn't work on the forum index, so I kept the same silly AJAX hack, but made it display the table correctly.

The list of latest posts displays just fine on the portal without javascript on the default theme, though...

I realize that, which is why that was the first thing I tried. It will have to be revisited, other features/bugs are higher priority. The good news is there hasn't been anything major, and many of them result in us reverting back to a default template and modifying CSS while keeping the enhancements we do want.

No SSL yet? This might be a good opportunity to add it.

SSL is now supported, and the default. http redirects to https.

Apparantly it is impossible to sign out for me.

Apparantly it is impossible to sign out for me.

Can you try clearing your cookies for forums.xonotic.org?

Apparantly it is impossible to sign out for me.

Can you try clearing your cookies for forums.xonotic.org?

That solves the problem

Apparantly it is impossible to sign out for me.

Can you try clearing your cookies for forums.xonotic.org?

That solves the problem

Thanks Mirio.

Can't find the "Mark all forums read" button in "Default" theme. Help?

It's at the very bottom of the page. There is a gray bar with some links. This one is called "Mark All Forums Read".

why the forum is not responsive? today I checked on my phone and had to zoom in.

why the forum is not responsive? today I checked on my phone and had to zoom in.

Responsiveness and adaption to mobile access platforms are an entirely different thing. If you want to report a malfunction, be specific.

The design is not responsive. Seems like a legitimate complaint in 2017

Yep, that falls under a "future improvement" as the system itself wasn't designed with this in mind. So I have to implement it a theme, which is a bit more complex than it sounds.

The design is not responsive. Seems like a legitimate complaint in 2017

Huh? Responsiveness means that it actually reacts to your input and how it does. I would agree that the current design feels a bit slower (things take a bit longer to load/show up), but what Champ was on about was that he had to zoom in - which probably means that fonts were too small to be readable on a mobile device. This may come from the site not offering a theme tailored to mobile devices that can be automatically delivered to smartphone browsers as an alternative to the desktop browser theme. Of course a theme designed for a desktop browser would be less usable on a mobile phone's small screen, but that doesn't make it automatically less responsive there...

@Halogene - I believe the complaint is about responsive web design as described here. It's hard to do even if you have complete control over the product (it was a full three years later before I made XonStat responsive). The situation we have for the forums is one where we don't have such control, so it is quite a difficult task.

There are some responsive themes for MyBB, but none that look as nice as this one.
Might be possible to do it with some clever CSS, but that depends on how this theme really works behind the scenes.

Just a reminder that there is a xonotic-mybb sandbox available for anyone that wants to experiment and submit patches upstream https://gitlab.com/detrate/xonotic-mybb

Unfortunately the workflow is going to be more mouse-centric until I improve that via a filesystem-to-database bridge that skips the XML serialization.

You might be able to get away with pure CSS, but I'm guessing it's going to be a lot easier if I were to migrate to a more div-based layout... which is a possibility as a future improvement. Obviously a "mobile-first" theme is up for consideration as an alternative approach. Lastly, a plugin could be written the route to separate mobile themes/templates, but that increases maintenance overhead.

Personally, I find the most value to be in writing that bridge for the sandbox as it lowers the barriers for theme development on this system. That being said, the theme itself is composed of over 100 hierarchical template files. Themes may fallback to global templates as well. So this isn't as simple as churning out a web 2.0 blog template.

Nice to see the update coming to fruition, great work!
 
Regarding the loading speed, there is some potential in optimizing the images.
For example, png files could be recompressed with zopflipng.
In case of the logo, that reduces the size from 67 KB to 58 KB, without loss of quality.
Avatars also would benefit from this.
 

Code:

zopflipng -y -m --lossy_transparent logo.png logo_opti.png
# As a note, --lossy_transparent removes colors where alpha == 0. No visual difference.

 
And since the tab header background (thead.png) seems to be colorized in code,
it should suffice to store it in 8-bit grayscale (158 KB to 68 KB):
 

Code:

convert thead.png -colorspace Gray thead_opti.png
zopflipng ...

 
Most importantly, the size of the header could easily be halved,
without losing much quality (519 KB to 254 KB):

 

Code:

convert bfbg.jpg -quality 94 -sampling-factor 4:4:4 -strip bfbg_opti.jpg
# Of course an uncompressed source is preferable

 
In total, that would reduce the payload by about 400 KB.

As an additional note, it seems redundant that code blocks have an explicit Code: header.

 

Code:

code

[optimized images]

Thanks, that's a good point, I could/should work that into the build system for the theme, but I'll drop these you've attached into the current theme in the interim.

An additional optimization in this regard is the beautification of the CSS to normalize and merge selectors and declarations.

As an additional note, it seems redundant that code blocks have an explicit Code: header.

 

Code:

code

I think the reasoning behind this is that the wysiwyg editor (SCEditor) also has a "PHP Code" block. Though, I do agree it's redundant. I'll revisit this when I also look into extending the syntax highlight to more sensible languages for this forum.

Thanks for your reports.