Inforge - your hacks community

[murdercode]

Hi,
I would share with you our config of Xenforo, based on a vBulletin 4.x import in 2015.

So, this is the Forum Home

As you can see is a huge UI.X modified version, lot of edits are in the EXTRA.css (you can download it from Console).
In Forum Home we used a sprite custom icons and used UI.X options to add class and manage better positions of each icon.
The sub-forums are using font-awesome as default UI.X.
In the top you can see Popular Tags, which are generated through a combination of TagEss + XenTag, while in the bottom left you can see a "Luminous Trigger" who set a global opacity from 0.7 to 1.0 for auto-set lightning.

Now go in to a forum:

As you can see the header was changed by a custom library called "Luminous Engine" who detects the Title forum and load a custom graphic. We have at least 50 custom graphics for each forum with their menu (in top right) and some custom links.
You can see also a special widget for take all threads based on a forum, thanks to Widget Framework.

This board generate at least 600k/m visits and this is possible thanks to [bd]Cache + memcached engine (soon with Redus).

Now go in to posts:

Is pretty similar to UI.X, there are some little changes like subtitle with Extra Throphies by ******* and medals who says which level user got.
Signatures are collapsed with a low opacity that goes high with mouse over effect in CSS3 (opacity 0.6 -> 1 with transitions options).


That's all, feel free to write if you have some question about design and plugins choosing.
Best regards,

 

[Araripe]

Wow, looks amazing! Nice work
The theme is impressive.

 

[Max Fridman]

Hello;

Im here to update this topic with a our new design for 2019, we did a little bit of changes during Q1 2020 in Q4 2020 we plan a minor revamp of this style.

Forum Home



Based on UI.X we customized the forum home, we removed the font awesome icons from sub-forums.

Forum



We abandoned the concept of "designs" for specific forum categories because it wasn't flexible enough and sostainable enough for future updates. We redesigned the forum view from the ground up removing the clutter and organizing the elements better.

Topics



The postbits changed too with the redesign, we changed how we display user levels (they have even a border under their avatars) and we now show more Trophies and stats about our users. We are planning more fine tuning in our future revision of this theme.

Parting Words

As you can see our community changes a lot with the years, we like to experiment and try to please our users (and visitors) with cleanest graphics like modern social networks do nowadays.

Let us know what you think about our forum and if you have some questions im here to answer to them, we are gathering feedbacks for the theme revision that will be released in Q4 of 2020 if everything goes as planned!

 

[l3ta]

Your landing page is awesome and the forum looks great. Love it!

 

[Max Fridman]

For our 10 years anniversary update, in October 2020 we did a major overhaul of our theme and community. Upgrading the forum to Xenforo 2.2.

Forum Home​

We switched our three columns layout to two. Mainly because the "sidebar" was mostly ignored on mobile (more than half of our visitors come and use the mobile version of Inforge), id say not only ignored but full of clutter which slowed the site considerably.

Then we implemented our "Grid" and scrapped the "Newsfeed" page, only few users liked it, now this custom addon is in full development by our team to integrate more and more features, this will be fully automated in the future. A mix of hand picked and trending threads with a responsive design for mobile.

We have a Twitch PiP embed for our Livestreams. We will polish this theme in the next few months with more features and design tweaks.

Forum Nodes​

​

We reworked the forum list too, giving more space to the Thread titles, every element now has a clear color to evidence his function ("Open a thread") is now clearly a relevant element inside the page. We removed every useless element inside this page too.

Forum Threads​

We did the same inside the threads, everything is cointained inside a "block" and colours and shapes are now coherent in every page of our forum. Some elements need more polishing (like the ads block) but we are happy with the results so far.

Parting Words​

Nothing else to say for now, we need a little bit more time to integrate more features and polish the existing theme. The road ahead is a little bit easy now that we have laid the foundations.

 

[Faust]

Nice style . Is that UIX ?

 

[Max Fridman]

Nice style . Is that UIX ?

Yes is UI.X customized by our dev team

 

[Faust]

Yes is UI.X customized by our dev team

Cheers. Regarding forum tabs on top, is that kind of addon .?

 

[Max Fridman]

Cheers. Regarding forum tabs on top, is that kind of addon .?

Is a custom addon developed by our dev team, before was just a custom coded widget.

 

[Faust]

Is a custom addon developed by our dev team.

Thanks. Anyway, looks very good.

 

[JoyFreak]

Looks fantastic! Great job!

 

[Max Fridman]

​

Hello;

An entire year passed by and we released a ton of things, small and big:

• Inforge now has a dark theme
• We refined our internal developed addon called "Grid Show" now is fully responsive (and has a ton of optimization going on in the background)
• We developed another addon called "Title Helper" to improve the quality of our discussions titles.
  • The addon not only blocks users to send short titles but provide a visual guide to them (like we already do with passwords) so users are incentivized to write better titles as expected titles improved, reducing our moderation work.

​

• We integrated in our theme the excellent Threadmarks addon by Xon
• We reworked the thread list so is more clear and we added a "Jump" button so you can faster get to the last post in a thread
• We removed the Resource addon because we didn't use it properly and we noted problems with SEO as noted here
• We added 4 more User Levels reaching a total of 12 as you can see here
• We worked a lot on optimizations and removing clutter in the background so our site is faster and use less data on mobile (and we are still working on this)
• We worked on solving every SEO related problem, de-indexing lower quality pages and improving the useful ones (and we are still working on this)

Overall was a nice year for us, we hope 2022 will be better of course, our staff still have a busy schedule and will continue to work refining our custom addons and developing new ones from scratch.

 

[JoyFreak]

Great job on the theme. Your site is wonderful

 

[Max Fridman]

Great job on the theme. Your site is wonderful

Thanks, we try our best to implement new features and keep the site clean and good looking from desktop and mobile, we refined every inches of the theme alternating rounded and straight corners elements, maybe isn't "original" but we try to keep things clean and straightforward.

 

[Hotfix]

View attachment 261285​

Hello;

An entire year passed by and we released a ton of things, small and big:

• Inforge now has a dark theme
• We refined our internal developed addon called "Grid Show" now is fully responsive (and has a ton of optimization going on in the background)
• We developed another addon called "Title Helper" to improve the quality of our discussions titles.
  • The addon not only blocks users to send short titles but provide a visual guide to them (like we already do with passwords) so users are incentivized to write better titles as expected titles improved, reducing our moderation work.

View attachment 261286​

• We integrated in our theme the excellent Threadmarks addon by Xon
• We reworked the thread list so is more clear and we added a "Jump" button so you can faster get to the last post in a thread
• We removed the Resource addon because we didn't use it properly and we noted problems with SEO as noted here
• We added 4 more User Levels reaching a total of 12 as you can see here
• We worked a lot on optimizations and removing clutter in the background so our site is faster and use less data on mobile (and we are still working on this)
• We worked on solving every SEO related problem, de-indexing lower quality pages and improving the useful ones (and we are still working on this)

Overall was a nice year for us, we hope 2022 will be better of course, our staff still have a busy schedule and will continue to work refining our custom addons and developing new ones from scratch.

Wow. The design makes me ashamed of my forum. How does that side navigation work?

 

[Max Fridman]

Wow. The design makes me ashamed of my forum. How does that side navigation work?

The underlying theme is UIX.2 but we are thinking to switch to Bolt to reduce the JavaScript in our site. UIX is very versatile but is really tough to optimize.

 

[Max Fridman]

oppps it is not good

What did you find not good? So we can improve it

 

[Old Nick]

The addon not only blocks users to send short titles but provide a visual guide to them (like we already do with passwords) so users are incentivized to write better titles as expected titles improved, reducing our moderation work.

Hello. Do you plan to make it public, paid or free?

 

[Max Fridman]

Hello. Do you plan to make it public, paid or free?

For now we don't have such plans, in the future maybe, we will discuss this in the upcoming year with our development team.

 

[Max Fridman]

It has been a while since the last message, little has changed externally. The theme of the site is pretty much over now, after a year-long renewal cycle. We continued to work to offer better services to our users, we integrated new features. Today I would like to tell you about one in particular.

Thanks to our collaboration with @Ozzy47 / @Painbaker (OzzMods), we were able to release a new aesthetic enhancement for our users.

The "Message Styles," addon was commissioned and then designed and integrated with DragonByte Credits. Thanks to Message Styles, our users can purchase in Euros or Credits, Frames and Backgrounds for the postbit. I would like to say a few words related to this addon.

​

Many users on this same forum have had problems buying services from third-party developers. For that matter, not having the ability to evaluate the quality of the code they were then going to install on their forum.

This addon meets ALL the standards of Xenforo. And it has been checked by two of our in-house developers. I have in the past had a VERY bad experience buying services on this same platform (and to my way of seeing it, little to nothing was done to fix the problem).

Were bugs present? Yes. They were fixed in a timely manner. The experience was very positive. And Ozzy and Painbaker always responded in a kind and professional manner, and even some changes (some quite significant) were made after the addon was finished.

This addon is so well written that it was possible for our internal developers to write an addon that extends its functionality. In fact you can now customize your profiles with as many as two style changes. Avatar Frame and Postbit Background, whereas during the design phase it provided only one type of modification.

​

This addon is currently under an exclusivity agreement, but it will be released on Xenforo when this lapses and will be sold by OzzMods and available for purchase by all.