Clean Up The New Forum! Use New-Found Features!

[viven44]

There is considerable empty space in the area shown in the red box.

- If the contents in the blue box can be dispersed somewhere and we can widen the panes with the information, perhaps it would reduce the crowding ? 

- other option is to make use of the area in the red box... links to documentation ?

And why are there 2 scroll bars ? The website at times seems to wander more than my Bronco's steering 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by viven44

[ckuske]

2 hours ago, Gary Lewis said:

Ok, made most of Jim's suggested changes.  However I think there is something better to be done with the stickies instead of placing them in Marketplace.  But I don't know what that is - yet.

And I changed the description of the Bullnose Forum itself from 20 point to 14 point font as well as changed the verbiage itself from:

This forum is dedicated to 1980-86 Ford pickups and Broncos. Here you can ask questions about these trucks, make comments about yours or those of others, and help others sort out issues with theirs. Or, if you are just looking for documentation it is there in the navigation menu above.

To:

Dedicated to 1980-86 Ford pickups and Broncos. Ask questions, make comments, and help others sort out issues with their trucks. And the documentation needed is in the navigation menu above.

So, are we making progress?  Better ideas?

Looks good to me. I am happy to support whatever changes are deemed appropriate as well.

 

I do have an axiom about UI changes/design - You can ask five people for their opinion about the perfect UI, and you will get seven or eight conflicting answers.  So at some point Gary, you will probably need to be a despot and just decide for all of us once it gets to a point where it gets the job done and makes sense.  🙃

[ckuske]

8 minutes ago, viven44 said:

There is considerable empty space in the area shown in the red box.

- If the contents in the blue box can be dispersed somewhere and we can widen the panes with the information, perhaps it would reduce the crowding ? 

- other option is to make use of the area in the red box... links to documentation ?

And why are there 2 scroll bars ? The website at times seems to wander more than my Bronco's steering 

 

There are two scroll bars because one scroll bar is the Weebly page HTML that contains the top menu, and all of the documentation. 

The home page HTML in Weebly has an <iframe> inside it that hosts the forum.  That's how the forum shows as embedded in our home page. The forum itself is taller than the available vertical space, so the browser renders a scroll bar to handle the entire vertical space required for the forum content.

So, Weebly scroll bar, forum scroll bar.  There may be a way to make it less annoying by tweaking HTML/CSS, but it basically is what it is based on the requirement to embed a different site within our homepage.  If anyone has insight on what to change in the HTML or CSS, I'm all ears.  I work in software, but I am not an HTML/CSS expert.  I am serviceable for UIs that look like they were written by an engineer, not an artist lol.

[viven44]

Chris, my laughing emoji was intended to make fun of my bronco's steering!... the website looks beautiful... the 2 scroll bars just make it a bit harder for me to navigate and was wondering if we could do with just 1...

And I understand now why there are 2 scroll bars.... thanks for the explanation. I don't understand how all this works, just a novice / layman's feedback without any understanding of the complexities behind the scene.

Edited 5 hours ago by viven44

[ckuske]

17 minutes ago, viven44 said:

Chris, my laughing emoji was intended to make fun of my bronco's steering!... the website looks beautiful... the 2 scroll bars just make it a bit harder for me to navigate and was wondering if we could do with just 1...

And I understand now why there are 2 scroll bars.... thanks for the explanation. I don't understand how all this works, just a novice / layman's feedback without any understanding of the complexities behind the scene.

All good!  I promise I wasn't offended regardless.  Does Borgeson make a steering shaft for websites? 😆 

I'm not a huge fan of the two scrollbars either, but it is what it is.  Is is a much smaller shift to do what we did.  To make everything "ideal", we would need to move all the Weebly content into InVision then we would have one unified view.  But that isn't as easy of a task as we would like.

[Gary Lewis]

Ok, let me address a couple of the suggestions:

• Jeff: I'm not seeing a way to collapse things that are in a folder.  But I think it will take editing our theme, which means using Cascading Style Sheets, and Chris has already said he can do but isn't a guru.  So I can go ask in the InVision Help forum, but want to understand more about what to ask for than I currently know.
   
• Vivek: The space to the right can house a multitude of things.  I've included a screenshot of what we currently have, and to the left you can see a few of the possibilities.  I'm going to turn all of them off now that I have a shot of what they actually are so I can get back to it, and let's see if the extra space gets used.  How's that?

[viven44]

Thanks Gary, I really like the clean look now... those panes were useful in providing some statistics and showed who was online, etc... so I do agree there was some value there. Could those "widgets" be present elsewhere horizontally ?

PS: I peeked at the other forums I'm (ve been) part of and tried to see what those panes are used for... you won't like what I saw so I won't mention what I saw ☠️

Edited 4 hours ago by viven44

[Gary Lewis]

I'm guessing they are used for advertising.  Right?

And I'm not sure what is going on, but apparently we can customize the side bar awa header & footer differently on each forum/sub-forum.  I cleaned up the main forum but not this one.

As for who is online, just scroll all the way to the top and click Online Users.

 

[Gary Lewis]

Ok, just made a change.  In AdminCP/Systems/Forum Settings and under Topic Summary Settings we had what's in the first pic and I made it what is in the 2nd pic.

Thoughts?