Ok, so what can I do better / differently?

Wayne

Wayne

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Hey guys,

The site appears to be fairly stable (knock on wood), so what can I do better or differently to make your Whyzzat experience more enjoyable (aside from turning it into an Amiga Worship site?) :)

Wayne
 
Make my boss give me more time for "social" internet.
 
In the hopes that Xenforo is now doing a better job at handling bot registrations, I opened up new user registration. DNSBL and StopForumSpam already caught two bots in the last 6 hours, so... Maybe?

The "get more users" is really a matter of promotion, and I'm not quite sure how better to do that than the "Like" and "share" features which cross-post to FB / Twitter / G+, which each of you can help with.

Wayne
 
I've shared on FB & G+.
 
I haven't shared in the past mostly because I knew that new memberships were banned. Now I'll share more.
 
It would be great if you could add....

Code: 
body {
    max-width: 1280px;
}

to the CSS file included in the XenForo theme you use.
 
JoBBo said:
It would be great if you could add....

Code: 
body {
    max-width: 1280px;
}

to the CSS file included in the XenForo theme you use.
Click to expand...

I can alter it any way pretty much, but is there a problem I should know about?
 
The old Whyzzat improved readability on large displays by limiting the maximum width of each page. According to research, the most common line length on the internet is between 80 and 100 characters (which is already notably more than in print media). After the recent changes, Whyzzat shows roughly 300+ characters of text per line on my monitor.

Also, if you still own your iPad, you might want to take a look at the homepage using Safari on iOS. The mouse-over forum descriptions are shown "in-line" overlapping other content. The same happens on my Android smartphone. I believe the problem is that the CSS media queries, which manage how the layout behaves on lower screen resolutions, use less-than-perfect pixel values. You can find the related media queries in the CSS file by looking for "@media". By changing the number after "max-width:", you will be able to optimize the behaviour. (The numbers should be increased.) You can simulate the behaviour on mobile devices by slowly scaling down the width of your browser window. Doing so, it is quite obvious that the current layout produces overlapping content in many scenarios.
 
Jobbo,

I added max-width: 1280px; to the CSS file. What you see now, what I see, is the result. 1/2 a white screen on the right.

Wayne
 
Ok, that doesn't work. Literal whitespace was too annoying, even for an example, so I went back in and reset the default value in the theme to "max width=1170px" (as it came stock) rather than allowing it to run unlimited, and that seems to have put things back into perspective.

edit: that's still 150 characters worth of text (good point), so I lowered it to 980px (120 characters).

That's a lot of whitespace, but if it helps the readability...
 
I made a few of changes to help tablet display (and ours really) with the forum list. Most of the problems were actually fixed by the default install but I was trying to "fix it" for larger displays.
  • The forum description on regular screens won't show except on hovering over forum name
  • The RSS icon (which no one uses) is removed)
  • The "last post" block is restored to 210px wide. I had altered it to 420px wide to move it left (CSS table, not HTML table) but that didn't work well.
Work better?
 
Much better on my mobile devices and desktop computers. Thanks.

Regarding the "Last Post" content blocks, you may want to use the following CSS code:
Code: 
@media (min-width: 1200px) {
  .nodeLastPost {
    width: 390px !important;
  }
}
This will overwrite the width on all desktop monitors and laptop displays that are at least 1200 pixels wide without altering the layout on mobile screens. (Mobile devices with high-DPI screens internally divide the actual display resolution by a factor of 2 or 3, so they won't be affected. This is why whyzzat.com's layout elements are identical in size on Retina and non-Retina iPads, for instance.)
 
Just one reason I hate web development. Sucks that it's so darned in demand.
 
Why exactly? Not every web application needs to scale perfectly from a desktop workstation down to a tiny mobile phone (or even at all). If you were to write an app in C that is supposed to run on a phone as well as on computers, you face the same fundamental challenges.
 
JoBBo said:
Much better on my mobile devices and desktop computers. Thanks.

Regarding the "Last Post" content blocks, you may want to use the following CSS code:
Code: 
@media (min-width: 1200px) {
  .nodeLastPost {
    width: 390px !important;
  }
}
This will overwrite the width on all desktop monitors and laptop displays that are at least 1200 pixels wide without altering the layout on mobile screens. (Mobile devices with high-DPI screens internally divide the actual display resolution by a factor of 2 or 3, so they won't be affected. This is why whyzzat.com's layout elements are identical in size on Retina and non-Retina iPads, for instance.)
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, I'm a bit limited in what I actually can do directly with the CSS. What I have found is that this theme offers a lot of configuration ability, but screw with it manually and you break other stuff...

Silly shit is locked down so tightly that I don't even find a single .css file on the server.
 
Last edited:
Wayne said:
Unfortunately, I'm a bit limited in what I actually can do directly with the CSS. What I have found is that this theme offers a lot of configuration ability, but screw with it manually and you break other stuff...

Silly shit is locked down so tightly that I don't even find a single .css file on the server.
Click to expand...

Apparently, you need to use XenForo's built-in web-based template editor to add custom CSS rules. Source: http://xenforo.com/help/templates/

If you would rather not mess with individual CSS templates, you can also use a global "extra.css" template to add custom rules. You will find further instructions on the following page: http://www.artodia.com/xenforo-tutorials/customizing-style/ (Scroll down until you see the read headline "Editing CSS".)
 
@JoBBo,

Well crap. Yeah, I completely forgot about the template editor. Got so focused trying to physically locate the actually CSS files on the server I guess. I still know pretty much jack all about CSS, so I'm still kinda clueless there...

Wayne
 
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