Post Sales Experience

[Gabby]

Ok so I've owned an Xenforo for a few months now. Gladly left VB for several reasons. While I get frustrated, it's mostly with myself and lack of tech knowledge. Oh and my general burn out with forum management in general.

My experience thus far in comparison..

Xenforo's support has been great.
Xenforo's support forum and most members have been more than gracious is helping me with my problems which are usually caused by me or my lack of knowledge.
Design features are outstanding and do not even compare to other brands.
I've dealth with a very personal problem and my licensure and they have been more than admirable in their response. (I strongly doubt you would get the same response I received from a big corporation)
I see no legal comparisons to other brands whatsoever.
System runs very smooth.

Really, the only thing I really think XF lacks is a decent smiley system. It really needs to be a priority.

A few things I would like to see here. Less comparison to VB would be my first and my second would be less court room discussion-chips are gonna fall where they may-deal with it.

As far as add-on dev, you know there really is a lot of crap you DO NOT need. Less is sometimes better.

 

[melbo]

What are your smilie needs?
I brought 300 some smilies over from vB so as not to break all my old posts.

edit: I don't think I've ever typed that combination of words in my life - What are your smilie needs- lol

 

[0xym0r0n]

I think that the smilie system as it is only need a bulk uploader for those of us who don't want to use sprite sheets.

BUT going with the idea "not to be compaired to other forums(VB/IPB)" sprites sheets are a much better/faster loading idea. IF we could break the habit and work with that, we'd be improving our sites. Some people don't mind the lag, like me, and went a bazillion smilie options for my users to express themselves.

 

[bluemartian]

melbo, how do you display and choose from 300 smilies? XF just has a little flyout panel that can display a dozen or so smilies - unless I've completely overlooked something, which is possible as I'm very new to XF. Otherwise, I completely agree with Gabby's statement about XF lacking a decent smiley system. My old VB forum has 3500 smilies (one of my admins is a smiley fanatic) and they are all organized into categories and can be displayed and selected from category by category using an add-on. I have yet to see a comfortable way of displaying more than a few dozen in XF. I like the sprite sheet option, though.

 

[melbo]

I widened the smilie drop out panel to 450px per the below code that I think I found from Shelley (SmilieBB)

It's not going to work for 3500 smilies but for 250 (I pruned a bit and added the other code triggers to similar smilies) The drop down is almost instant and although you need to scroll to get to the bottom, it works and I've actually received comments on how people like our new 'smilie system'

I might actually experiment with widening the drop down some more. edit: Just widened to 600px and it works even better. It's slow to load 1 time while the system creates a cache.

I think I used the sonnb Bulk Smilie Importer to bring them all over and then I did have to go through and edit all the triggers. It helps to print out your smilie list from vB first...

Add to EXTRA.CSS

/*WIDE SMILIE LIST*/
 
.xenForoSkin .mceSmiliesMenu div {
    width: 430px !important;
}
 
/*WIDE SMILIE LIST*/

I would suggest that you not try to really run with 3500 smilies but you also don't want to have broken smilie code after import. My pruning process was as this:

[eek]
:eek2:
[eek2]
:eek3:
[eekeek]

were all added to one smile called ;eek; which means that any of the above triggered that one smilie. I think the system is brilliant.



Here's an example, ACP view, for one smilie showing the multiple triggers which reduced 3 or 4 smiles from the old system down to one:

 

[bluemartian]

Much thanks for all the info, melbo! I'll definitely try this out. And, I agree, it might be a good time to prune down from 3500.

 

[Gabby]

That looks great melbo. Would there be anyway to columize and row the drop down?

 

[melbo]

Much thanks for all the info, melbo! I'll definitely try this out. And, I agree, it might be a good time to prune down from 3500.

I would. I actually will prune further over time (How many versions of ROFL are really necessary?) some of my smilies were carry overs from an old phpBB board from 2002.

That looks great melbo. Would there be anyway to columize and row the drop down?

I bet there is but that's beyond me. An expert like Shelley could advice more.

 

[Gabby]

Speaking of smilies. Where are the design controls for the smilie drop down box? Be specific as I'm a goofball.

 

[RobinHood]

This will style the background of the drop down smiley menu, just replace 'blue' with what you want

.mce_xenforo_smilies.mceSplitButtonMenu.mceSmiliesMenu div {
    background: blue !important;
}

 

[bluemartian]

melbo, your hack worked beautifully. Thanks!

I also wanted to mention that TaigaChat (http://xenforo.com/community/resources/taigachat-ajax-shoutbox.115/) has a custom smiley flyout panel that is scrollable. Might be worth looking into.

 

[melbo]

melbo, your hack worked beautifully. Thanks!

I also wanted to mention that TaigaChat (http://xenforo.com/community/resources/taigachat-ajax-shoutbox.115/) has a custom smiley flyout panel that is scrollable. Might be worth looking into.

Just to keep it honest, it's a tweek I implemented but was created by Shelley.

I use Taigachat and the smilie slideout does scroll. I don't know if its my APC caching or some file cache but my Quick Reply smilies slidedown just blasts to life.

 

[Gabby]

See what I mean. Member support is really good here

 

[melbo]

he he. i have 3 guys drinking beer!

 

[ragtek]

it's definitely time for smiley categories

 

[Shelley]

it's definitely time for smiley categories

Is this something your looking into Ragtek or was that a passing comment for it to be improved? Yeah you've got my hopes up.

I know your passing comments nearly always leads to something being developed.

 

[ragtek]

a passing comment for it to be improved?

This^^
(just hope somebody else could code it....)


Still have to finish finally my other playground ( http://ragtek.github.com/videos/dtdemo.htm ) before i get back to my coding passion