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NeoGAF and latest web technologies aka | Make NeoGAF Great Again |

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I wrote some scripts that I can share if anyone is interested.
One is hover above thread title to see a preview and the second one is OP posts are highlighted.
 
Alerts when quoted/a subscribed thread is replied to would be nice. I'm not sure how easy that would be on such a heavily modified version of vbulletin though.
 
Definitely need gifs to be disabled for mobile

But then you will miss out on stuff like this

yogajeslm.gif
 
webm and gifv arent supported by mobile safari so no.

Notifications for new posts in subscriptions and when people quoted would be awesome. Also a built in live-thread option, plz.
 
I'm generally fine with the level of tech, but having actual responsive design rather than a separate mobile site would be nice.
 
gifv support.

Some of the suggestions are too server intensive, especially on whatever software base the forum is running.

gifv support should not be.
 
Honestly I think it's great how it is. Part of what I like about it is that it doesn't have post "likes" or up votes or anything like that. It's just an ongoing conversation rather than something like Reddit where you only look at the top few comments and move on.

I don't think anyone's asking for the forum to be turned into reddit.

It would be nice to have QOL enhancements though. Ability to quickly see who quoted you, basic formatting for making OT threads, AJAX notifications when you've received a PM, etc.
 
Tweets from Twitter to be easily shareable rather than having to take screencaps would be useful. Quite a few other forums' tech allow that.

(Giant Bomb)
EsmlWLK.png

We had twitter embed support for like an hour and a half, but it was immediately abused and so it was turned off.
 
Vbulletin has this built in, and it works here I'm pretty sure?

edit: yup, if you post a duplicate post within 5 minutes it won't post it for you..

Additionally, you can only post once every 60 seconds.
 
We had twitter embed support for like an hour and a half, but it was immediately abused and so it was turned off.

How did people abuse it? Just fill threads with it for no reason?


I wrote some scripts that I can share if anyone is interested.
One is hover above thread title to see a preview and the second one is OP posts are highlighted.

Please do share!
 
I'm up for making the forums 100% responsive, but the arguments going to be... well we have a mobile version of the forums.

One thing about gaf is its nice and simple, don't fix whats not broken.

We've also added new things in the past that lasted all of like 10min because people abused the heck out of em (embedded tweets).

There are pros and cons to going fully responsive.

Going responsive would fix the following issues:
  • m.neogaf.com screen scrapes meaning every page request done on mobile requires extra work on the server
  • If the desktop skin is changed enough, m.neogaf.com breaks
  • All areas of the forum are not available on mobile (control panel, admin tools, etc.)
Reasons against going responsive:
  • m.neogaf.com simply works and is proven
  • m.neogaf.com outputs much less code/css and thus renders faster and uses less bandwidth
  • m.neogaf.com has a few unique features unavailable on desktop
  • Making all of neogaf.com responsive would be a major undertaking
And before anyone asks, I don't work on m.neogaf.com anymore. I originally wrote it but gromph handles maintenance now, I believe.

You can disable gifs on mobile but it doesn't work for all of them for some reason.

It's because if a GIF is added to a post but the URL doesn't include ".gif", there's no way for m.neogaf.com to know what the format of the image is. For example, some image sharing sites simply have the GIF url as "http://host.com/asdf23".
 
Tags would be pretty cool. You can keep the two separate forums (because reasons), but each thread is tagged. Each tag has an index and you can ignore tags ..

Who quoted me, and live threads would be the dream, though.
 
There are pros and cons to going fully responsive.

Going responsive would fix the following issues:
  • m.neogaf.com screen scrapes meaning every page request done on mobile requires extra work on the server
  • If the desktop skin is changed enough, m.neogaf.com breaks
  • All areas of the forum are not available on mobile (control panel, admin tools, etc.)
Reasons against going responsive:
  • m.neogaf.com simply works and is proven
  • m.neogaf.com outputs much less code/css and thus renders faster and uses less bandwidth
  • m.neogaf.com has a few unique features unavailable on desktop
  • Making all of neogaf.com responsive would be a major undertaking
And before anyone asks, I don't work on m.neogaf.com anymore. I originally wrote it but gromph handles maintenance now, I believe.



It's because if a GIF is added to a post but the URL doesn't include ".gif", there's no way for m.neogaf.com to know what the format of the image is. For example, some image sharing sites simply have the GIF url as "http://host.com/asdf23".

Yep, thats why you don't fix what isn't broken. m.neogaf.com works too well right now.

Though (vbulletin/limitation wise) nothing is really stopping us from adding some of these features back on the desktop version as well.
 
Oh, if we're talking wish lists, I want a redesign with those stupid circular avatars that make non-photo ones look bad. Endless scrolling that consumes RAM is great, especially when it makes you lose your place when you go back a page; pagination apparently sucks because it's old. I would also love it if the page loaded javascript from at least 25 different domains and required a Core i5 to process. Hiding menus behind an unlabeled and unexplained three bar menu button looks nice, too.

...Alright, I may be a little salty.
 
Most of the newer forum software I've seen is really fucking ugly. Traditional shit like vBulletin has super dense content which is excellent. New stuff has 20px padding on everything. Software like Discourse is slow as fuck and expensive to run.

However, adding things like embedding youtube or gifv would be really great improvements that only affect client-side experience. If it somehow negatively affects the flow and balance of conversations, they can just as easily be removed.
 
The search system also has a certain time limitation. I think having a restriction on frequent posting has some use but I don't think people can really abuse search.

Indeed; the search limitation is a mere 15 seconds. That'd only bother you if you were a bot.
 
On on hand the place works great. Especially on mobile.

On the other, I'd like some added features and UI/aesthetic options. Skins or something. But sometimes simple is better and you will get resistance either way.
 
Its attractive, simple, clean, and usually fast. If it isnt broke dont fix it ?

The only thing to work on is to reduce outage time to practically zero which can be quite frustrating when major events happen
 
i've been a member of polycount for years. they redid their forums a few months ago with all that web 2 cubed stuff. It looks pretty for about 5 seconds, then you realize in terms of usability it's worse in pretty much every single way. Information density alone is probably less than half of before because I guess negative space looks pretty, so there's a lot more scrolling. I hate how it feels now and spend far less time on the forums because of that.
The point is that they added all the fancy web tech and gave it a huge face lift and it's much worse for it. Healthy communities has died from stuff like interface redesigns, don't mess with things that are proven to work unless they stop working. If stuff needs to be upgraded do it incrementally over the years.

the only feature I'd like added is some kind of notification when I've been quoted.
 
Desktop site loads so slow. It's because of all the trackers on it. There are literally more trackers on GAF than the infamous Verge. I'd like a speedier desktop site. The forum is so bare bones. It shouldn't load slow.
 
Like the design of the site. Clean and simple. Just add a few tweaks like gifv and the ability for quoted posts to include the original post's quoted text.

Overall I'm fine with the site.
 
I've been getting logged out on phone safari recently - remember me box is checked but forms are blank - and I'm not quitting safari. Is there a gaf control panel item that could be to blame?
 
Alerts for quotes is all I care about and honestly I feel like there is no legitimate reason not to have it in 2015. People shouldn't have to beg for relevant forum features.
 
The search system also has a certain time limitation. I think having a restriction on frequent posting has some use but I don't think people can really abuse search.

It's not just about abuse; it's about the vast amount of records NeoGAF has and how unoptimized Vbulletin is for that depth of querying. In the past IIRC they've completely disabled search in favor of a box that just spits out google results (no use of the NeoGAF servers.) I know other big forums in the 90s had to disable their search as well as the servers can't handle it.

These days DB's are faster, caching mechanisms are more advanced and server power is cheaper.. IIRC 15 seconds is half what the limitation used to be, but likely still somewhat important to stem the potential for abuse and stop regular users from slowing down the servers too much. Searching the site isn't making NeoGAF money, so it's a balance of making the site useful / useable to people vs. having to pay for more resources.

It's why there is no "show who quoted me feature" any more as it would cause people to constantly click and do heavy searches... same with why there are no AJAX style notifications.. thousands at a time causing timer based pulls on the server (about all they could do for an ancient codebase like this one.)
 
If we're talking old fashioned PHP forum software, I like Xenforo. Great notification support, likes, loads of plugins, great admin options. Kicks vb's arse.
 
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