Access World Programmers forum

[Jon12345]

I've been running my forum for about 20 years now, using vBulletin 3.8 for most of it. Last month, I switched over to Xenforo 2.1, following a change of host and big revamp.

Here it is: https://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/

I am interested in what others think about the speed, layout, look, anything really! I love feedback, and it all goes into the melting pot when it comes to what to work on next.

Thanks!

 

[l3ta]

Well, you've got a huge community. That's wut's important. Now that you are becoming more familiar with XF, maybe you will start looking into adding more flair in terms of customized styles that will differentiate your forum and give your members more choices. A dark style maybe?

 

[Jon12345]

I already have a dark style: Shades of Grey. It looks awesome!

 

[l3ta]

I already have a dark style: Shades of Grey. It looks awesome!

Oh, I couldn't see it. Whenever I tried to click on the style chooser, it kicked me to the homepage :/

 

[JoyFreak]

Oh, I couldn't see it. Whenever I tried to click on the style chooser, it kicked me to the homepage :/

Yeah I'm getting "Security error occurred. Please press back, refresh the page, and try again. "
But I also agree with @l3ta to add a custom style to make your forum stand out!

 

[Jon12345]

By adding a custom style, do you mean they can still choose Shades of Grey and the default, but give them a third alternative?

 

[l3ta]

Yes! Give them lots and lots of alternatives. A community such as yours deserve the best. I can recommend you look into ThemeHouse and PixelExit styles. Both teams have fantastic styles to chose from. And their support is the best.

 

[Jon12345]

Oh wow, you saying that some pages are dark and some light? Any idea if this is avoidable or not?

 

[Jon12345]

But the whole point of me having litespeed was for guest caching.

 

[Jon12345]

Thanks for the suggestion. I will look into that, although I don't know where to start! I had no idea that the dark theme was getting displayed to guests. Whenever I went to Edge browser and clicked on a few links, I never saw any dark theme pages, just the defaults. I wonder if my new implementation of cloudflare has anything to do with it?

 

[Jon12345]

Hey @rdn, thanks very much for that. It will save me a ton of time trying to work out what is going on. I am finding everything overwhelming, what with trying to work out how to tune, litespeed, getting redis working properly, implementing cloudflare and then finding my site has gotten slower!!

 

[Jon12345]

What is odd is that I keep clicking around on Edge browser and still haven't found any dark theme pages yet.

 

[Jon12345]

Idea: Maybe I could remove style choice for guest visitors and perhaps that could solve it?

 

[Jon12345]

Yep, I saw dark theme in both Chrome and edge for that.

 

[Jon12345]

Great, I will try that. Pleased I posted here because I would never have known.

 

[Jon12345]

This is frustrating. I've clicked 50 pages now and I can't find any dark theme pages to test the new config code with. I will try a different time of day to see if that makes a difference.

I see you added xf_style_id although I am not sure what that code does. I would have thought that some kind of code like if xf_style_id="shades of grey" then no cache, that kind of thing. But then I'm just a conventional programmer.

 

[Jon12345]

Whenever I tried to switch to dark theme, I get an error, saying Oops...

I haven't tried your code yet.

 

[Jon12345]

Wait, I've found a bug. On the forums home page, I get that error, but if I go to an actual thread I don't. Odd. I will try that.

 

[Jon12345]

Ok, I go to a thread, see the drop down for style chooser without the Oops error, select Shades of grey, but then the style doesn't change.

 

[Jon12345]

I was going to find a dark page first, then add the code and then see if it goes light. Otherwise, how can I test if it works?