Board Suggestions

[Applewood]

Hi Guys. First off, kudos to the new owners of this board. It's a great service and I'm sure we all appreciate it loads.

Now, after the fawning, may I please make some usability suggestions ? I'm happy to help with the workload as a mod, but my technical skills in site authoring are a little on the crap side so I dunno how easy these things are:

1) Can we have thread notification actually give thread notifications ? Despite setting it to instant mail verification I don't get any sent to me. Yes, I've checked my address etc. It may be that this only works for threads you start as opposed to just comment on. I guess I'll find out later Also, see 2)

2) I'm browsing with mozilla firefox as IE is less a browser than a hacker magnet. So far things are cool with the general look of the board, but there could be a problem with people using backward slashes in links that it'd be nice to get enforced properly. A lot of people are switching off to IE in favour of something else so this can only get worse in future.

3) Can there be an option to turning off these annoying floaty yellow boxes whilst browsing through thread listings ? All they seem to do is duplicate information at the cost of obscuring stuff and being generally poppy-uppy and annoying imo.

4) Is it possible to have the back button skip back to wherever you were before editing/creating a post ? If you select "new posts" then make a comment on one, then maybe edit it, then you want to go back to new posts and read the rest, it seems about a dozen clicks on the back button.

Many thanks...

[svero]

1) Can we have thread notification actually give thread notifications ?

The feature works for me. I have to assume there's something specific going wrong on your end.

2) I'm browsing with mozilla firefox...

Currently the percentage of non ie browsers (<1%) is so low that any effort spent accomodating them simply doesn't make sense. There's much better places to put in time.

3) Can there be an option to turning off these annoying floaty yellow boxes whilst browsing through thread listings ?

I'm not sure if the popups can be turned off or not. I'll discuss it with the other mods. I'm not a big fan of them myself.

4) Is it possible to have the back button skip back to wherever

That would be nice but I think any attempt to make the back button forget pages would necessarily be hack-y. I'm not even sure it could be done.

[Applewood]

1) It sometimes works, often doesn't - which is why I didn't think it was my fault. Could possibly be something cookie related but I'm too newbie at net stuff to know whereof I speak. Could also be that only new posts are acknowledged as opposed to other peoples threads that you join later. I'll keep an eye out for a pattern.

2) I'd question where you got that stat from tbh. It may well have been the case a while ago, but MS's constant lack of security has made loads of people desert it. Most of the technical people I know are now using mozilla, some of whom against their main wishes but after being hacked (as I was).

3) Cool

4) Yeah, I figured that one would be a bit "beyond the scope of this book"

Thanks for listening and thanks again for even being here.

[stan]

I think disabling javascript would get rid of popups... I don't see any, at least Might be CSS though, not sure what can be done with that thing. (my browser doesn't handle CSS)

Maybe you should directly mail your suggestions to vBulletin authors.

[Mike Boeh]

I think the reason the notifications didn't work for you before was that I switched from an ip address to the forum to an actual url. Now it's forums.indiegamer.com. Which means that you lost your cookie

What are these popups? I see none.

[Applewood]

I think you're right - I've had a couple lately

[nquijano]

Actually for the first time since the Netscape/IE wars, IE is starting to lose market share, but still hovering around 95%

On supporting only IE, and forgetting about the rest :
We have standards on the Net, and MS does not make or control them.
Coding for IE only, is flouting all those standards.

Plus, IE's marketshare includes all of its versions, which can be differentiated between 6 and before : a lot of people are still running 5, 4 or god forbids 3 ;)
IE 6 oriented webpages can mess up browsing for those people too, so it's not jsut about IE being the only one that counts...
Backward slashes have no reason to be used in links, at all.
Matter of fact, they have no reason to be in your C or C++ code either in your includes or filepaths, as MS products have supported the standard forward slash for ever ;)

Also, if your game has a MacOS X version, your website better render properly on Safari and Mozilla/Firefox, or you'll alienate your customers.
As for instant email notifications, it should have nothing to do with the webpage rendering, or even care what browser

It's not more effort to do proper webpages that run everywhere than to do an IE centric page : it's still only one page, jsut done properly ;)
You know, we can't embrace standards only when the shoe fits and discard them when it annoys us, right ? :)

A Nice weekend (what's that ?) to all :)

[oNyx]

Popups? You mean those tooltips right? Well, they only appear if you stay with the cursor on a tooltip-trigger-spot for awhile. They are set with title="blabla". They are pretty useless but not really annoying imo.

And the "back" issue. Right click on back and seletct the one you want to jump to. It's nicer to navigate that way, trust me

[ggambett]

Firefox 0.9 in Linux works fine for me

[svero]

> I'd question where you got that stat from tbh.

The statistic is from the actual weblogs of my website and so far as I know they're accurate.

>On supporting only IE, and forgetting about the rest :
>We have standards on the Net, and MS does not make or control them.

Well maybe you work for some internet web standards enforcement agency and make a whole lot of money doing that, but as for me I make my money selling games. To make matters worse the board is a part time thing that makes no money at all and is strictly (at least for the moment) a community thing. So why should I spend any time coding to specific web standards for <1% of the browsers that visit? I'd rather tweak my demos etc...I don't have the luxury of wasting time. As a small indie company I rely on sales to pay the rent and eat so that comes first. Getting urls to standard complience for mozilla isn't too high on my list of priorities and, frankly, nor should it be.

[Dan MacDonald]

I use firefox almost exclusively, and I've had no problems. Maybe you just need to upgrade to the latest bits?

[Mike Boeh]

1 Internet Explorer 22,210 361.05M -
2 Gecko 16,976 174.75M -
3 Opera 419 6.31M -
4 Netscape Navigator 368 4.95M -
5 Safari 203 2.75M -

Straight from the indiegamer logs... I use firefox and have no problems at all...

[nquijano]

>
Well maybe you work for some internet web standards enforcement agency and make a whole lot of money doing that, but as for me I make my money selling games. To make matters worse the board is a part time thing that makes no money at all and is strictly (at least for the moment) a community thing. So why should I spend any time coding to specific web standards for <1% of the browsers that visit? I'd rather tweak my demos etc...I don't have the luxury of wasting time. As a small indie company I rely on sales to pay the rent and eat so that comes first. Getting urls to standard complience for mozilla isn't too high on my list of priorities and, frankly, nor should it be.

Ouch. Point not only taken, but I agree, for all the reasons you mentioned
I didn't express my point properly, I guess, and it sounded too much like I was telling you you should take the time to modify a codebase that you didn't write. That never was my intention

I don't work for a web enforcement agency either, or a web design firm, btw, I'm a fulltime indie.
Again, I really meant the general case : a sort of rant if you will, not a suggestion you should change the website, etc.
Which btw, works fine in Safari on MacOS X and Firefox on windows, so no worries there (maybe I should have said that in my original post, huh ?)
My peeve is with the true web pros who are actually getting paid to do web development (and good money too) who not only stop at just checking that it renders properly in IE, but uses its more specific features
In other words, I was not targetting you, I was just picking apart the general "coding for IE only" stance. And there is no need to actually go out of your way to support other browsers, you just have to start on the right track.
We're really far from the days, where you really had to make allowances for various browser quirks (although granted, it's not a perfect world, but what is ? )

Again, I apologize for not taking the time to think on how my comment might be perceived as telling you to redo the site, etc.
It's fine as it is, and I'd like to add thank you to you and the others for picking up the torch, to paraphrase Steve's post on dex
Have a nice weekend

[Mike Boeh]

It really doesn't matter... VBulletin is what does all the coding for the site... We just set the parameters up.

[svero]

1 Internet Explorer 22,210 361.05M -
2 Gecko 16,976 174.75M -
3 Opera 419 6.31M -
4 Netscape Navigator 368 4.95M -
5 Safari 203 2.75M -

Straight from the indiegamer logs... I use firefox and have no problems at all...

thats a much higher ns percentage than my regular site.

[Gmicek]

I'll just mention that most people that use Opera (including myself) have it report itself as IE to help with compatability.

And concerning the whole compatability thing. It reminds me of when I ask my web guy something like "So, is that going to work ok in Moz, Opera, and the other smaller browsers?" He always comes unglued and starts yelling about how he's not a hack and knows what the hell he's doing. Usually takes me a while to talk him down, hehe.

[papillon]

... because of that whole Microsoft purposefully tryign to break Opera thing?