Updated look for the site (part2)

Adyx

Boards.ie: Paddy wrote: »

I assure you it's not an ego thing. We have reverted previous changes based on user feedback and I'm sure we will do it again in the future.



I'm sorry that you're finding this frustrating, that isn't our goal. I think we were all pretty surprised by the strength of the negative reaction from some users to this change.

To try to give you the straightest answer I can: From a technical perspective there is no reason that the bottom breadcrumbs can't be put back. However, they won't be put back the way they were previously for design reasons. They took up too much room on the page and the old footer breadcrumb layout won't work with the new layout of the thread footer. We're also not entirely sure that they should go back as there is a strong argument that say's we're just duplicating functionality unnecessarily. (which is why we removed them in the first place)

So, at this point we haven't made a final decision on what will ultimately happen with them which is probably why our answers seem a bit vague.

Space wouldn't be an issue if the header wasn't so enormous. It's at least 3 times the size of the header in the original Beta and most of the space in it is wasted since there is little extra functionality. All the buttons (Quote, Follow Thread etc) are gigantic as well. I can only assume it's to achieve some commonality with the touch site because you could mash those buttons with your fist.

Sad Professor

Boards.ie: Paddy wrote: »

Actually you may have a very good idea here...

Is that what you mostly used the bottom breadcrumb for, just to go back up to the thread listing?

In my own case, yes, and I'd imagine most users would be the same. I actually don't care about there being breadcrumbs at the bottom as long as there's a Back to Forum button.

wnolan1992

Boards.ie: Paddy wrote: »

Actually you may have a very good idea here...

Is that what you mostly used the bottom breadcrumb for, just to go back up to the thread listing?

That's pretty much all I ever use breadcrumbs (both the top and bottom included) for, and from reading the posts here I'd say I'm not alone in that.

In a way, having a "Back to Forum" button would kill two birds with one stone. Those who want to go back to the thread list will be brought there, and those who want to go back to the Homepage or their CP (who have the Sticky Header switched off) will have the header in view once the thread list loads.

Obviously, there're knock on problems from a solution like that, namely that you're loading a new page instead of just scrolling up the currently loaded page, which might ire people with slower connections and on mobile.

Faith

John mac wrote: »

Has anyone asked for prev/next thread link to be reinstated. ?

dont think so .

Yes, I did, amongst others.

And it's back, hurrah!! Thanks guys .

For those of you who are confused about its functionality, I use it in private forums and in forums I moderate, where I read every single thread. It saves me a whole load of time. And those of you who remember the years where boards moved at the pace of a snail, the "next thread" button was a godsend for only loading one new page to get to the next thread, rather than having to go back to the forum to do it and then click into the thread.

Star Lord

Boards.ie: Paddy wrote: »

Actually you may have a very good idea here...

Is that what you mostly used the bottom breadcrumb for, just to go back up to the thread listing?

Yup, that's exactly what I've used it for. Returning from the current thread to the parent forum.
I can see how using the bottom breadcrumbs may be duplicating functionality alright, but for ease and speed of intuitive navigation, nothing beat that. A return to forum button (or simple text link!) would do this job beautifully.

Boards.ie: Danny

The PageDn/PageUp handling has been extended to logged out users and has had it's reliability improved.

And after a few attempts, we believe we've managed to implement a workaround for scrolling with the spacebar. It should no longer scroll too far and disappear some text under the sticky header. It should also not scroll on text areas, input boxes etc

Testing has taken place in IE8, IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera predominately in Ubuntu (except Safari and IE). Please report any issues you may find.

Danny

28064212

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

The PageDn/PageUp handling has been extended to logged out users and has had it's reliability improved.

And after a few attempts, we believe we've managed to implement a workaround for scrolling with the spacebar. It should no longer scroll to far and disappear some text under the sticky header.

Testing has taken place in IE8, IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera predominately in Ubuntu (except Safari and IE). Please report any issues you may find.

Danny

You're probably not going to like this, but....

• If the sticky header is turned off, it doesn't scroll far enough (i.e. it's not doing a full page-down)
• Shift+Space used to Page Up, it doesn't do that anymore

(Both FF 15.0.1)

Boards.ie: Danny

28064212 wrote: »

You're probably not going to like this, but....

• If the sticky header is turned off, it doesn't scroll far enough (i.e. it's not doing a full page-down)

With sticky header off the javascript event handler is removed using $(document).off(). I don't believe any browser just full end-to-end scrolls, they always leave a bit of a buffer. When I was looking into this a few months ago I found if our sticky header was only 50px high we wouldn't have had to change a thing from native browser behaviour

I will double check the event is getting unbound though

28064212 wrote: »

• Shift+Space used to Page Up, it doesn't do that anymore

(Both FF 15.0.1)

Guess you learn something new every day - I'll see about deteting a control key on spacebar press and handling that, thanks.

Danny

28064212

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

With sticky header off the javascript event handler is removed using $(document).off(). I don't believe any browser just full end-to-end scrolls, they always leave a bit of a buffer. When I was looking into this a few months ago I found if our sticky header was only 50px high we wouldn't have had to change a thing from native browser behaviour

I will double check the event is getting unbound though

There's always a bit of a buffer, but it was very small. Now it's that plus the full size of the header, which is a lot

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Guess you learn something new every day - I'll see about deteting a control key on spacebar press and handling that, thanks.

Danny

Thanks

Oh, and another (minor) one: When you load a page that jumps to a particular post, it used to jump the whole way to the post. There's now space for the header at the top, even with it turned off.

Boards.ie: Danny

28064212 wrote: »

There's always a bit of a buffer, but it was very small. Now it's that plus the full size of the header, which is a lot

You're right, I'll double check that and iron out any issues.

Oh, and another (minor) one: When you load a page that jumps to a particular post, it used to jump the whole way to the post. There's now space for the header at the top, even with it turned off.

Leave that one with me, the changes should only have affected the keypress handling, not the onload post-jump one

Danny

Boards.ie: Danny

28064212 wrote: »

You're probably not going to like this, but....

1. If the sticky header is turned off, it doesn't scroll far enough (i.e. it's not doing a full page-down)
2. Shift+Space used to Page Up, it doesn't do that anymore
3. When you load a page that jumps to a particular post, it used to jump the whole way to the post. There's now space for the header at the top, even with it turned off.

1. Fixed
2. Fixed
3. Can't reproduce this one, could you provide me with a link that exhibits the behaviour?

Danny

oscarBravo

Um. When I just loaded this thread with the "first unread" link, your post was partly hidden under the sticky header. That's the first time I've seen that happen.

28064212

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

1. Fixed
2. Fixed

Yay, and yay

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

3. Can't reproduce this one, could you provide me with a link that exhibits the behaviour?

Ah, seems to be a caching issue, works ok now. Will let you know if it shows up again

oscarBravo

oscarBravo wrote: »

Um. When I just loaded this thread with the "first unread" link, your post was partly hidden under the sticky header. That's the first time I've seen that happen.

This hasn't happened since. Glitch in the matrix, I guess.

oscarBravo

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

And after a few attempts, we believe we've managed to implement a workaround for scrolling with the spacebar. It should no longer scroll too far and disappear some text under the sticky header. It should also not scroll on text areas, input boxes etc

Ooh, a penny just dropped with me.

The page up/down keys are being intercepted when I'm composing a post. I sometimes quote a post, then select chunks of it to delete if I don't want to quote those bits. I tend to do this with shift-pgdn to extend the selection downwards. As of some time ago, when I do that, the whole page scrolls - which is a little disconcerting.

Quazzie

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

The PageDn/PageUp handling has been extended to logged out users and has had it's reliability improved.

And after a few attempts, we believe we've managed to implement a workaround for scrolling with the spacebar. It should no longer scroll too far and disappear some text under the sticky header. It should also not scroll on text areas, input boxes etc

Testing has taken place in IE8, IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera predominately in Ubuntu (except Safari and IE). Please report any issues you may find.

Danny

I could kiss you right now.*




*under the assumption Danny is short for Danielle

Boards.ie: Danny

oscarBravo wrote: »

The page up/down keys are being intercepted when I'm composing a post

No more

Danny

Boards.ie: Danny

Below the Quick Reply box, there's now a fourth link - back to forum

Danny

Star Lord

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Below the Quick Reply box, there's now a fourth link - back to forum

Danny

To steal a phrase from Quazzie:

I could kiss you right now.*




*under the assumption Danny is short for Danielle**

** Who am I kidding, you're getting one either way.

Thargor

Thanks for the attempt but its too far down, you have to scroll down to find it so its still extra work and this makes it unintuitive, the place for breadcrumbs or their pointless Boards.ie replacements is below the Post Reply and Unfollow buttons on the left there <----

wnolan1992

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Below the Quick Reply box, there's now a fourth link - back to forum

Danny

Thank you kindly.


Now, something I raised a while back (think it was while ye were working on the Dark Theme), can anything be done about the tooltips on the "Unfollow"/"Follow" button at the bottom of the thread, as well as the "Go" button?




EDIT: Also, I notice that the "Post Reply" button doesn't have a tooltip, whereas all the others do, would be nice if there was consistency IMO.


Just a minor gripe, but we can't be letting ye rest on ye're laurels after the Back to Forum button now can we? :P :P

Boards.ie: Paddy

The follow/unfollow one is a bit of a pain to fix as it involves tinkering with some fairly arcane JS that was written long before anyone on the current dev team was around.

The others are fairly minor. I'll add them all in as bugs now, they will be on low priority though.

.BrianJM

Why tinker?
With a 'fresh, new look' boards surely a fresh piece of code would be appropriate.

wnolan1992

Thargor wrote: »

Thanks for the attempt but its too far down, you have to scroll down to find it so its still extra work and this makes it unintuitive, the place for breadcrumbs or their pointless Boards.ie replacements is below the Post Reply and Unfollow buttons on the left there <----

I would agree with this. Would be far better if they were above the QR box.

Maybe try keeping your QR box minimised? Not a perfect solution I know, but that's what I'm doing for now, considering I more often than not use Advanced Reply anyway.

Boards.ie: Danny

Auld-Yin wrote: »

Why tinker?
With a 'fresh, new look' boards surely a fresh piece of code would be appropriate.

This "fresh, new look" is a skin on the top of old, legacy code. Work's ongoing to move away from it, but we're not there yet. So yeah, tinkering

Danny

_blank_

So, I arrived to work this morning, opened Boards as normal, and my pages looked like the picture labelled "normal"

At about 0720 or so, they all changed to look like the one labelled "weird". It just..happened. I wasn't in UserCP messing with settings, I wasn't tweaking anything in IE8 (no other browser available here in work), I was just reading a thread, clicked back out to the forum and had the new, squashed layout. I was able to screencap the "normal" one from a different tab that I hadn't refreshed.

Is this behaviour expected. Can I go back to the old layout?

I don't like this new one. Too much empty space.

Thanks

Boards.ie: Neil

Des wrote: »

So, I arrived to work this morning, opened Boards as normal, and my pages looked like the picture labelled "normal"

At about 0720 or so, they all changed to look like the one labelled "weird". It just..happened. I wasn't in UserCP messing with settings, I wasn't tweaking anything in IE8 (no other browser available here in work), I was just reading a thread, clicked back out to the forum and had the new, squashed layout. I was able to screencap the "normal" one from a different tab that I hadn't refreshed.

Is this behaviour expected. Can I go back to the old layout?

I don't like this new one. Too much empty space.

Thanks

We served boards in a fix width of 960px when you're not logged in.

When you log in you have the option to choose full width or 960px width in appearance settings.

Something odd must have happened to make you get logged out in the weird attachment.

Boards.ie: Paddy

Just to clarify what we're saying here, when logged out you will have a 960px fixed with design, once you login you will get a fluid 960-1400px design or you have the option for a 100% width layout on the "Appearance Settings" page.

_blank_

Wonder how I got logged out then?

Strange one, I'm automatically logged in.

Boards.ie: Paddy

Not entirely sure, there's potentially a bunch of reasons. If you notice it becoming a recurring issue please let us know.