Small announcement about AVForums

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James said:
Because when that person comes along that can do both it means you have one point of contact rather than two.
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True, but its rare that the person excels at both creative design and programming. Its hard enough to find people to excel in one of the two skills. Expecting both is asking for the moon.
 
@Arty was the designer to make the first well supported responsive design here on XenForo, before even XenForo developed one of their own.

I would also recommend @napy8gen who did our vBulletin design and specializes in porting over such designs into XenForo.
 
Mike @Audentio is good, but ultimately due to lack of communication I went with David @Forsaken with a design...and I'm beyond impressed.

Just waiting for the final touches to really push my site over the top.
 
Stuart Wright said:
Since I have been chatting to a couple of people about the design situation, I thought I would clarify that.
So we have the design of the editorial pages of our new site supplied by our designers. They are old school photoshop from designer -> css, js and html from their coder type organisation.
That design is being coded by John Warwick. It's not using Xenforo code, though it will work within Xenforo and will of course use the Xenforo style. The site header and footer will be the Xenforo header and footer. The header menus will mostly contain dynamic contents from the editorial system. Latest news and such.

What we need is the Xenforo style created which makes the forums look like the editorial.
The designers are working now in the Xenforo admincp to create the design, except the design company don't know anything about Xenforo.
Without intimate knowledge of the various settings and the influences they will have on the final appearance, it's very hit and miss and I don't know whether they can do an efficient job.
My objective is to retain the look and feel of their design (obviously including the colours, no rounded corners or gradient elements etc.) by altering as little as possible in the style properties and templates.

It makes sense at this point to get quotes from Xenforo styling gurus. I've been working with some of the best people to get the best results. Jake Bunce for the import/301 redirects, Chris Deeming for the addons. I would like to get an idea of the cost of creating the style from one of the top stylers. It involves recreating our designers' vision in Xenforo.

We have a whole bunch of pages which people can look at to get an idea of the design vision, but I don't want to make all of them public as I don't want to let too many cats out of the bag ahead of time.

So that's it. We have very little in the way of budget, but if a top designer would like to work with us, then PC me and I will point you to a few pages so you can get a good look at the designs and give me a rough idea of the cost. Then if our current designers struggle to complete the job, I have a backup plan.
Many thanks
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I think for your site you really want to speak and approach @Forsaken
 
TheComputerGuy said:
Mike @Audentio is good, but ultimately due to lack of communication I went with David @Forsaken with a design...and I'm beyond impressed.

Just waiting for the final touches to really push my site over the top.
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Hopefully this week my new system should be up so I can actually get some work done.

I like being lazy as much as the next guy, but almost two weeks is killing me when I have nothing to do.
 
Slavik said:
These particulars look interesting. Can you expand on DFP management? I assume this is a more comprehensive ad-serving system the XenForo side to alternate ads in and out etc?

Conversation Spam check - what criteria to check for spam?

But, looks like you have a lot of cool addons coming, keep up the good work.
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Thanks.
For those unfamiliar with DFP, it's Google's ad serving system, free for businesses up to a certain size (bigger than us) which is extremely flexible in the way it allows you to manage ad serving on your website.
Because it's flexible, it's also somewhat complicated.
When, for example, an advertiser wants to place 100,000 advert impressions in a particular forum on your site, showing 3 times max per person, only to forum members (not guests) located in the UK and made up of a combination of leaderboards and MPUs, DFP will let you know whether you have the inventory to do this, and will serve the ads for you.

So Chris created a system which allows us to set up ad slots in the various controllers (which create the different pages) in any template hook, defining the slot name (as set up in DFP) and the ad size options (e.g. for leaderboard: 728 x 90 / 970 x 90 / 970 x 250) and css classes for a surrounding div. We can also define the parameter names and values for things like node id, usergroups, thread id, thread title, search keywords and breadcrumb node ids so that DFP can target ads appropriately. The breadcrumb node ids is something particularly useful which I wanted to continue from our current vBulletin setup. It's a comma separated list of the current and all parent forum ids for the currently viewed thread or forum. It means that you can tell DFP to target a particular breadcrumb node id so that it will then target ads to every thread in a particular category/forum and all its subforums. A highly targetted ad campaign could, alternatively use the thread id to only target advertising in a particular thread. So we have the ability to satisfy the needs of our advertisers to a high degree.
e.g.
Code: 
googletag.pubads().setTargeting("usergroupid", "1");
googletag.pubads().setTargeting("nodeid", "82");
googletag.pubads().setTargeting("threadid", "1775475");
googletag.pubads().setTargeting("pagetitle", "panasonic,vt65,fan,noise");
googletag.pubads().setTargeting("breadcrumb", "82,104,91,493,-1");

Conversation spam check is about people who have more conversation messages than posts. We had a problem a while back where scammers registered with login names very similar to members involved in trading in our classifieds. They would send a PM to people who had declined an offer on a thread, lowering the price and asking for payment by bank transfer. This stung a few people, though our excellent moderating team limited the damage considerably. Unfortunately Gumtree does not have the same level of moderation and so many people were stung on there. Hence the police named their operation 'Gumtree'. Thankfully those scumbags (including Ashley, Calvin and Jared Ainsworth from Lichfield) are now in jail, but at the time, the ability to get an alert when someone registered and posted a PM before posting on the forums was useful.
http://www.expressandstar.com/news/crime/2012/09/29/fraud-gangs-elaborate-tales-lured-in-buyers/
 
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Stuart Wright said:
Thanks.
For those unfamiliar with DFP, it's Google's ad serving system, free for businesses up to a certain size (bigger than us) which is extremely flexible in the way it allows you to manage ad serving on your website.
Because it's flexible, it's also somewhat complicated.
When, for example, an advertiser wants to place 100,000 advert impressions in a particular forum on your site, showing 3 times max per person, only to forum members (not guests) located in the UK and made up of a combination of leaderboards and MPUs, DFP will let you know whether you have the inventory to do this, and will serve the ads for you.

So Chris created a system which allows us to set up ad slots in the various controllers (which create the different pages) in any template hook, defining the slot name (as set up in DFP) and the ad size options (e.g. for leaderboard: 728 x 90 / 970 x 90 / 970 x 250) and css classes for a surrounding div. We can also define the parameter names and values for things like node id, usergroups, thread id, thread title, search keywords and breadcrumb node ids so that DFP can target ads appropriately. The breadcrumb node ids is something particularly useful which I wanted to continue from our current vBulletin setup. It's a comma separated list of the current and all parent forum ids for the currently viewed thread or forum. It means that you can tell DFP to target a particular breadcrumb node id so that it will then target ads to every thread in a particular category/forum and all its subforums. A highly targetted ad campaign could, alternatively use the thread id to only target advertising in a particular thread. So we have the ability to satisfy the needs of our advertisers to a high degree.
e.g.
Click to expand...
This is excellent news. I use DFP exclusively to handle dozen of existing campaigns and this can come handy. Look forward to this being available.
 
The DFP banner system sounds particularly interesting. Does it address, in any way, (either in the front end or within DFP) scaling as/when ads are presented in a responsive design?
 
Stuart Wright said:
Thanks. Help is appreciated. Did you have any particular requirements?
Click to expand...
Forum logo at top left.
URL for content shown top also
Ability to download only one post (or the first in thread to pdf)
Links in posts must be links in pdf also
Pdf export uses basic layout and structure, like headlines and tables.
 
@Stuart Wright did Huddler pester you also? We had them email us for awhile--I had to reply back to them a few times to stop (it was always a different person) and then finally had to put them in our spam filters, and told staff to watch for any incoming mail from them. Annoying as hell. The two forums I visit occasionally switched to Huddler (Head-Fi and AVS Forum), and I can't say I'm impressed with how "spammy" the sites feel now--I feel more like I'm being marketed to vs. being part of a community.

I hope they noticed we moved our "big board" to XenForo. :D
 
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