Spherical forums

General Discussion => Spherical News => Topic started by: DaVince on July 26, 2017, 04:36:54 am

Title: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on July 26, 2017, 04:36:54 am
So if everything looks a little different right now, that's because the forum system has just been migrated to ElkArte (http://www.elkarte.net/)! It's basically a modern version of the SMF forum system that is actually properly maintained and updated. This was necessary as old SMF was starting to show its age and breaking on a standard, updated server configuration.

ElkArte also has much improved features like better spam management, which is an absolute must for this place as you might know.

I will be taking advantage of the move to try to improve the forums in a few other ways too.

If you find any bugs, issues, or have suggestions, please let me know!
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on July 26, 2017, 04:40:39 am
Todo list:

✔ Fix some things (like broken images, avatars and attachments)
✔ Configure anti-spam and re-enable forum registration
✔ Change favicon
✔ Install some useful plugins (suggestions are welcome: emoji, ReCAPTCHA
✔ Add the Spherical logo

- Find a solution for syntax highlighting
- Find and edit an appropriate new theme
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Rhuan on July 26, 2017, 06:38:09 am
Well the migrated forum seems to work and it looks alright good work.


Though I'm not sure if the green suits Sphere.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on July 26, 2017, 07:53:19 am
This is just the default theme. Picking or making another team will come later, but I have more important things on my plate right now unfortunately.

You can help by looking here (http://themes.elkarte.net/) and checking out what themes might be good. :) I'm especially looking for ones that look good on phones too (responsive).
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on July 26, 2017, 09:14:04 am
I kind of like this default theme, but I guess it's not very Sphere-y  and OH NO PIGGGGGG :pig_nose: *MUNCH*

Hm, that emoji plugin would be nice to have.  Regarding issues: It seems to be glitchy on mobile; sometimes I have to tap things twice to get them to respond, which is kind of annoying.  And the posting page gets too wide once you activate the keyboard, at least on iOS.  See screenshot.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Nikoomba on July 26, 2017, 01:29:35 pm
I like it! Great to see this place up and running still
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Jacob on July 26, 2017, 11:23:41 pm
Not bad, nice layout. I definitely see the similarities to SMF. :) What version of SMF were you running prior? Last I knew, they were regularly updating the SMF 2.x line.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Radnen on July 27, 2017, 12:30:06 am
It's quite nice! Just gotta get that theme updated. Thanks for your hard work!
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on July 27, 2017, 01:19:18 pm
Oh, as a reminder, at some point we need syntax highlighting back, for JS at the very least.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on July 27, 2017, 03:26:49 pm
Nice to see some activity! (Seems like sending this as an announcement helped... :P)

I kind of like this default theme, but I guess it's not very Sphere-y  and OH NO PIGGGGGG :pig_nose: *MUNCH*

Hm, that emoji plugin would be nice to have.  Regarding issues: It seems to be glitchy on mobile; sometimes I have to tap things twice to get them to respond, which is kind of annoying.  And the posting page gets too wide once you activate the keyboard, at least on iOS.  See screenshot.
Thanks for the reports! I'm sure most of that will resolve itself once a different theme is picked. As for the emoji plugin, I had some issues before but I think I know what was wrong before, and also one of the important bugs was fixed. Will add soonish.

Not bad, nice layout. I definitely see the similarities to SMF. :) What version of SMF were you running prior? Last I knew, they were regularly updating the SMF 2.x line.
Thanks! We were running 2.0.14 (after a much due upgrade) but the Big Issue is that it didn't work on PHP 7 without workarounds due to them never changing the database code to use mysqli, instead using the old deprecated mysql module which stopped being supported in modern PHP. There were more issues like mods and plugins not really functioning well and not really having a lot of options.

ElkArte is basically a fork I believe, but I have some more trust in the code base being kept up to date. All in all it seems to do a lot of things better in general. For one, I re-enabled account creation and no spambots seem to have invaded us yet. :)

Oh, as a reminder, at some point we need syntax highlighting back, for JS at the very least.
Agreed, but there seems to be no plugin for this. I think N E O made his own plugin at the time, or whatever is available for SMF doesn't exist for ElkArte. I'm gonna have to look around for solutions.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on July 27, 2017, 05:21:20 pm
Is there a way to disable hyphenation on mobile?  I don't know who thought that was a good idea, it makes text harder to read, not easier. :P
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on July 27, 2017, 06:06:52 pm
This theme looks kind of Sphere-y: 
http://themes.elkarte.net/mimic/Frozen-Stars.html
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on July 28, 2017, 10:57:47 am
Hmmm, it seems to be some sort of modification on top of the green default theme instead of a full theme on its own, so it wouldn't really solve any of the current theme/responsiveness issues. It does look like a good style to follow though.

Edit: for now, I've changed themes to StormCloud (http://themes.elkarte.net/creative/StormCloud.html), just to get rid of the default look at least. Edit 2: reverted, as the theme had a bug where read forums were indistinguishable from unread ones. (Sigh) You can always manually set the theme, but I'm going to have to put some more effort into this in the weekend, it seems.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on July 31, 2017, 04:01:01 am
Something is apparently wrong with the forum registration captcha, trying to fix that now.

Update: I'm trying to implement a ReCAPCTHA plugin, but it doesn't work properly so I've posted an issue report on Github about it.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Rukiri on July 31, 2017, 11:47:59 pm
Place looks modern, I like it :p
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on August 01, 2017, 01:33:37 pm
As modern as this style of forum gets, I suppose. :P The gradient styles are actually pretty old compared to modern flat looks.

By the way, here are some nice things the new forums can do:

Another tip: in the look and layout preferences (http://forums.spheredev.org/index.php?action=profile;area=theme) you can set it so that the quick reply box shows up as a full reply box rather than the simple no-button text area it is now. :)
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on August 01, 2017, 02:18:30 pm
As modern as this style of forum gets, I suppose. :P The gradient styles are actually pretty old compared to modern flat looks.

I like the gradients, it makes things "pop".  Reminds me of the UI for MS Office 2010, which I really liked.  Everyone's UI now is getting that new flat, monochromic gray-and-white look and I don't really like it much, makes things flow together too much.  Too much 3D (like the Win9x interface) is bad too, but some sense of depth is appreciated.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on August 01, 2017, 02:23:39 pm
I agree. Now that I think about it, flat design is kinda old too and you'll see a lot of paper and material design (https://material.io/guidelines/material-design/environment.html). And material design is known for adding a little 3D back into the flat philosophy. Check that link, for example (and the whole website behind it).
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on August 04, 2017, 01:27:34 pm
So I looked into the mobile issues you're having, @Fat Cerberus, but frankly it seems to be working all fine here. The reply box resizes properly here and I haven't had to press any links or buttons twice yet. In fact, I'm pleasantly surprised with the mobile experience.

This is gonna make things difficult to troubleshoot.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on August 04, 2017, 01:39:14 pm
I definitely have to press the "More" below a post twice to get the menu open, and that seems to extend to any button with a drop down.  First tap makes the button sink in, second one opens the menu.

As for the too-large controls, it happens on the post page.  It opens up sized perfectly, but tap the text area to type and iOS zooms in without resizing the text area.  See screenshots attached.

Text selection for copy/paste is an awful experience on iOS with a zoomed-in textbox because it gets glitchy: selecting too much text, selecting something else entirely, losing the selection, etc.  It's been broken since at least iOS 8 and hasn't gotten any better in all that time.  Leave it to Apple to keep adding gimmicks without fixing the existing bugs...

iOS 10.3.3 (Safari), if it helps at all.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on August 04, 2017, 01:40:55 pm
Attached second image because it was too large for last post.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on August 04, 2017, 02:17:25 pm
Thanks for the info. I'll try a few things tomorrow but no guarantees I'll get it to work.

As for things like the more button, it might be because double behavior is set for those: on the desktop they open on mouse over, so maybe it triggers that action first for some sort of compatibility. I can set the behavior to "open menu on click" too though, let's see if that helps. I'll let you know when you can try.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on August 04, 2017, 02:25:49 pm
Okay, this is apparently a per-user setting. Press the profile icon at the top and pick Look and Layout. There should be an option "Use click to open menus, instead of hover to open.", toggling that might help things hopefully.

Otherwise I hope this would just be a theme specific thing, because switching themes would make it easy to fix then.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on August 04, 2017, 04:37:36 pm
I actually already had that option turned on somehow.  Turning it on or off doesn't seem to affect anything.  Weird.  It's not a deal breaker or anything, just kind of annoying.  At some point muscle memory will take over and I won't even notice it :P
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on August 26, 2017, 08:06:48 am
The emoji plugin has been readded, this time with bug fixes. :pig_nose:

Just type : and then start typing whatever you want to appear. It uses the Twitter emojis. :smiley:
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: Fat Cerberus on August 26, 2017, 09:43:54 am
Yay pig!! :pig_nose: *MUNCH*
Cows eat kitties! :cat2: :cat2: :cat2: :cow2: *MUNCH*
(also it's a time-traveling cow)

:P

I love that it shows a dropdown after typing a : and a few characters.  This'll make it way easier to find appropriate smilies.
Title: Re: Forums moved to new forum system
Post by: DaVince on September 06, 2017, 12:55:34 pm
I'm currently creating a new theme for the forums. The layout is based on the current theme, the visuals are based on what the main website looks like.

Progress is very slow because of real life + modifying the theme is proving a challenge, but I figured I'd just leave an update that something is happening in that regard.
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on September 17, 2017, 11:08:34 am
I installed an addon that allows the use of the [ gist ] tag, and even adds a nice little button in the editor interface. Note that this gist tag is a little different from the previous gist addon on SMF: instead of just the gist code (ex. 6386456), the full url needs to be put within the BB code (ex. https://gist.github.com/Radnen/6386456 ).

Example:


Note that I still have to add code to limit the height of the element.
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on September 17, 2017, 02:24:02 pm
We now have support for the [ html5video ] and [ html5audio ] tag, useful for directly embedding sound and video files.



One downside: if you attach a WebM or sound file to a post and try to link to that, that won't work. So it's good for external sources only. Kind of a bummer.
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: Fat Cerberus on September 17, 2017, 03:46:41 pm
I don't think this was supposed to happen @DaVince...

iPhone 7 Plus :iphone:
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: Miscreant on September 17, 2017, 07:21:07 pm
I don't think this was supposed to happen @DaVince...

iPhone 7 Plus :iphone:

Android as well
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on September 18, 2017, 12:58:16 am
Oh, so it's not responsive or even limiting itself to the dimensions of the theme, huh? I should've guessed... :smile: Will fix!

Edit: fixed! I literally only had to give it a maximum width and remove the absolute sizing it defined...
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on January 25, 2018, 08:07:04 am
Just a note: I tried updating ElkArte to the latest version but something seems to have gone wrong. I reverted the update but we've lost useful plugins for now. Will attempt to fix this once I figure out how to get the new version of ElkArte installed. Registrations are disabled until I figure it out. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: Radnen on January 30, 2018, 01:27:04 am
We apparently lost our favicon, too. I was looking at my bookmarks and couldn't immediately see the Spherical icon.
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on January 31, 2018, 10:10:18 am
Thanks - fixed. :)
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: DaVince on August 20, 2018, 10:23:49 am
I've started working on updating the forum and wiki themes to match the website theme. So far, the forum's front page and some shared elements have all been changed. Feedback and pointing out things that broke, as usual, is always welcome. :)
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: Radnen on August 23, 2018, 01:12:58 am
I really like the theme going on. It's easy on the eyes and says "Sphere". Thanks!
Title: Re: Forum updates thread
Post by: Rukiri on November 04, 2018, 01:15:11 pm
I'm not the most active guy around here, but this is going to blind a few people in the morning :P