Very Exciting News: Forum Upgrade Next Week

I can’t tell if you are being honest or sarcastic here

Sorry, I thought I made it obvious that my post was sarcastic. But I was honest in describing some of the characteristics of new designs that I don’t like. And I’m honest in hoping SP’s design will be very user-friendly!

No sweat - you never can be too safe :wink:

Oh man. Let’s hope the user experience stay fairly easy, not being too hard to adjust too.

There are a lot of little usability improvements that could have been made to the current version of Sitepoint, so I hope that this version 4 thing, whatever it is, actually makes at least some of them.

…and Netscape Navigtor 4 :stuck_out_tongue:

The default coming out of vBull4 is not keyboard-friendly or even keyboard-accessible… at all. The default reset css comes with an a{outline: none;} in it.

I FULLY expect that SitePoint’s new forum roll-out will WORK on the keyboard, will WORK for screen reader users (though I don’t expect them to have done the right thing and gotten rid of the CAPTCHA when users try to sign up), and will NOT have misused and abused title attributes all over the place. I fully expect that decorative images who are sitting next to text (decorating that text) will have alt=“” instead of long repetitive text long repetitive text.

I expect that it will NOT have mystery-meat icons, menus, or hidden accesskeys that we all get to have fun guessing which buttons do what (Opera users excluded).

I expect proper markup (with the well-known exception of turning tabled forums into some sort of listy abomination) to make page structural navigation easy.

I expect the forums to be able to gracefully accommodate larger fonts, smaller screens, and any lack of scripting. Especially I do not expect scripting to be necessary simple to use simple HTML dropdown menus, since that is of course abuse of scripting.

I expect the developers here are at least as good as those of us who enjoy the forums.

Sitepoint Co: don’t break my expectations.

OMG, indeed, I haven’t noticed that one! Completely blind keyword navigation on the new default theme at https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum.php - unbelievable! Who thought outlines are bad? It looks like they intentionally cripple usability and accessibility :rolleyes:

Another one: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/386207-How-long-does-a-license-last, the links: Thread Tools, Search Thread, Rate This Thread and Display - their url is “javascript://”. Uh? In our current SP forum the respective links point to actual urls where you can do what they say.

Yet another one on the same page: the ‘quick navigation’ at the bottom - some css popup instead of standard <select> with options - I’m afraid it won’t work for someone with Opera Mini or a mobile phone with a small screen. If you are not logged in click on “reply to thread” and below the login form the “Quick Navigation” is even funnier - pointing to “javascript://” and displaying a cropped navigation list with 2 scrollbars - at least in my browser.

It looks like the SP team will have a lot of work if they want to make the site equally usable and undo all the “improvements” from the newer version. But let’s hope they do the job well! :slight_smile: I haven’t seen other themes so maybe there are some better ones. But now seeing what kind of default skin they decided to release officially, I no longer think vbulletin is that good anymore…

So in other words, you’ve not visited any vBull 4 based sites – if you had you’d not have such outlandish expectations.

Crusty: my outlandish expectations are that the SP devs will REPAIR that horrid code before deploying it here.

I believe this should be considered a realistic expectation… more realistic than expecting the vBull guys to do it right.

and Lynx! :smiley:

The forums currently are usable in Lynx. The only real issue I remember hitting was, if text was quoted, there was no way to tell where the quote ended and the new text began in Lynx, other than memory.

If a page works in Lynx, it’s a good sign that you’re doing something right. Can’t really say that about NN4. : )

… and here’s where I’m not entirely thrilled.


Documents (1 file)        25 KB (138 KB uncompressed)
Images (46 files)         97 KB
Objects (0 files)
Scripts (11 files)       116 KB (328 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (3 files)    29 KB (102 KB uncompressed)
[b]Total                    267 KB (666 KB uncompressed)[/b]

When you need compression to get it down to 25k of html and 116k of javascript, and when uncompressed the page is two thirds of a megabyte to deliver 12k of plaintext… NO excuse for that to be more than 140k total BEFORE compression, apart from “let’s sleaze out the scripting and HTML any old way”

… and that’s before we talk the absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts that have become the hallmark of “crap out a site any old way” developers…

Peeking under the hood it’s far, far worse – list abuse on obviously tabular data, content cloaking, static scripting inlined in the markup, IE conditional bull on a layout that isn’t complex enough to warrant it, use of the BASE tag which in 99.99% of cases means there’s something horrendously wrong with the directory structure… then of course, to top off the tag abuse you have the nonsensical heading orders where they skip clear over h3’s (every H4 on the page should be a H3 or even probably a TH)…

It’s like “Do us a favor, go and learn some HTML before you write a forum skin.” – View it with CSS disabled to see what total garbage it is. I particularly like the ordered lists around things that would never have more than one element and don’t appear to have any specific order. What was that Dan used to say about “people who used tables for nothing now just incorrectly use other tags for nothing”?

Not before deployment unfortunately. If we don’t get this upgrade done immediately our servers will die and there will be no forums to upgrade! It is the first thing on the list to be done post-deployment though.

Hey All,

We have been testing vb3 vs vb4 and vb4 takes up far less server resources on our end. It also allows us to do some cool new things, which will be announced in the coming months.

Everybody has their opinions and I’m glad we have a passionate community. The upgrade is however, something which we have to do to move forward with the forums.

Look forward to seeing you all post-launch and getting your feedback.

Cheers,
Kristen

Personally I don’t care a jot about ‘cool’. Albeit I do care if it provides core forum functionality and works without JS and doesn’t contain too much code bloat or other added fluff.

I find that hard to believe – unless they did some REAL magic on database side of things (entirely possible) – what it outputs for markup, CSS and the endless script bloat should be making it suck down more server resources, not less… as it spends four times as long gzipping stuff as necessary, repeatedly sending data it shouldn’t have to from failing to leverage caching models, etc, etc…

Guess we’ll see… Having seen 4 in action though, I feel a bit like the claims of Vista using less resources than XP back when it was called longhorn.

Crusty: the problem is more likely that all the extra scripts and junk they’ve layered onto v3x is gone (is native) in v4

my guess

anyway, vbull devs should be deeply, deeply ashamed of themselves. they don’t deserve to call themselves developers in my very opinionated opinion

Doesn’t vbulletin 4 have a classic theme that will look like what we have now here?

SP has created its own theme for this.