Questions, questions, questions...

[cwe]

Hi folks,

I've got 3 forums currently running on vBulletin 3.x platforms with various add-ons including vBAdvanced, DJ's media embedding and others. I've held off changing things as long as I could, but I think I'm getting close to the point where it's time to move/upgrade.

Some specific questions about potentially migrating my forums to XenForo:

1. Does XenForo (or any add-on/mod) offer any means to develop a home page showing recent threads (just titles, authors, etc. - not paragraphs of content from each thread/post)? See home page on http://www.coping-with-epilepsy.com for an example of what I'm looking for.

2. Does XenForo (or any add-on/mod) offer any means to develop additional non-forum content pages similar to how vBAdvanced works?

3. Does XenForo (or any add-on/mod) offer media embedding (YouTube, etc)?

4. Can we create custom smilies and bbcodes in XenForo like we can in vB?

5. How does XenForo handle integration with ad code (AdSense)? Is it a template edit exercise? I currently have ad code on my forums wrapped with a bit of code so that it only shows to visitors (not to logged in members). Is this easy to do with XenForo?

6. I'm currently using TapaTalk to enable members to access my forums from their mobile devices. Does Xenforo offer a native solution for this functionality, or would TapaTalk (or an alternative) still be necessary?

7. I'm also currently using vBSEO. It would be nice if there were an easy means to redirect vBSEO urls to XenForo urls after conversion. Is there support for doing this?

8. Any other comments or advice from people who have made similar moves from modded vb 3.x forums to Xenforo? Anything I'm missing that was a challenge you solved?

9. Lastly, does XenForo offer customization services to help fix templates, etc. to achieve a similar look to existing forums?

 

[cwe]

... I can't think of a situation in which users really need to have all the smilies not display, ...

... It's important for accessibility. Photosentive people need to be able to disable animated images (some disable static images too as simply scrolling a page with many colors can be problematic). They don't always have the luxury to make a global change to the way their browser handles images, so having an option in the forum is necessary.

~~~

For about 3% of people with epilepsy, exposure to flashing lights at certain intensities or to certain visual patterns can trigger seizures. This condition is known as photosensitive epilepsy.
...

https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/triggers-seizures/photosensitivity-and-seizures

 

[imno007]

I'm aware of such things, and I have had the occasional user complain about an effect, such as maybe falling snow in a Christmas theme/style, causing some nausea. But I can honestly say that in all my years of running various communities, over the last twenty or so years, I've never once had a user claim that any of those things actually brought on a seizure; and I can't recall anyone ever claiming that static smilies made them sick. So it's news to me if this is a common problem.

 

[Jake B.]

If the only thing you're still waiting for is the ability to allow a user to disable smilies within a post that should be able to be done (at least for the core smilies) with css and a custom user field. It'll probably get a bit more tricky as XenForo 2.X supports all of the UTF8 Emoji (which will basically just behave as text until the browser displays it as the correct icon). Blocking these from rendering will be more difficult, you'd definitely need an add-on to parse the contents of every post checking for specific characters and completely stripping them from displaying (or converting them to words).

But I can honestly say that in all my years of running various communities, over the last twenty or so years, I've never once had a user claim that any of those things actually brought on a seizure; and I can't recall anyone ever claiming that static smilies made them sick. So it's news to me if this is a common problem.

Pretty sure their site is primarily focused around epilepsy, so his percentage of users that would have issues with things like that would be drastically different than other sites.

 

[imno007]

Pretty sure their site is primarily focused around epilepsy, so his percentage of users that would have issues with things like that would be drastically different than other sites.

You got me there, ha! In my defense, though, his response to mine was like three weeks after the fact, so I'd completely forgotten that he had mentioned that. But yeah, I think I must have missed that somehow in my initial response too, so I take it all back. Carry on.

 

[cwe]

If the only thing you're still waiting for is the ability to allow a user to disable smilies within a post that should be able to be done (at least for the core smilies) with css and a custom user field.

That's what I'm currently doing with vB 3.8. It's using CSS3 which some older browsers don't support, but it's better than no solution at all.

It'll probably get a bit more tricky as XenForo 2.X supports all of the UTF8 Emoji (which will basically just behave as text until the browser displays it as the correct icon). Blocking these from rendering will be more difficult, you'd definitely need an add-on to parse the contents of every post checking for specific characters and completely stripping them from displaying (or converting them to words).

Thanks for the tip. I did a search just now and found this:

... how to force a unicode symbol to render as text insted of emoji. ... appending U+FE0E forces the symbol to render as text. ...

http://mts.io/2015/04/21/unicode-symbol-render-text-emoji/

So maybe a custom user field can also be used to append that unicode code where necessary?

Does XF allow you to specify what encoding to use for the page? Could that possibly be dynamically set by the a custom user field?

Pretty sure their site is primarily focused around epilepsy, so his percentage of users that would have issues with things like that would be drastically different than other sites.

You are correct, sir!