xjas wrote on 2020-01-02, 11:09:

I'd argue strongly against a "lazy option" for uploading photos. If you can't be bothered to pull your pic into Photoshop and do […]
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I'd argue strongly against a "lazy option" for uploading photos. If you can't be bothered to pull your pic into Photoshop and do some basic editing as needed (crop it to show what you want, adjust the brightness / color balance, rotate it into the right orientation, check it's not in smear-o-vision, make sure your exposed junk isn't visible in any reflective surfaces, etc.) maybe you shouldn't upload it at all. Not saying every pic has to be an art piece, but I've seen some unbelievably awful pics uploaded here where you can barely even tell what's being shown despite it being about as big as the current board allows. There's a limit of 5 pics per post so it really doesn't take that long to make sure they're decent ones.

A 1600x1200 or 1920x1080 image easily fits into 2MB and IMHO there's no rational reason to upload anything larger than that. That's the size limit for Ebay listings, and that's a commercial service where money is involved and detailed photos of an item are absolutely critical. If that size is good enough for actual trade, it's good enough for our purposes here.

I browse threads like 'bought this hardware today' on my phone a lot, and I have a 512MB monthly data cap. If the average photo starts edging up towards 10MB that would obliterate my bandwidth in like three page loads. Even just loading & re-saving a typical camera pic at a lower jpeg quality level (I use 9) can shave about ~80% of the file size off while keeping the compression imperceptible.

Regarding auto-resizing uploads: that's how vcfed.org works and it's a clusterfuck of poor implimentation. Until, like, a month ago, it would brutally resize pics so small (to like 400x300) that any text on them became impossible to read. They FINALLY upped the resolution & size limits after a bunch of complaints, but whatever software the board uses still re-"compresses" black & white PNGs with huge solid color bands to lossy jpeg at some garbage quality level, which manages to make them look worse and increase the file size at the same time. (That's not a hypothetical example - I was trying to upload an info sheet scanned as a B&W PNG a while ago, and it just would. not. let. me. do. it. in any way that kept it readable. I eventually gave up.)

Granted, it wouldn't be hard to do a better job implementing the resizing feature than that board does, but it's not trivial either & I'd still rather force the poster to make choices about how they want their uploads trimmed down.

+1 I agree.

Oh shit, I almost forgot to post this.

I hate the new typeface. I can understand why Trebuchet may be a reasonably good typeface for certain types of websites but for a forum where ease and speed of reading is most important this highly stylized Verdana derivative is cancer of the eyes.

Can we please switch to a more easy to read, simple sans serif font like Helvetica or Verdana instead? I would even be OK with a decent screen friendly serif font like Georgia, but please not this Trebuchet shit..

appiah4 wrote on 2020-01-02, 12:39:

Oh shit, I almost forgot to post this.

I hate the new typeface. I can understand why Trebuchet may be a reasonably good typeface for certain types of websites but for a forum where ease and speed of reading is most important this highly stylized Verdana derivative is cancer of the eyes.

Can we please switch to a more easy to read, simple sans serif font like Helvetica instead? I would even be OK with a decent screen friendly serif font like Georgia, but please not this Trebuchet shit..

https://makeawebsitehub.com/best-safe-web-fonts-html-css/

Check the part about Trebuchet. I personally prefer to use Helvetica Neue on every project I do, and sometimes Roboto.

bfcastello wrote on 2020-01-02, 12:43:

https://makeawebsitehub.com/best-safe-web-fonts-html-css/

Check the part about Trebuchet. I personally prefer to use Helvetica Neue on every project I do, and sometimes Roboto.

I know what Trebuchet is and why it is common on the internet. It just doesn't lend well to this site. (Coincidentally this site appears to be rendered using Merriweather Sans on my Linux PC instead, which is an even worse offender than Trebuchet MS in many respects, so that might also be contributing to the poor appearance as well..)

I think it would look a lot better with a simpler font like Helvetica, Verdana or Georgia.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-01-02, 12:39:

I hate the new typeface.

+1

That was the other thing I didn't mention in my post. It just plain takes me longer to read things. ESPECIALLY TYPED OUT NUMBERS. 123456789 - look at those - those are vertically all over the place. And given the nature of these forums, numbers are used quite frequently.

It still seems to me that the simple solution here is to add some extra themes that people can choose from in their global settings once logged in. "Flat Style" is a great looking modern theme. ProSilver for retro.

bmwsvsu wrote on 2020-01-02, 15:04:

It still seems to me that the simple solution here is to add some extra themes that people can choose from in their global settings once logged in. "Flat Style" is a great looking modern theme. ProSilver for retro.

Adding more themes is NOT a simple solution, Snover explained this already.

bmwsvsu wrote on 2020-01-02, 15:04:

That was the other thing I didn't mention in my post. It just plain takes me longer to read things. ESPECIALLY TYPED OUT NUMBERS. 123456789 - look at those - those are vertically all over the place. And given the nature of these forums, numbers are used quite frequently.

I guess this may be to harder confuse 5 with 6 with 8 and 8 with 3. They are less similar now.

I am for the lazy upload with both hands and legs!

I want to mess around with old tech, not with mundane photo editing. Often times, i'll just describe stuff and don't add any pictures to the post because of that.

But in general i would suggest that any reader would appreciate a photo along with description pretty much every time...

It would be nice if photos were just resized automatically if they are too big when uploaded.

Dominus wrote on 2020-01-02, 17:08:

bmwsvsu wrote on 2020-01-02, 15:04:

It still seems to me that the simple solution here is to add some extra themes that people can choose from in their global settings once logged in. "Flat Style" is a great looking modern theme. ProSilver for retro.

Adding more themes is NOT a simple solution, Snover explained this already.

This is the post where Snover explains it: Re: Welcome to the updated VOGONS

To quote him:

Snover wrote on 2019-12-28, 03:59:

ATauenis wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:43:

Why not to add theme selection like most of phpBB forums and add the the old theme as an option for registered users?

This is an excellent question. The answer is simply that there is not enough manpower for this. I know it seems silly on its face—like, hey, the old theme exists already so why can’t it just always exist?—but believe me when I say that phpBB is not as modular and customisable as it seems. Themes are not drop-in replacements, especially across different phpBB versions. Even in patch releases, the phpBB team adds, deletes, and breaks features and this often involves changes to the templates. The templating system is also super broken architecturally; among other things, it sends generated HTML to the templates to be injected instead of passing the raw model data, so things like the language files, which should be totally independent, end up needing to be rewritten to match the theme. It’s absolute lunacy, but it’s what we’re working with here.

VOGONS also has some added customisations which would need to be restyled and tested for every theme, so trying to make that all work across multiple themes would also increase the manpower requirement for maintenance. Since the only reason why this upgrade finally could happen was because I became temporarily disabled due to a medical condition so had the free time to do it, you can see how the desire to keep the maintenance cost low is a pretty strong one.

So essentially, it's too complicated and not worth the effort.

cde wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:11:

So essentially, it's too complicated and not worth the effort.

I know theming in CSS can be a donating task to undertake on the surface but I have a hard time believing that when others have made their own changes with nothing more then a few lines of code.

dann86 wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:25:

cde wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:11:

So essentially, it's too complicated and not worth the effort.

I know theming in CSS can be a donating task to undertake on the surface but I have a hard time believing that when others have made their own changes with nothing more then a few lines of code.

I suggest you take Snover's word for it, he has no reason to lie to us.

dann86 wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:25:

cde wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:11:

So essentially, it's too complicated and not worth the effort.

I know theming in CSS can be a donating task to undertake on the surface but I have a hard time believing that when others have made their own changes with nothing more then a few lines of code.

As Snover explained above, I believe him in that it's more complex than just altering a couple CSS and/or PHP files.

personally I got used to the retro theme , it only needs some minor tweaks that could be done over time... the used font that is mentioned in previous posts is a little weird because it's not in a straight line but I would imagine changing that would be something easy?
People need to try the retro theme if the default one is too vibrant for their taste.

dann86 wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:25:

cde wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:11:

So essentially, it's too complicated and not worth the effort.

I know theming in CSS can be a donating task to undertake on the surface but I have a hard time believing that when others have made their own changes with nothing more then a few lines of code.

There’s a significant difference between using Stylus to overwrite a few CSS rules locally and integrating new board themes, both from a technical perspective and from a resource availability perspective.

Ignoring everything I said earlier about how phpBB themes work and focusing exclusively on the CSS side of things: official VOGONS themes have to work with every browser the site supports, not just whatever browser an individual is using. New official themes are the responsibility of VOGONS to maintain, so if something is broken, then it becomes our responsibility to fix it too. The risk of bugs increase as the number of themes increase, and maintenance becomes more difficult. Due to CSS limitations in some browsers and for performance reasons each colour scheme gets pre-baked into its own separate CSS file using a preprocessor. This means each new scheme will generate a new copy of the entire CSS for the site. There are also a couple raster images—again, due to CSS limitations and for performance reasons—so any non-trivial modification to the colours requires those to be edited too. Finally, each new theme needs to actually be added to the theme selector, and pages tested, to make sure nothing accidentally becomes invisible.

It’s not my intent to make it sound like any of these steps are impossible or even particularly challenging, since they aren’t, but in aggregate it’s just not as simple to deploy new colour schemes on this side as it is for you to add a few rules into Stylus and call it a day. On the other hand, there are other things that can only be done on this end—blocking bots, making image uploads easier, improving the searches, etc. are all on my list of TODOs, and I can’t do any of that if I’m working on building new colour schemes for the site.

Can we get jump to bottom/top buttons on the bottom/top of the thread pages?

I miss that button.

post organization right now isn't working at least for me, the posts are not organized by date but seem to be disorganized

sticky ones go first 😉

I actually really like the new site on desktop, particularly after applying my own style

One thing I've noticed, not the biggest deal at all: When looking at the active topics page, there used to be page numbers next to each topic to be able to jump to the last page

Right now, there's a link on the right hand side that will say like "10 minutes ago" which goes to the last post. Almost functionally identical to the page number, only it'll jump to the bottom of the page, or to the very last post. Before, the link would just go to the top of the last page. Again not a big deal at all, but in stuff like the "I bought this retro hardware" or some of the super popular ones, users may want to catch up on the last 10 or so posts