Open Discussion: the Launch Announcement

[Aaron]

Please let us know what you think of the launch of the new forum software?

Initial impressions?

[chrroe]

Hi Aaron!

Definitively a progress (beyond) compared to the wordpress-platform and even the public UBB for BC 2! ;)

Let's see, how things come in to flow here ...


Bye
Christoph

[Michael Bulgrien]

How soon will you be phasing out (closing threads) on the WordPress forum?

[Tim]

How soon will you be phasing out (closing threads) on the WordPress forum?

I'll wait until people seem to be comfortable with vBulletin.

[Marjolein Katsma]

I'll wait until people seem to be comfortable with vBulletin.I already am. ;) But being able to attach screenshots is a major improvement over both the old forum and WordPress, and of course threading support is an improvement over WordPress, too!

It would be great though if you could find a way to migrate existing discussions to vBulletin. Does that sound feasible?

[Aaron]

There are some methods for importing wordpress into vBulletin, but I could not come up with a better way than manually. They are unofficial hacks, and we are still testing the stability of the base vBulletin install. Also, the issue is wordpress organizes all of its conversations into a single thread, while those conversations would be much better as separate threads.

There are no plans for an import at this time.

As we answer and close down wordpress, we may reconstruct particular conversations into new threads (only taking responses to the original post, etc). We are also looking at leaving wordpress 'up,' just in a read only mode for reference.

[Marjolein Katsma]

Your Cirrus theme is progressing nicely! I think I'm seeing the third version already. :D

It would be neat if you could do your nifty the banner-rotation trick here as well! (I'm going to steal that trick somewhere!)

[Marjolein Katsma]

More theme changes... :)

One thing: I'm not too fond of the default font for message bodies - Verdana may take up a bit more space, but is far more legible, IMO.

[Tim]

I'm using Trebuchet in order to match the Cirrus beta site. (Our main site does use Verdana.)

The theme here is a bit temporary -- we'll release a new main site design in a couple of months and I'll try to match that style in the forums.

[Tim]

Marjolein,

I've gotten the banner-rotation working. Let me know if you'd like the code. :D

[Marjolein Katsma]

Marjolein,

I've gotten the banner-rotation working. Let me know if you'd like the code. :DI noticed it worked before I found your post. No need for the code, I can easily write my own. (I'm thinking of doing a season-based or month-based rotation rather than time-based.) I love the idea, and have been taking pictures last Saturday already with that idea in mind. ;)

[Pete]

Hey, these new forums are great! Nice job, Team Scooter. It only took me two months to find them. ;)


One thing: I'm not too fond of the default font for message bodies - Verdana may take up a bit more space, but is far more legible, IMO.

I use 1600x1200 resolution. It would also be nice if the font size was bigger (or not hard-coded at all). I set a big minimum font size in Firefox and usually that works, but not with the message bodies in these forums. Strange. All of the other text in these forums is fine.

[Aaron]

Do you still run into this issue in the newest version of firefox?

I experimented around with ctrl+ +;ctrl+ -;ctrl+ 0. They seem to decrease and increase all of the fonts on the page.

Is there another setting you are changing which is not affecting the body of the message?

[Pete]

Aaron, as far as I know there is no other Firefox setting that's causing a problem. Anyway, I just looked at the source code of this HTML page and see that it hardcodes a 10pt font size. This is one of my pet peeves. Hardcoding font sizes on webpages is completely against the spirit of HTML and the reason is that it ruins the display of the page for people who use larger or smaller screen resolutions than 800x600 or 1024x768.

I hope that you can either remove or increase the hardcoded font size. I know that I can use Ctrl-+ every time I visit these forums, and use Ctrl-- when I then go to a well behaved website, but that is not ideal.

Anyway, thanks for investigating this.

[Tim]

Setting the minimum font size in Firefox works for me, and effects the font size of the message bodies.

[Tim]

I've added a vBulletin style called "Cirrus Generic". You can select it via the style picker at the bottom of this page.

[Pete]

Thanks, Tim. The "Cirrus Generic" forum style is great. :)

I discovered that this has to be set in "Profile > Edit Options" by forum members if we want this style to persist across logins.