DescentBB

Top Gun wrote:It's just that I now see a white page with the usual "If your browser doesn't support meta-redirect click here" message at the top for all of a half-second when I click on View Newest Post. I assumed it was just because of RC's PHP update.

I'm sure it is related to my PHP update. I have still not seen this message myself and I've made quite a few posts since the update. Lets just wait till we can finish the upgrade and see if the new PHPBB board has the same issue before trouble shooting it.

RC

WOW theme?? Who wanted that?

Using FF v3.6.13. The DBB_Green theme has those stretched pyros icons on the subforums.


Other then that.. Looks good.

Oddly enough... I kinda like the CA Black theme..
Just needs a proper DBB logo for that theme! heh

Koolbear, for the new theme, could you go back to the dbb.net's font size as it is for menus and posts? I have perfect vision, but I felt my eyes straining when reading text with the new theme on the test site, even though I could otherwise read it fine. Other forums/sites with smaller text my eyes don't have a problem with, but I think it's because they use higher contrast colors like black on white instead of our seafoam blue on black. My eyes don't mind that color combination with the dbb.net's size as it is, but I guess they freak out with it smaller. (If everyone loves the smaller text though except for me, I can just tell Firefox to automatically bump it up for this site, so it's not the end of the world.)

I find this hard to read in a PM with the DescentBB theme.

I find this odd too. Happens here as well but only under quote/code boxes I think. Theme: DescentBB_Green

Aus-RED-5 wrote:WOW theme?? Who wanted that?

Using FF v3.6.13. The DBB_Green theme has those stretched Pyro icons on the subforums.


Other then that.. Looks good.

Oddly enough... I kinda like the CA Black theme..
Just needs a proper DBB logo for that theme! heh

The stretched Pyros have been replaced, those "stretched Pyros identified that there are subforums listed on that page under the Category - changed to new image no longer used the "forum image" now it uses "subforum" image

Once we figure out which themes to keep we can work on getting new logos for those themes, I can make buttons but will need the help of our artist friends here

Jeff250 wrote:KoolBear, for the new theme, could you go back to the dbb.net's font size as it is for menus and posts? I have perfect vision, but I felt my eyes straining when reading text with the new theme on the test site, even though I could otherwise read it fine. Other forums/sites with smaller text my eyes don't have a problem with, but I think it's because they use higher contrast colors like black on white instead of our seafoam blue on black. My eyes don't mind that color combination with the dbb.net's size as it is, but I guess they freak out with it smaller. (If everyone loves the smaller text though except for me, I can just tell Firefox to automatically bump it up for this site, so it's not the end of the world.)

Ok I increased the size, now I think it's too big, so I will continue to adjust in the next days or so. I have to learn this new (to me) method of sizing text.

Richard Cranium wrote:I find this hard to read in a PM with the DescentBB theme.

Umm,this one is still eluding me...

Richard Cranium wrote:I find this odd too. Happens here as well but only under quote/code boxes I think. Theme: DescentBB_Green

Thanks, it was an easy fix. This is the theme I want to have three of D1 D2 and D3.

Top Gun wrote:No, there's nothing wrong per se. It's just that I now see a white page with the usual "If your browser doesn't support meta-redirect click here" message

Ok, I just saw it for the first time today. Wonder why it took so long for me to see it.

KoolBear wrote:Ok I increased the size, now I think it's too big, so I will continue to adjust in the next days or so. I have to learn this new (to me) method of sizing text.

With the default theme? I checked it out again, and it looks the same, still much smaller than the dbb.net as is. I've just signed up with an account to try out some of the other themes.

Control + F5 it, make sure your browser updates the stylesheet.

Most of the themes are using the new standard em sizing for fonts instead of being driven by points. This should allow users to easily control their own font sizes if I understood properly

Krom wrote:Control + F5 it, make sure your browser updates the stylesheet.

I tried that, and even in different browsers where I hadn't visited it yet.

KoolBear wrote:Most of the themes are using the new standard em sizing for fonts instead of being driven by points. This should allow users to easily control their own font sizes if I understood properly

OK, so the text is not supposed to be any larger then by default?

View it side by side with this board for comparison; the default text size over there is definitely too small.

in reality, the best way to let people control their own font-sizes is not to specify them.

anyone have anything else?

use em instead of % in the body declaration.

fliptw wrote:use em instead of % in the body declaration.

Exactly what I am doing fliptw but I have never used it, don't forget RL pulled me away years ago. So this new crap is that... crap

Get rid of that static Pyro backdrop. The effect is not desirable at all, in my opinion. It's a cool idea but static backgrounds generally don't work.

Sergeant Thorne wrote:Get rid of that static Pyro backdrop. The effect is not desirable at all, in my opinion. It's a cool idea but static backgrounds generally don't work.

It is gone from the boring black and blue ol'theme refresh your screen.

Update progress: I installed a 3.0.8 board on the production server and ran a test conversion of the first ~10,000 posts. The configuration looks good so RC and I are planning on starting the full conversion tomorrow. The forum will be down for the duration which will require at least a few hours, and could end up taking most of the day.

Jeff250 wrote:

Krom wrote:Control + F5 it, make sure your browser updates the stylesheet.

I tried that, and even in different browsers where I hadn't visited it yet.

KoolBear wrote:Most of the themes are using the new standard em sizing for fonts instead of being driven by points. This should allow users to easily control their own font sizes if I understood properly

OK, so the text is not supposed to be any larger then by default?

Jeff250 Please try again, make sure you hit the reload. I am talking about the DescentBB theme are you talking about and also which browser

The front page menu looks larger than dbb.net's now, which I don't mind at all (better that than too small), but the text in post bodies is still smaller. This is with Firefox, Opera, and Midori (Webkit), and I'm using the default theme that you get when not signed in since my account hasn't been activated yet.

I've looked over your *.css file. Let's go over some font best practices. I hope this doesn't come across as condescending--if it does, I apologize. I mean this to be strictly informal.

As far as font size is concerned, 1em == 100% is the user's preferred size. In modern browsers, this defaults to 16px == 12pt, but the user can change this in his preferences. So almost all content should be near 1em == 100%, without good reason, since this is just giving the user what he prefers. Some things should be larger (e.g. headers) and some thing can be smaller (e.g. navigation, subtitles, breadcrumbs, etc.), but the primary content should be near 100% (I'd push it as low as 0.8em). So when I read this, I'm a bit alarmed: This says to me that you want fonts, by default, to be 70% the size that I prefer! The other problem with this is that font em's/%'s styles are recursive. In other words, if you set the body to 50%, you're going to have to set something in the body to 200% to get back to 100%. So by setting the entire body to 70.5%, you're going to have to do some back-of-the-envelope math to even get back to 100%! That's a lot of hard and needless work! It gets even worse once you have multiple layers of em/% font styles nesting.

This is why, as a best practice, the body tag and large tags that comprise most of the page should be 100%. If you want individual elements in the body to be smaller, just make those individual elements smaller. If you want individual elements in the body to be larger, just make those individual elements larger. Note that styling the body tag (or any tag) with 100% font size is equivalent to setting no font size at all, so this makes it easy peasy.

As another example, Firebug tells me that the calculated font size for posts is 14.6px. Since my default font size is 16px == 12pt, this tells me that this is still a bit smaller than my preferred size, which isn't necessarily bad. But this also tells me that at some point you've tried increasing the font size with something over 1em inside the body to try to offset the small recursive font size applied to the body. Ideally, the post body should just be set to specifically whatever size you want without recursively inheriting anything. The body tag should just be left at 100% by default. The containers the post body is in should be left at 100% by default. And the post body itself should be either left at 100% by default or set to something conservative, no less than 0.8em. This way, it makes it easy peasy to make sure that the post body is the desired size, and no awful algebra required to get it there.

The other issue is different fonts themselves. Looking over the css file, it looks like \"angry fruit salad.\" There seem to be font typos (veranda == verdana?) and a lot of different fonts for different contexts. As a best practice, I think you should replace all sans-serif font styles with a single ubiquitous font name followed by the generic name, e.g., font-family: Arial, sans-serif, or you would also do well with just the generic name. Do this again with monospace fonts, and continue to not use serif fonts. There's usually not a good reason to use different fonts on the same page with the notable exception of sans-serif vs. monospace and maybe a logo or very large headers. (FWIW, the dbb.net appears to use Arial).

Let me know if you have any questions.

edit: So back to post sizes, since it looks like the dbb.net uses 12pt, and since seafoam blue on black doesn't provide the best contrast

The dbb.net is consistently cutting off my edit text. It's a good thing we're upgrading. This is what it's supposed to say:

edit: So back to post sizes, since it looks like the dbb.net uses 12pt, and since seafoam blue on black doesn't provide the best contrast, I would recommend having the post font size be 1em == 100% to be equivalent to the dbb.net's size and be more readable.

wow that was a mouth, and some of it actually sank in I'll see what I can do tomorrow but for the most part tomorrow afternoon is a family day. If time permits i will look into this in the morning.
You could have posted this the first time instead of letting me try and figure out what the theme designer was doing. that persectage was actual set to 63.4 when I first started editing and yes I was chasing that font size since the first time you posted your question.
KB

Jeff250 wrote:The dbb.net is consistently cutting off my edit text. It's a good thing we're upgrading.

Fixed: We had forgotten to change the 4k default size limit in the php configuration. You should now be able to post up to 65,500 characters without issue.

Looks like the conversion took a little over 4 hours and that would have been shorter if we didn't run in to an issue about half way.

Is this memorex?

Nice Job…Thanks guys.

Have a beer or two on me…

[quote="Spidey"]Nice Job…Thanks guys.

Have a beer or two on me…[/quote]

x2!!

Oh, the "top" button doesn't do anything, but I don't ever use it.

hummm... "quoting" and "smilies" are not working.

I've checked my profile settings for the smilies and it say it's on, but it isn't.

Guess you guys are still working on the changes?

EDIT: seems the settings are disabled in this forum

Ya, some little things still need to be worked on. I've started a Bug Thread to log them all in. Look in the Feedback Forum.

I don't see it in the Feedback forum. hehe

Never mind... lol

has there been any thought to activating Sigs?

It doesn't look one billion percent the same.

I'm leaving forever.

Aus-RED-5 wrote:hummm... "quoting" and "smilies" are not working.

I've checked my profile settings for the smilies and it say it's on, but it isn't.

Guess you guys are still working on the changes?

EDIT: seems the settings are disabled in this forum

Still off for users, Krom

Ok, try again.

Congrats guys! It's nice to see the under-workings of this forum finally get overhauled.

Did anyone think to archive the forum on some physical media...just in case?

Also, does this conversion mean that the search function finally works?

Cool. More freedom now, all the long-ago deleted items such as signatures & info below avatar are back, and there's a selection of themes ("DescentBB Orbital" is nice.). (Please don't void any of the aforementioned...)

...I really made 1,668 posts? What the h...

Unless I'm imagining it or thinking of another forum, I'm glad being able to link to a specific post is back. In the old board, the icon/links were gone because of the theme's removal of so many attributes...

Wow, congrats on the upgrade!

KoolBear wrote:I'll see what I can do tomorrow but for the most part tomorrow afternoon is a family day. If time permits i will look into this in the morning.
You could have posted this the first time instead of letting me try

Sorry. I think it will be a lot easier this way. No rush though--people can just bump up the text size until you finish.

Krom wrote:Ok, try again.

Yep, they work here now.