Style Suggestions

[Samir]

Exploring the site styles at the old NBR, it seems that the style there was something everyone liked and felt at home with.  I know that this is a an ipb powered board and not xenforo, but the style at the old site was actually created by a company called pixelexit.com.  I think reaching out to that company to create a style similar in function to the old NBR for ipb would be a good idea since it would make this more like 'home' for many users.  There will be a cost, but I think it will be well worth the investment to create the community in one place like it once was.

Also, I noticed how on NBR they did something pretty brilliant--there were actually styles to make it look like vbulletin3 and vbulletin4.  Now, on the surface this may not seem like much, but what if the community likes the format of another site as well--if you make this one look like that too, there is another feeling of 'home'.

Thoughts?

[Reciever]

Announced that this was a goal very early on in this forum.

This has been something I wish to emulate as well, but havent been able to do as a function of time and means.

 

 

[Samir]

Nice!  I've had to mess with themes before and the time it takes to tweak it in a major way like this can easily be much more expensive (time wise) than outsourcing it, hence the suggestion since the creator of the original seems to be pretty easy to reach.  They might even have one ready for ipb that could be implemented fairly quickly.

Edited February 1, 2022 by Samir
grammar

[Reciever]

I'll draw some attention to this @Hiew so he can look at some options (one of which you provided in the OP).

[Sandy Bridge]

The funny thing is there was a big uproar over how inferior the NBR vBulletin 4 style was when that forum upgraded from vBulletin 3.  That's why they introduced a "retro" vBulletin 3 style.  Not everyone liked it when it was new.  I wasn't really active when NBR went to XenForo, so I can't speak as much to how that was received.

Thanks for posting the link to the NBR theme creator, by the way.  I had no idea there were companies that created themes for forums, and one of my other forum homes is a XenForum.  Every year or so someone bemoans how they only have a couple themes and they used to have more before they migrated to XenForo.  Now I'll be able to offer a more practical suggestion, particularly given that they have some standard options that are not very expensive.

(I still need to try out the styles we do have, been too busy archiving things to play around with that)

[Samir]

1 hour ago, Sandy Bridge said:

The funny thing is there was a big uproar over how inferior the NBR vBulletin 4 style was when that forum upgraded from vBulletin 3.  That's why they introduced a "retro" vBulletin 3 style.  Not everyone liked it when it was new.  I wasn't really active when NBR went to XenForo, so I can't speak as much to how that was received.

Thanks for posting the link to the NBR theme creator, by the way.  I had no idea there were companies that created themes for forums, and one of my other forum homes is a XenForum.  Every year or so someone bemoans how they only have a couple themes and they used to have more before they migrated to XenForo.  Now I'll be able to offer a more practical suggestion, particularly given that they have some standard options that are not very expensive.

(I still need to try out the styles we do have, been too busy archiving things to play around with that)

Thank you for the insight as I wasn't around for the vb transitions although I know I never went beyond vb3 on my own site because vb4 was pretty much a trainwreck with the departure of the original developers to create xenforo.  And after the dust settled it was pretty clear who has the best system as almost every forum now is xen powered.  IPB has always had a strong product, especially with their fully hosted series which is completely turnkey but has a hefty per month commitment.

You're welcome for the link.  It was trivial at the time, but now that I think about it, it was another data point that would have been otherwise lost with the shutdown.

The thing about styles is that I've always found them to be productivity driven.  People want a dark theme so they can be on a night more easily.  People want a mobile theme so they can be on their phone.  People want a fluid theme so they can utilize their bigger monitor, etc.  I actually only had one theme for my site since I've always been 'function over form'.  But a little eye candy also helps to grab people's initial attention.

[Reciever]

There was also the school of thought that dark modes were easier on cell batteries. I never verified it myself but the surface thought process made sense.

[Sandy Bridge]

7 minutes ago, Reciever said:

There was also the school of thought that dark modes were easier on cell batteries. I never verified it myself but the surface thought process made sense.

IIRC, that is true for OLEDs.  A black part of a screen on an OLED requires essentially zero energy, so white/green/etc. text on a black background is very efficient, whereas that isn't the case for dark text on a light background.  My Nokia 808 took advantages of this to display screensavers including notification icons that were colors on a black background - essentially, the screen was always "on", but because 90% of it was black, it took very little energy.  I could get five days battery life with the OLED screen "on" all the time, with light usage.

Whether that's true for traditional LEDs, or older CCFL-powered laptop displays, I don't know.  Seems unlikely for CCFL, since the bulb would still have to be on to have any illumination at all - my old laptop's CCFL bulb died recently, and it was almost impossible to read the screen without that illumination.  But maybe, maybe not for traditional, non-organic LEDs.

I know of one forum that stuck with vBulletin and is now on vBulletin 5, but indeed all the other ones I frequent (and knew what they were running) switched to XenForo either directly from VB3, or after trying VB4 as NBR did.

[Samir]

On 2/1/2022 at 3:15 AM, Reciever said:

There was also the school of thought that dark modes were easier on cell batteries. I never verified it myself but the surface thought process made sense.

Never thought if that, but sounds logical for sure.

 

On 2/1/2022 at 3:29 AM, Sandy Bridge said:

IIRC, that is true for OLEDs.  A black part of a screen on an OLED requires essentially zero energy, so white/green/etc. text on a black background is very efficient, whereas that isn't the case for dark text on a light background.  My Nokia 808 took advantages of this to display screensavers including notification icons that were colors on a black background - essentially, the screen was always "on", but because 90% of it was black, it took very little energy.  I could get five days battery life with the OLED screen "on" all the time, with light usage.

Whether that's true for traditional LEDs, or older CCFL-powered laptop displays, I don't know.  Seems unlikely for CCFL, since the bulb would still have to be on to have any illumination at all - my old laptop's CCFL bulb died recently, and it was almost impossible to read the screen without that illumination.  But maybe, maybe not for traditional, non-organic LEDs.

I know of one forum that stuck with vBulletin and is now on vBulletin 5, but indeed all the other ones I frequent (and knew what they were running) switched to XenForo either directly from VB3, or after trying VB4 as NBR did.

Neat!  Might explain how my samsung's always got the time on the screen and still has great battery life. 🙂

Yeah, I think I've only seen one or two vb5 in the wild and then I never saw them again.

[serpro69]

Would be nice to fix those enormous emojis 

[Aaron44126]

4 hours ago, serpro69 said:

Would be nice to fix those enormous emojis 

There is a note here about the emojis.  https://efgxt.net/topic/52-suggestion-box/?do=findComment&comment=487

If you are on Windows you can also hit "Win+." and use the system emojis.  😁

[serpro69]

3 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

There is a note here about the emojis.  https://efgxt.net/topic/52-suggestion-box/?do=findComment&comment=487

If you are on Windows you can also hit "Win+." and use the system emojis.  😁

Thanks for the link, missed that one.

Though strangely enough, I'm not getting the smaller sized ones:

and the categories I have are also limited to 100px and classic:

 

[Samir]

Try the classic ones--they should be normal sized.

[serpro69]

11 hours ago, Samir said:

Try the classic ones--they should be normal sized.

The classic ones are normal sized and that's what I use so far, but the rest aren't.
I mean, it's not that big of a deal really  But I kind of don't see the point in the huge-sized emojis, especially since they add huge spaces between the lines and the text becomes ugly to read.
In any case, just wanted to mention this. As I said, it's not really a big deal and definitely not something that needs to be prioritized.

[Reciever]

On 2/5/2022 at 12:05 PM, serpro69 said:

The classic ones are normal sized and that's what I use so far, but the rest aren't.
I mean, it's not that big of a deal really  But I kind of don't see the point in the huge-sized emojis, especially since they add huge spaces between the lines and the text becomes ugly to read.
In any case, just wanted to mention this. As I said, it's not really a big deal and definitely not something that needs to be prioritized.

Some of the oddities seen are just default functions I believe, yet to be stripped out. We will be working on some of these things relatively soon. 🙂

[Samir]

11 hours ago, Reciever said:

Some of the oddities seen are just default functions I believe, yet to be stripped out. We will be working on some of these things relatively soon. 🙂

Yep, that's what it looks like.  No biggie, the tweaks will come as the site takes shape.  Rome wasn't built in a day. 😉

[Aaron44126]

With the "Inverted" theme, I can't see text in a "code" block.  It is black text against a dark gray background.

Example: The block at the top of @Vasudev's post here. https://efgxt.net/topic/171-which-thermal-paste-to-buy-and-apply-traditional-and-liquid-metal/

The offending CSS seems to be this, the ".pln" class which sets the text to black.  Maybe just change it to #fff?

[Samir]

8 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

With the "Inverted" theme, I can't see text in a "code" block.  It is black text against a dark gray background.

Example: The block at the top of @Vasudev's post here. https://efgxt.net/topic/171-which-thermal-paste-to-buy-and-apply-traditional-and-liquid-metal/

The offending CSS seems to be this, the ".pln" class which sets the text to black.  Maybe just change it to #fff?

The style sheets in forums should be even easier to modify than back in the day, hopefully not requiring to touch the css manually.  But in case it still needs to be done--you posted everything necessary to do it. :D

[Mr. Fox]

I'm glad this form is not part of the XenForo mob. I really dislike it and the original NBR was never as good after the downgrade to XenForo. I think that also contributed to the overclock.net fall from grace in the eyes of many. While my preference is vBulletin, this is a good alternative.

I like the Dark Bravo 6 theme. It is much better than the eye-searing and ugly white and cornflower blue bloat-UI mess that seems to be wildly popular with the W10/11 fanboy masses.

[Samir]

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

I'm glad this form is not part of the XenForo mob. I really dislike it and the original NBR was never as good after the downgrade to XenForo. I think that also contributed to the overclock.net fall from grace in the eyes of many. While my preference is vBulletin, this is a good alternative.

I like the Dark Bravo 6 theme. It is much better than the eye-searing and ugly white and cornflower blue bloat-UI mess that seems to be wildly popular with the W10/11 fanboy masses.

Tell us how you really feel, lol.

I've noticed a lot of site do have a 'dark' theme, but I've also read that chrome/ff/something has a 'dark' mode that does a pretty good job as well.

[Mr. Fox]

7 minutes ago, Samir said:

Tell us how you really feel, lol.

I've noticed a lot of site do have a 'dark' theme, but I've also read that chrome/ff/something has a 'dark' mode that does a pretty good job as well.

Yes, I use a dark theme from Chrome store, but some of them I have used in the past do not render pages correctly. The one I use now does not force dark mode on web pages that do not already have a dark mode option. It generally works best when it is natively supported. Otherwise you get random weirdness like text being too dark to read or black everwhere except text with the text being white over a white background make it as impossible to read as black text on a black background.

[serpro69]

8 minutes ago, Samir said:

but I've also read that chrome/ff/something has a 'dark' mode that does a pretty good job as well.

Do you mean the 'force dark mode' flag in chrome? That thing is horrible, unfortunately. It works well on some websites, but makes others practically unusable.

There are also extensions that force all websites to be in dark mode, but they're not far better, and often make things quite slow as well.

[Reciever]

6 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

I'm glad this form is not part of the XenForo mob. I really dislike it and the original NBR was never as good after the downgrade to XenForo. I think that also contributed to the overclock.net fall from grace in the eyes of many. While my preference is vBulletin, this is a good alternative.

I like the Dark Bravo 6 theme. It is much better than the eye-searing and ugly white and cornflower blue bloat-UI mess that seems to be wildly popular with the W10/11 fanboy masses.

From what OCN originally was to where it is now, xenforo did absolutely nothing to either maintain or promote growth of that community. That's what happens when the site gets sold twice and it's user base is tossed around and told to deal with it. OCN was my original forum to post and its basically dead to me. This was mostly due to the ignorance and lack of laptop information.

[Samir]

1 hour ago, Reciever said:

From what OCN originally was to where it is now, xenforo did absolutely nothing to either maintain or promote growth of that community. That's what happens when the site gets sold twice and it's user base is tossed around and told to deal with it. OCN was my original forum to post and its basically dead to me. This was mostly due to the ignorance and lack of laptop information.

Using Xenforo as the platform probably has less to do with that than the site being sold.  Ime, once a site is sold from the original creators, it loses something significant--two sales is nearly impossible for a community to take if the community is told to 'deal with it', twice.

 

6 hours ago, serpro69 said:

Do you mean the 'force dark mode' flag in chrome? That thing is horrible, unfortunately. It works well on some websites, but makes others practically unusable.

There are also extensions that force all websites to be in dark mode, but they're not far better, and often make things quite slow as well.

Yep--don't use them myself so didn't realize they were so bad.  Dark themes are usually part of a default theme pack so shouldn't be too hard to implement when the time comes.

[Reciever]

I agree with you if it wasnt for the fact that it was the second sale, and the second time that forum screwed its userbase. None of the changes made were a consequence of the forum moving to something else instead of what it was, who ever they sold to uses x software therefore OCN will now use x software. userbase be damned.

 

• Changed the domain to overclock.com even though its known as OCN (only to revert to overclock.net anyways)
• Deleted member flares (1-5 Flames for REP counts)
• Deleted Seller REP
• Stopped MOTM 
• Stopped Case Mod of the Month
• Broke and Deleted Curated News
• Got rid of the Blue flame for a time
• Downright insulting and condescending Moderators (after the original guard had retired) 

 

Thats just what I recall, and I havent logged in over there since either 2017 or 2018.