At some stage early next week (exact time TBC) we will be upgrading the forums to vBulletin 4. It is a massive upgrade and will take several hours.
For those people that haven’t seen vB4, it is markedly different to our current version (vB3.8.5) and may take some getting used to. As with any big aesthetic change, some of you will love it and some of you won’t. For the record - I do.
There are bound to be some bugs but we’ve been testing for a while now so I hope (and pray) that those will be minimal. I will start a thread for you to post anything that you notice.
I’ll keep you updated with the details as they come to hand.
So, that extra 200k of bloated scripting nonsense with the associated accessibility train wreck that is vBull 4 – so bad I can’t believe they have the cojones to charge MONEY for that crap…
– that determined to drive me away, huh? It’s what stopped me from going to digitalpoint.
Or did the year plus delay on transitioning been from you folks taking the time to neuter out all the non-semantic usability nightmare their default skin saddles you with, so it’s not wasting 160k of HTML on 15k of plaintext? Much less the 270k of scripting for nothing and 80k of “other documents” that get included for christmas only knows what reason?
… and to think 3 is a bloated mess; outright lean compared to 4. I’d be looking at other software instead of trying to upgrade this – maybe with a mod for stopforumspam.com thrown in for good measure?
Yes indeed. The whole upgrade is being done because of you.
Well, given the usual length of your posts that criticize bad code, I assume from your relatively short post above that VB4 must be pretty good! (Or is that just a red rag to a bull? )
I’m glad at least that we’ll have a table-less forum. Good luck with it, Sarah and team!
Unfortunately that’s where a lot of the problem lies – since their baseline skin doesn’t even used tables on tabular data, and abuses nested lists inside nested lists instead… to go hand in hand with the 80+K of cloaked content for unnecessary (and painfully useless) scripting.
Because nothing works wonders for a site like cloaked content and non-semantic markup… even sadder when the poor sods who wrote it thought they were being semantic just by removing ALL tables… Because four times as much markup with applying the wrong meanings to the content and COMPLETELY breaking the navigational relationships is SUCH an improvement.
I’ll probably get used to it but I don’t know if I’m thrilled. The change will probably mean:
more rounded edges and gradients (they seem trendy nowadays and regarded as ‘modern’, personally I’ve seen too many of them everywhere now and prefer a more straight design)
some ajax cool effects, like you hover over a link, title, etc. and a very pretty popup baloon appears trying to be helpful but actually covering the content all around that you just wanted to see, so you end up running away with your mouse cursor as far as possible from the site so as not to accidentally turn on some magick widget in fear of not being able to do what you came here to do: read content (see title links at Hardware and Software | Gaming Masters)
clean, clutter-free layout. This means that the important information that used to be visible always now appears only under certain conditions - for example, you won’t see how many pages a thread has unless you hover your mouse over a row nor will you be able to see where you need to click to go to page 4 (again: Hardware and Software | Gaming Masters). Also, let’s hide most of other controls and buttons like go to the last post, etc. so as not to scare away those who could get a headache from being overwhelmed with all that stuff. You’ll have to click a lot more to do the same thing as before but at least the design is super clean and modern. Chrome users (and recent Firefox users) will find themselves at home!
no tables anywhere - at least someone can take a look at the huge css files and learn all the exotic hacks being used to make a table-like forum layout fit into a nested series of <li> and <div> tags. Well, html doesn’t have any dedicated tags for discussion forums so a <table> is no less suitable than <li>, but at least the hard goal has been achieved.
Having said that - take it with a pinch of salt, these are more my personal observations of recent online discoveries than about the new Site Point forum which, well, I haven’t seen yet!
It is a forum. For 99% of users the change should take 30 seconds to figure out. vBulletin probably optimized stuff, so instead of having a link saying Edit signature, it is probably hidden under personal details or something. If there is a more widespread learning curve than that, it will reflect badly on SP.
Ahh, I forgot about buttons with words like edit, reply, etc. The new trend of Optimizing stuff is replacing the words with small graphic icons so instead of knowing immediately what a button does you have to hunt with your mouse for any tooltips that will expain to you its purpose (if there are any, hopefully). The buttons look so great that you feel ashamed to admin you didn’t immediately and instinctively know what the author of the icon image was trying to convey - if you didn’t know you are clearly behind the times!
A more advanced and cutting edge techique is to hide buttons behind another graphic button so when you click on it then the rest of the buttons smoothly and beautifully roll out to your delight and you are surprised to discover they even exist! When looking at the page it’s not obvious when the needed button is, you have to go looking for it but you are happy because the layout is clean, modern, clutter-free and you feel you have lots of space to breathe!
(Or is that just a red rag to a bull? 
)
