Forums Software Upgrade

[roddy]

Header now has title and Google search box. Have also emailed a couple of advertisers about smaller banners - the current set up is effective, but I'm under no illusions about the impression given to new visitors. You logged-in folks don't see that, at least once you log in.

It's kind of an all or nothing thing on the quoting I think. I suppose I could probably make it so that instead of the quote there's an 'in reply to' link which points back to the post in question, that might work and still leaves the scope for editing in of actual text.

Anyone online for the last thirty minutes may have noticed a sudden appearance of Chinese. However the sudden disappearance of English required a rapid rollback. I shall look at this again tomorrow.

[chrix]

Do they have both traditional and simplified? I'm not just talking about different character sets, but also about vocabulary, as especially for forum-related matters they are quite divergent....

[Gleaves]

Might be my imagination, but I feel like Chinese is slightly easier to read on this new board, 比较清楚. Good stuff.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but comments that were previously covered by spoiler tags are now full monty for the world to see.

[c6ray]

RSS users - any feedback?

The old feed address at http://www.chinese-forums.com/external.php?type=rss2 now gives error 49 at Bloglines:

The feed does not appear to exist. This can be caused by the feed URL being incorrect, or it can be caused by a configuration issue with the server hosting the feed. If this error continues, you should check the feed URL and, if it is wrong, subscribe to the correct URL.

Resubscribing at http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/rss/blog/ works.

[atitarev]

Copied from another thread:

....

In another thread on the new look and feel - tracking own posts and subscribed threads has become very difficult, seriously. This is something, which was much better in the other forum and it is a common functionality for the forum software. Could you look into this, please? The subscribed threads or threads where a user has participated should be sorted by date.

Completely in agreement, but could you please keep any comments here - the more things are in one place, the more I can find them. (although made a big change to subscribed threads yesterday, should be at least somewhat improved, just haven't had a chance to post about it). If you've already said so and there's been no movement feel free to repost - things might get moved up a list.

Thanks very much for adding the Watched link. Sorry for not replying in the right thread. Copied the discussion to the proper place.

[roddy]

No problem, I should be apologizing for it taking so long - I spent a while trying to figure it out, consulted with Imron, he sent over the solution and I spent an afternoon figuring out how to put it into the skin. The actual putting took literally seconds. That I think was the number one gripe, and hopefully it can now be considered . . . a little bit better? Ideally it wants to be paged.

[roddy]

For mobile users. Short version - see bottom left, and greater things are coming.

[roddy]

Couple I skipped earlier

BTW, what is the difference between a yellow icon and a blue icon on the left of the New Content page?

One take you to the last post, one to new posts.

I do not agree that things need to be mainly in English if we are going to link up blogs to the Chinese Forums.

If you're just linking a blog so it appears in the list (as you've already done) I'm not too fussed. Actually posting the content here, or importing it automatically, would be different.

Things I've just done, beside the above. . .

Reputation: you can no longer rate your own content. I know this will be a mortal blow to many of you, but soldier on. However, if you make a post with five positive votes (on balance, negative posts will count against it), it gets a popular icon. I'll probably move that goalpost as people make more use of the reputation system. Go and rate this first post and you'll see (it's at 3 now).

I've not given up on a Chinese interface, but I need to submit a ticket, and there isn't a simplified pack as yet.

Have emailed advertisers and will hopefully be using less in-your-face banners in the near future - may roll back depending on consequences. At that point I may set up an opt-in / opt-out group (the old Hide Ads group is gone, although I could probably retrieve it if I wanted). Perhaps a 'reload with ads' link so you can see what's being advertised on topics you are interested in. Who knows, it's a whole world of possibilities.

More later.

[jbradfor]

It's looking better and better by the day!

My only real complaint is with the editor. When I click on, say, the bold icon, the "[ b ] [ / b ]" markup tags show up as they should. [i added spaces so it won't get parsed.] However, the markup tags are highlighted, so that when I start to type, the markup tags go away.

This is under Firefox 3.0.18 under Linux. Not sure if others see this as well?

Ohh, I just noticed we have _subscripts and ^superscripts in the editor.... _funfun^fun

[gato]

Potstickers^∞

[jbradfor]

I'm going to have to start a new thread, "did gato just insult me?" :rolleyes:

[edelweis]

Is there a way to have a bigger font for Chinese characters than for Latin characters?

This seems a general computing issue, but perhaps the forum software could be tweaked to do this?

[jbradfor]

I like the new way searching for new messages is handled. For me, it's showing all threads sorted by time of last post, even those that have nothing new for me. And there is an icon clearly stating which threads have new posts. This is different than the last version, which doesn't show a thread if there are no new posts. After playing with it a bit the last couple of days, I think I like the new one more.

I did encounter one weirdness. This thread is not showing up for me under the "New" tab, but it is showing up for me under the "Today" tab. Glitch in the matrix?

[Meng Lelan]

If you're just linking a blog so it appears in the list (as you've already done) I'm not too fussed. Actually posting the content here, or importing it automatically, would be different.

What do you mean by "here"? There are so many "here"'s in here that I don't understand what you're saying. In mathematical terms,

Chinese Forums = Here^∞

How come your blog shows up under Latest Blog Entries and mine doesn't?

[roddy]

Real life keeps on getting in the way at the moment. Progress is slow.

[imron]

I've got a warn level of 10%, thanks to imron . . .

活该

[imron]

On the old site, the top of the "Latest Discussions" panel was actually also a link to the "New Posts" page. It would be nice if this could be also be the same on the new site.

[necroflux]

Unfortunately I've got to say I'm not a fan of the new look, at first I actually thought I typed the URL in wrong as the upper left hand corner totally looks like one of those spam trap domains (http://chinese-forum.com/ for example, which I accidentally type about half of the time anyway). The google search looks out of place and jammed into place under the logo, and I'm not sure why it's even necessary when there's a forum search button on the right side.

Something about the colors/layout/spacing on the front page makes it very, very difficult to process the information on the page. I do like the forum layout style though, when you're looking at a list of threads.

Just my opinion of course.

[gougou]

I'm not sure why it's even necessary when there's a forum search button on the right side.

It used to be that the built-in search function was lacking - not sure whether that's still the case for the new software.

[Meng Lelan]

Something about the colors/layout/spacing on the front page makes it very, very difficult to process the information on the page

It's very washed out and too many shades of white and blue. Huge amounts of white space. It's not a very user friendly layout.