Thread: Major Forum Changes Ahead

What about picture hosting with the new site?

This forum has a spotty history with picture hosting. It had it, then it didn't, then it did again but it didn't work well, etc.
I've always thought a forum should not be involved with picture hosting. That is my personal view on the matter. A forum should do one thing, and do it well. Picture hosting is a completely different animal that should be left up to picture hosting sites that are MUCH better at providing that service.

For sure, picture hosting won't be part of the initial roll-out. It likely won't be part of the 2nd and 3rd planned upgrades either. After the site is back to normal, and all of the core features are in place, we can then talk about picture hosting and see what it would take to do that, do it well, and do it within costs.

I hope that answers the question?

Update

Still not finished with the hybrid section/thread display yet, but steady progress is being made. Let me just go into hiding a bit while I finish this part.

Update

The hybrid section/thread display is finished. In the process, I also finished the regular thread display as well. The main things left until we go live are thread creation, post display, and post creation. I'm going to tackle post display next. I think this is the largest task left, which I saved basically for last. More updates soon. =]

I'm sure this will be of interest to many people. The current forum has a mobile version which has some issues, but generally I believe it works well. (No clue if TapaTalk is still compatible, or used by anyone?)
The new site is not going to have a mobile version out of the gate. For sure we will get it working great on mobile devices, but it is not being built specifically with mobile in mind just yet. That being said, I checked the new site on a Galaxy S6 running Chrome and it is surprisingly well behaved. It is by no means what mobile users will want to use for any length of time, but it at least doesn't shit the bed. There were a few odd things I'd like to take care of later, but I was pleasantly surprised with the results.

Now back to making real progress...

It's going to be a bit before the next major milestone is reached, so nothing major to report right now. I am making progress though, and fixing or improving more things as I go that I've never liked about the forum. Simple little things like the pages shown in the thread preview. Right now if a thread has more than one page, you see tiny links to some of the pages in the thread preview. If there are more than 4 pages, it provides links to the first 3 pages, then a link to the last page. That last page link is extremely useful, and I believe most of us use them to jump immediately to the latest posts. For example, if there is a thread with 10 pages, how often do you want to see the first page? Sometimes... So a link to the first page makes sense (even if it is redundant). But the second page, and third page? Who cares? Who wants to jump to page 3 of a 10-page thread? That's not likely... But jumping to page 9 might make sense, so you can catch up on the conversation...
So I'm changing the way that works.

Current thread preview pagination:
1 2 3 ... 10

New thread preview pagination:
1 ... 8 9 10



It's little things like that which I'm very happy to improve. I've also solved the problem where you would see 1 2 3 ... 4 which was hilariously dumb.

More real updates soon I hope.

Make it so, Mister Fenner.

Update

I have made good progress. Not as much as I wanted for various reasons, but I'm getting there.

Getting the thread/post display stuff working made me realize I needed to overhaul the routing technique I was using. You see, the new forum software will have a slightly different URL structure than the old forum software, which means that I need to do some fancy routing to get the old links to work seamlessly. To make sure everyone's bookmarks still work, and links to threads, or posts in the past all still work, I need to detect that an old link is being used, and route it accordingly. Anyway, I got all that sorted out, and then continued to work on the thread/post display.

I'm getting it done, but it's a lot of work and there are really tricky things to take into account, like the post numbering system needs to skip numbering deleted posts so Admins and Members all see the same post number for the same post, even if Admins can see additional posts in the mix. It sounds simple, but trust me, it's not.

So, the normal post display should be done soon. Then I can start working on getting polls to display properly, and then the classified ads.

Sounds terrible! Glad you know what you're doing and doing it!

Help! This website is attacking me! :P

This seems like a huge undertaking. Glad to see @FenBenner is still dilligently being dilligent.

I've missed this place. :|