Please Don't Get Carried Away

Ryan

Well-known member
It's been about 2 weeks now. Things are moving rapidly and shaping up very nicely here. I had a concern early on and that concern still lingers. There have been many cases where I've seen a new feature implemented that looks cool and is flashy, but it interferes with my use of the forums.

Examples

- Multi-Quote
That feature, to me, is for single-quoting, and nothing more. It's fine when quoting one person, but it is not realistic as a multi-quote feature. It's annoying to have to scroll up and down and up and down and up and down to quote multiple people.

- The confirmation dialog on "Mark all forums read"
It's just unnecessary. I know why it was put there - and that's because people were accidentally clicking on the link (myself included) when it was first in the sub-navigation. Problem is, you fixed this accidental clicking by moving the link - you don't need to add a confirmation on top of that.

- The "mini me" avater to indicate you've posted in a thread
When you shrink an avatar down that small and then put it on top of another avatar, it looks like a mess. It's hard to pick out when scanning an entire page, defeating the purpose of the indicator. Also, when you shrink an avatar down that small, it's hard to even tell what it is a picture of. The fact that it's your avatar is a moot point by the time you lean in close to the screen to squint at it. A simple icon is all that is needed there.

- The "bouncy" effect used when zooming to quotes or resizing images
When you click the up arrow in a quote, you're shot up to the original post. When you get to the top, the screen bounces back and forth real quick. It looks cool the first few times, but it gets annoying fast. The same is true for the animation effect when you click on an image that's been resized. Unnecessary animations make me cringe.

- The floating description when you hover over a subforum
The description should just be fixed underneath the title


Now, before you start throwing stones at me...Kier and Mike are doing a lot of things correctly here. There are a lot of flashy features here that I love (member card popups, thrread page number scrolling effect, quick nav in the footer, alerts...). They're being very innovative and cutting-edge. Most times, they're hitting the target, but a lot of times they are not. I understand that in order to be innovative, you've got to be radical. When you are radical, you're going to try stuff that doesn't work, and maybe that's what they're doing.

Not here to argue individual features (there is a separate thread for every one of these). I'm more here to point out this basic trend that I've noticed that features are being add that look cool and hip but aren't very practical. I don't want XF to get bloated with animations, popups, etc. Part of what is so appealing to me about XF is how sleak everything is.

Am I alone? :oops:
 
So everything should be like you want it to be?


Don't get me wrong, everybody's entitled to their opinions. Personally, I could care less about Facebook. However, if people want that, I like that they put time in it to check the suggestion out and possible integrate it. And honestly, if you dislike software because you have to click once more, you might be a bit of a perfectionist. Go build it yourself, then.

Hence why there are new forum products perhaps? No offense but if people want all the bells and whistles vB and IPS already have them covered and have large support communities, and gosh third party mod/theme writers. Perhaps there are people looking for a simpler option than what is perceived as overly bloated software?

Personally I think forum software is for posting and starting topics not for running a psuedo facebook site.

Completely off topic, but a couple of dudes knocked up a forum product on apparently 90 lines of Ruby on Rails code :) Now there's some bloat avoidance :D
 
Ehrm...first, I can't accept the "you can change anything you want later, so why should you care" answer. If that were truly the case, then I would just go write my own forum software to do exactly what I want it to do. The reason I don't do that is because it's very time-consuming and there are people out there who are a heck of a lot better at it than I am. I buy packages (vB and IPB) because they come slam-packed with features that I will use. I don't like the idea of buying software with popups and animations all over the place that I have to go through and remove myself - in code.

It's not just style/theme problems I'm concerned with (like where the "Mark read" link is). I'm concerned with core functionality (the silly zooming animations, popup confirmations, etc.) This isn't stuff that can be removed by editing templates. It's in the core files. I also would venture to guess that changing the "mini-me" avatar to an icon instead is not just a simple template edit. If the trend continues with bouncing animations and popup confirmations all over the place, the forum script is going to get more and more difficult to navigate.

Also, I'm in the business of making and selling skins. I want the XenForo package to look and perform its absolute best out of the box so that all I have to do as a skin provider is change the look, not functionality, of the skin ;)


If you're in the business of making and selling skins then I'm sure you'll find a way to make it work. Personally I think the pop up on the mark all forums read looks great, no matter where it is on the page it could be mis-clicked so the added confirmation is a great addition. Also if you are involved in skins then you would know that on most forum systems it is in in the "core files" but rather the STYLING files.
 
Also if you are involved in skins then you would know that on most forum systems it is in in the "core files" but rather the STYLING files.

eh? Don't really follow your comment there. I think what you're saying is that all of this stuff should be able to be changed in the templates. I've never seen the XF backend myself, so I have no clue how it is put together...but, as I said in my post that you quoted, I bet that a lot of this stuff is not in templates. Animations, mini-me avatar (which has already been removed), pop-ups...This kind of stuff tends to be in the core .php files. It's not something you change on the skin itself.
 
eh? Don't really follow your comment there. I think what you're saying is that all of this stuff should be able to be changed in the templates. I've never seen the XF backend myself, so I have no clue how it is put together...but, as I said in my post that you quoted, I bet that a lot of this stuff is not in templates. Animations, mini-me avatar (which has already been removed), pop-ups...This kind of stuff tends to be in the core .php files. It's not something you change on the skin itself.

It's all in the templates. A styler can fundamentally change both how XenForo looks and operates.
 
Hence why there are new forum products perhaps? No offense but if people want all the bells and whistles vB and IPS already have them covered and have large support communities, and gosh third party mod/theme writers. Perhaps there are people looking for a simpler option than what is perceived as overly bloated software?

Personally I think forum software is for posting and starting topics not for running a psuedo facebook site.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about usability and getting the content out of threads and profiles and into co-members hands, or confusing the presentation and the two products.

Completely off topic, but a couple of dudes knocked up a forum product on apparently 90 lines of Ruby on Rails code :)
Now there's some bloat avoidance :D
Well, there you go , lean and mean!
 
Hence why there are new forum products perhaps? No offense but if people want all the bells and whistles vB and IPS already have them covered and have large support communities, and gosh third party mod/theme writers. Perhaps there are people looking for a simpler option than what is perceived as overly bloated software?

Personally I think forum software is for posting and starting topics not for running a psuedo facebook site.

Completely off topic, but a couple of dudes knocked up a forum product on apparently 90 lines of Ruby on Rails code :)
Now there's some bloat avoidance :D
There's about a million of reasons why I wouldn't want to use vBulletin or IPB. There's about an equal amount of reasons why I do want to use XF. Also, apparently, there are people looking for certain bells and whistles in XF. Maybe not a whole orchestra like in vB, but certainly some. And who are we decide to what everybody wants, anyway? Like I've stated before, what I want sure as hell doesn't match with what Biker wants, so where to go next?
 
eh? Don't really follow your comment there. I think what you're saying is that all of this stuff should be able to be changed in the templates. I've never seen the XF backend myself, so I have no clue how it is put together...but, as I said in my post that you quoted, I bet that a lot of this stuff is not in templates. Animations, mini-me avatar (which has already been removed), pop-ups...This kind of stuff tends to be in the core .php files. It's not something you change on the skin itself.

I have yet to see the backend either but more than likely you'd find the Mark All Forums read in the style system, and move the "on click feature"(or whatever it may be), in this particular case, just a thought.

Again it comes down to compromise, I'd rather have Kier and Mike focus on getting the product running bug free rather than how the forum looks. But I see where you're coming from as well, you want a product that you're able to get up and running, and start skinning without having to tweak it a ton.
 
It's all in the templates. A styler can fundamentally change both how XenForo looks and operates.

Animations are in templates? So if I want to remove the bouncy effect when zooming to a quoted post or enlarging a resized image, I do that directly in templates?

Irregardless, I'm sure that some of this stuff can be changed in templates, but I'm also sure that some cannot. Doesn't mean that you should just throw all sorts of bells and whistles into the default package and instruct customers to remove what they want in templates though. I like me some bells and whistles, just don't want them getting out of hand.
 
Animations are in templates? So if I want to remove the bouncy effect when zooming to a quoted post or enlarging a resized image, I do that directly in templates?

Irregardless, I'm sure that some of this stuff can be changed in templates, but I'm also sure that some cannot. Doesn't mean that you should just throw all sorts of bells and whistles into the default package and instruct customers to remove what they want in templates though. I like me some bells and whistles, just don't want them getting out of hand.

I think so far nothing it out of hand when it comes to effects. I love the way everything, I myself would probably end up changing the description pop up text but it's not something I would want the devs to spend time taking a poll on which way looks better. I'm positive it'd be as easy as taking the code from the popup and placing it underneath the forum title(slimmed down process ;p).
 
I just love how flexible it is. I think once users eventually near winter get their licensed copy that they will be impressed and come up with all sorts of awesome tweaks.
 
Very nice, I like

Still not completely comfortable with the idea of editing templates to remove "fluff" (popups, jittery animation), etc., but to each their own.

And no, those specific animations are obviously not a make or break feature for me. Honestly, the animations are incredibly minor. It's just the bigger picture - the more and more you add bells and whistles that look nice but get in the way of things, the harder it is to use the forums, and the less realistic it is to "just edit it out of the templates". It's just one edit, one template here...but who knows what it will be 6 months from now.
 
Ryan, at least you have the option. It's coded so it's dynamic and not set in stone in the source code .php.
It's a fresh look at what modern web sites can do, and I support it. :)
 
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