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sangiro

Forum Template Upgrades

By sangiro, in Announcements

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sangiro    4

sangiro
Heya all,

As you may have noticed, we've made some changes to the forum templates. There's nothing too dramatic here. This is primarily a template revamp to align the look-and-feel of the forums a little closer to the rest of the site. Some noteworthy changes:

  • The most obvious change is moving from a completely liquid design that takes up your entire screen to a fixed width scaling down approach. This is groundwork for where we want to be in the future, which is a responsive design that works well and looks good on a large desktop screen as well as on smaller mobile devices. The screen size is slightly larger than the rest of the site (at 1200 pixels) and will "shrink" to 1000 pixels - like the rest of the site before you start scrolling.

  • Sidebars have been moved to the right where it doesn't occupy the primary real estate on the page. The most important thing on the page (the actual forums) now starts at the top left where your eye starts to read the page.

  • The User Profile Pages have seen some pretty big changes. Go fill out your profile info and make it look good! We want to start bringing together all the contributions - forum, videos, photos, articles, classifieds, anything a user has placed on the site in one location. More work to come here.

  • There are small tweaks and changes that we've added (like the adult content flag) on the functionality side, but not that much.

Have fun and let us know what you think via the Feedback forum. Please report any bugs here.:)
Safe swoops
Sangiro

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theonlyski    3

theonlyski

Thanks to you and Meso for all the hard work getting this going. I know it was a LOT of work.:)
Looks good!B|

"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
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Bolas    5

Bolas

Thanks HH! Looks great!

One question. In the previous template, the My Stuff bar on the right could be disabled under Settings to allow posts to go all the way across the page. Can it still be disabled? Didn't see it under settings now.

Did see the new NSFW checkbox and adult content setting. Bonfire users, Especially BillyVance thread posters will need to change their settings. :P

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Meso    38

Meso
No ability to remove the sidebar anymore, primary reason being that to make everything fit neatly and organize it in the most logical manner. That sidebar now contains main navigation links that aren't duplicated elsewhere. Things like the friends and subscriptions.

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Fast    0

Fast
Might not be the case for everyone - but reading longer threads, it wracks on my brain some that the background color of the profile information is the same as the overall page background color.

I temporarily firebugged it to something different on my computer and it was a little easier for me to deal with.

I dunno - just my opinion really, I am sure you have your reasons for choosing the colors to use where you do. The narrow gap between the profile information and the body background just makes things start to blend together after I have been reading the forums for awhile.
~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

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Andy9o8    0

Andy9o8
Meso

No ability to remove the sidebar anymore, primary reason being that to make everything fit neatly and organize it in the most logical manner.



Sorta squishes stuff so less appears in given screen view.
Also adds more advertising to the page. (Just sayin'. ;))

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Beachbum    0

Beachbum
sangiro


  • The most obvious change is moving from a completely liquid design that takes up your entire screen to a fixed width scaling down approach. This is groundwork for where we want to be in the future, which is a responsive design that works well and looks good on a large desktop screen as well as on smaller mobile devices. The screen size is slightly larger than the rest of the site (at 1200 pixels) and will "shrink" to 1000 pixels - like the rest of the site before you start scrolling.



I'm finding that once inside both the forums themselves, and posts, I continually have to scroll sideways to see entire posts instead of them wrapping as they used to ... is there something I can set to stop this?
As long as you are happy with yourself ... who cares what the rest of the world thinks?

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Meso    38

Meso
On mobile or on a pc/laptop? The only time that this should be an issue, is if you're using very out of date hardware.

Our site is catered to screen resolutions of 1024x768 and up (far below the standard screen size used). So you shouldn't be having to scroll on a computer unless you're using a really low resolution, namely something like 800x600.

If you're having to scroll, we recommend seeing if you are able to increase the resolution on your monitor (how you do this will depend on the operating system you run). But we would suggest running at a minimum of 1024x768 pixels.

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BrianM    1

BrianM
sangiro

a responsive design that works well and looks good on a large desktop screen as well as on smaller mobile devices



I'm confused about how going from a design that scales to the screen size to one that barely scales at all (changing width by a measly 200 pixels) is supposed to make things look/work better on a variety of screen sizes.

My horizontal resolution is 1920. The new look uses only 62% of my screen - and only 51% if I ignore the sidebar (which is only visible at the top of the screen, and not is not visible as soon as I scroll down the page).

I can now view significantly less content on the screen, so I have to scroll more. I have the space, I want to use it.

Worse, if I resize my window in order to fit multiple windows on the screen, now the content doesn't fit and I'm stuck scrolling back and forth to read every single line.

It also looks really bad - I have this river of text flowing down the middle of my screen with huge swaths of blank space on either side. It is ugly, distracting, and frankly, it reminds me of the bad old days of 90's web design.

The rest of the changes are great - but can we please have the forums scale to fit the screen size again?
"It's amazing what you can learn while you're not talking." - Skydivesg

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Meso    38

Meso
Hey,

We appreciate you sharing your concerns and feelings regarding the new template, and I'll try and address some of the issues you've raised.

The old template didn't scale to screen size properly, yes it may have been a 100% width, meaning larger monitors would see 'more forum', but when it came to smaller devices, it was worse - and even at 1024 pixels, there were problems. The new template is better on devices like tablets and mobile phones, though still not ideal, and we'll be working on that in future.

The width of the screen is one that fits the rest of the site. We've been using a centered 'fixed width' layout now on the other areas of the site for about a year. Because we realized that the forum is a place you would want a bit wider, we did so and moved it up about 20% from the other areas of the site. And while there is the chance that we could increase it in future by another 10-15%, we're unlikely to go to a full width screen.

With regards to window resizing, the old template was the same. While the old template had a 100% width, it still also had a minimum width of around 1000px, pretty similar to what we have at the moment. None of the designs have been responsive in that manner, or completely liquid. Though that is something that will happen in the future - a proper responsive design.

Don't think that the blank spaces aren't something we considered and looked at, because we spent some time discussing them, and the width of the site. We also went and explored what the latest trends are and what users are getting used to on other sites, and fact of the matter is that fixed width, centered and rather narrow - is what is done at the moment. The full width forums were very 90s, something like PHPBB which filled up the entire screen. That's just not used any more. Sony actually use very similar widths and layouts as we do, on their site. The point I'm trying to make is that forums with the current width we have, is where things are right now. And it may take some getting used to by those who are used to full width forums (I am one of those people).

We're constantly working to ensure that the experience on dropzone.com is the best it can be, and as such we're constantly working at making things better. And I can definitely say, that the current forums are a huge step up from the previous ones. But I can assure you that in the future a full responsive design will come, which should relieve some of the issues you've brought up.

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GooniesKid    0

GooniesKid
sangiro

Heya all,

As you may have noticed, we've made some changes to the forum templates. There's nothing too dramatic here. This is primarily a template revamp to align the look-and-feel of the forums a little closer to the rest of the site. Some noteworthy changes:

  • The most obvious change is moving from a completely liquid design that takes up your entire screen to a fixed width scaling down approach. This is groundwork for where we want to be in the future, which is a responsive design that works well and looks good on a large desktop screen as well as on smaller mobile devices. The screen size is slightly larger than the rest of the site (at 1200 pixels) and will "shrink" to 1000 pixels - like the rest of the site before you start scrolling.

  • Sidebars have been moved to the right where it doesn't occupy the primary real estate on the page. The most important thing on the page (the actual forums) now starts at the top left where your eye starts to read the page.

  • The User Profile Pages have seen some pretty big changes. Go fill out your profile info and make it look good! We want to start bringing together all the contributions - forum, videos, photos, articles, classifieds, anything a user has placed on the site in one location. More work to come here.

  • There are small tweaks and changes that we've added (like the adult content flag) on the functionality side, but not that much.

Have fun and let us know what you think via the Feedback forum. Please report any bugs here.:)


I have nothing "bad" to say. (People think my opinions are "bad" when i'm just saying what others wont)

But i love the changes. Makes it more streamlined.

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