Move to XenForo software

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I’m cash poor but parts rich. If there’s a fund I’ll donate an EM3EV 12FET controller. Black version for a reasonable donation.
 
Thank you for your offer. I know you guys want to give back and we will revisit the idea of an organized fund in the future, and on another thread.


Right now, the best you could do is buy something from grin. Grin pays for a majority of the forum upkeep and asks for nothing in return, and has never even nudged in the direction of influencing content here. Our community could not ask to be in better hands. They're the ultimate reason ES is still commercial influence free and operated by people who are passionate about our topic.


The second best thing you can do is help me out by offering constructive criticism and your perspective as we start showing demos of our new wiki software and forum software. I often do not get good feedback and end up guessing what the community wants. I eventually do something a part of the community doesn't want and get hammered for it. This is not a good situation for me, i want to make sure i am hitting on what people want. Receiving verbal abuse drains my battery. :lowbatt:

In order to aid me getting good feedback, i am putting together some tools that let me rapidly mock up what i'm talking about doing. I'm hoping that providing a visual instead of a verbal on nebulous ideas will get me good feedback. I want good feedback that much.

I don't want money. I want a thriving forum. Good feedback and notes of appreciation are the ideal currencies to exchange with me.


Third best thing you can do is donate beer money, computer parts, or ebike parts to all other members of staff who help make the sphere turn. Appreciation works too. :)
 
Hope this is constructive feedback.

I'm relatively young, but i really like the old style of forum. The reason is, the worldwide trend towards low content density really grinds my gears. The esk8 forum for example, has about 3 words per page and information is utterly unfindable. To be fair, it's probably a good match for anyone who thinks it's clever to ride a3kW teatray on the sidewalk.

ES by contrast is so much easier for me. The text is a sensible (small) size, there's a lot of topics and posts per page, the colours are plain and easily differentiable.

Actually for me, the only substantial issue with it is the searchability and I'm not even sure that problem is soluble.

There are small things I might change, like eliminating the long obnoxious, space consuming signatures. Allow people 2 lines max.

Another thing I love is that we can edit pages months even years later. This is mainly used for the good, for example i vaguely try to categorise my threads on the first post and I like to update/edit factual information so that anyone who reads it doesn't have to trawl the next 20 posts to set if it was correct.
 
Don't worry dude, i'm a high density guy myself. I only pitched the font size up on this forum because us guys with 1440p monitors would be screaming for mercy otherwise. :lol:

This is what my eyes love ( so that you know the extent of my design bias ):

Fl8.png

Xenforo does include a lot of non-useful screen output that's already tuned out of the new design. I also have sliced and diced padding like crazy. I have a roughly equivalent density in xenforo as here. I'm pretty sure you'll like it, but you should go and preview it once that's ready.

The search function on xenforo is miles better. We also bought the advanced search system on top of the already good xenforo search.

Dunno about allowing editing of a page months down the road, unless we have an edit history like we used to have. Fingers crossed we have a way to do it in xenforo just like ES as of 2011.
 
If the XenForo software proves too ugly, it shouldn't be too hard to either make a userscript that alters the CSS or alter it at the server level.

It would be nice if there was a test forum for users to give feedback on / play with.
 
I do have a nice hook for overriding CSS at the top of the CSS hierarchy already. Been able to make all the modifications without touching the HTML template, as i did with phpBB. So whatever new look we end up with should be pretty durable through successive upgrades :thumb:

I'll get you guys a tester as soon as i get a moment to fix those colors.
 
Of course!


BTW, i am clearing my own personal backlog ( things have been mindblowingly insane ) and have one member of the ES team working on the new knowledgebase system, and i plan to have him work with me to tag team this conversion.

I also have someone else possibly coming onto the ES team, and this may be a triple or double tag team, which would mean it'd get done a LOT sooner. Cross your fingers.
 
Some foundational decisions about the aesthetic ( currently up for debate ) will be made by June 15th.
More on that later.

But so far, this is what ES 2.0 would look like if launched today:
ES 2.0.png
 
Not all too different.

The colors on those pages are a bit inconsistent, the padding also needs tuning, but you get the general idea.

es2.0 threads.png

es2.0 posts.png
 
Forgot one last thing..
In xenforo, if you click an image in a post, you get a fullscreen version gallery instead of a click into nowhere.
Nice!

gallery.jpg
 
I thought I'd asked this already, but cant find my post (or any answer):

Does middle-clicking (or ctrl-left-clicking) on a link, picture, thread, etc. still open that in a new tab (for browsers that already normally do this for the existing PHPBB ES)? I ask because it's the only useful way I've found of using the forum, especially when going thru new posts to help people with stuff.
 
Thanks dude. I'm gonna hold off on perfecting it until the 15th.
See you next month when we have more concrete plans.
 
Just an update..

We have all the bugs squashed out of the Xenforo conversion that we know of except one, which is probably getting fixed in a day.
I have time, and we have a team to do the transition.

Once we have things to 100%, we'll be giving a forum a taste test of the new sauce and submit it for feedback before the big red button is pressed. :mrgreen:

We think that the look is good but would like to improve on it later, maybe in a year once everyone's eyeballs have adjusted to change. :mrgreen:

You'll hear from us pretty soon.
 
Okay, CSS round 2 finished, there's still a couple rough edges but we can adjust after the fact.

Sent to the moderator team for review. The public is next. :bolt:
 
Okay, because my work load never seems to really die down..
I am going to hand this conversion over to a member of the team here and be his backup.

We're going to do one last rehearsal, and that will provide the member level preview and generate a step-by-step playbook for the final conversion so that we're very confident about hitting the big red button.

Stay tuned for the member preview.


Also one great thing about i didn't notice xenforo is that it shows little thumbnails when the user is not logged in.. that means that users visiting without accounts actually get to see images, but not abuse our bandwidth by hotlinking etc.. very smart design :)
 
Thanks nicobie.

Just a little update for now..

As my business goes into winter, things are getting slower, and time is being freed up for long/difficult projects, one which is the xenforo conversion, which we know is going to have about 3 weeks of 'aftercare', ie adjusting the forum's behavior and mechanics and taking feedback on how the new forum software should work.

..for example the fastest conversion time we've seen is 8 hours, slowest is 12 hours, so to do the conversion, we need an entire day set aside for babysitting the forum conversion and then handling a multi step post-conversion process afterwards. it's a real nail biter of a job, and winter is the time to do it where a lack of distraction is almost guaranteed.

Not setting a date for conversion at this time, other than to say it should be pulled off by the end of the year.


In other news..

ES Dev team is getting very close to completion on a native xenforo plugin that will allow us to 'speed-recategorize' content from one subforum to another.. this will be very important as once we move to xenforo, we want to do things like separate 'motors and controllers' into motor and controller subforums respectively.. a tool like this makes an otherwise very daunting job possible in a multiplayer fashion.. more on that later.

sifter.png
 
No offense because I'm sure that this is a lot of work, and I really don't want to sound rude, but this upgrade seems to be taking forever.
Is there any way to speed up the process a bit, maybe we don't need all the fancy functions? :wink:
 
You could always donate a few thousand and get people paid? :wink:
 
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