Interferon

In IPB I can't find the URLs to the following pages: View my purchases. View my credit card info. View my account balance. What are the links to these pages?

I always have problems with indentation in code inserted into a post. For us, the code box is a critical feature that is heavily used, since we have a programming forum. Would be nice if this worked correctly. It looks like there is a combination of space and tab characters, I'm not sure what is going on.

You can create a dark theme mostly with the visual editor, but it does require some CSS edits.

We did away with our heavily customized forum skin and just went with the default, with our own header and footer added. Then I changed the colors of that skin to make a dark version. It required a few lines of code in custom.css and it's not quite finished, but the results are really good. This is the best our forum has ever looked, and it's also the lowest-maintenance its ever been. The integrated GIFs, little changes like the rounded border around the reactions display, and other subtle improvements have made this update really nice. My community site feels lightweight, responsive, and alive. It definitely feels more like a "social community" than a boring old forum.

Real example from today: A programmer asked me a technical question. I thought maybe he asked part of it wrong, so I replied with a two-word question and went back to work. Then I saw his chat reply, that he had meant to ask it that way. Now I want to give him a full answer by pasting a block of code, which would be difficult to manage in the chat window, so I have to switch over to the private messages system, and the conversation will now be split across these two systems.

I have ArrowChat installed right now and there are problems. It's difficult to adjust the theme colors and it doesn't match our site. There is a hidden bar across the bottom of the screen that blocks the mouse from clicking on the underlying page. I sometimes am carrying on conversations with the same person simultaneously in messages and chat and can't decide which I should use to reply. The way Facebook and LinkedIn have quick chat merged with the private message system is really ideal. If you need to make a one-word reply to someone it only takes a second and you don't have to leave the page you are on, but you can also dive into the full message editor to read or write a more elaborate message. This request does not include any Discord-style chat rooms because I think that is outside the scope of what the forum software should do and I am not interested in this. I am just talking about improving the private messages system with a quick chatbox feature.

If this were done better it would actually be a really great feature, because it adds a bit of gamification to posting. People would be competing to see their image in the top images.

Without checking, I'm sure the majority are uploads. The thread goes for many pages, and all threads I have looked at behave this way.

The images shown in thread summaries seem to be whatever happen to be the first four images in the thread. We have long threads that go 30 pages with artists showing their work. I would expect the thread summary to show the best / most popular images in the thread, but instead it just shows whatever was there first. Consequently, this feature seems meaningless and I am disabling it. It would be much better if the images were taken from whichever posts in the thread had the most positive reactions.

If a forum has an icon assigned to it, it would look nice to have it displayed to the left of the title in the forum thread view, like this:

The design of the IPB Marketplace in the admin panel looks fantastic. I would like the interface for IP.Downloads in the default theme to look like this.

You're not allowed to have an opinion because your opinion is an opinion.

Yeah, that is what I am saying. I am a software developer, and I understand design decisions that are made for a whole have different ramifications from design decisions that are made on a case by case basis. But I also understand that your most core functionality needs to weigh heavily in those design decisions. Honestly, right now the system looks like it has a CSS file not loading or something.

Thank you thank you thank you.

The problem is that every update breaks our customizations. I am tired of this never-ending cycle of chasing a moving target. The default skin is finally good enough I feel okay just replacing the header and footer with our own. So in spite of my criticism, things actually are moving in the right direction. I don't think it is possible to ever get the skin perfect: Google is forcing everyone to use "responsive design" which massively complicates everything. If we had a free-market economic system the government would shut down monopolistic practices like this, but I digress. IPB is a collection of applications with some shared functionality, and that modularity of features will always lead to some tricky design choices. So I think we can reasonably expect to see some awkward spacing in various parts of the design. However, I think some more effort should be put into improving the most common parts of the most commonly used functionality, and the forum topics list is probably one of the top three pages that get viewed most frequently in the software.

This feature is incredibly confusing, it's just an extra field to enter and you have no idea what you are supposed to type. I still have no idea where these actually show up. It would be nice to disable them. Now there is an extra "General" navigation link showing, but it is showing blog entries that have a different category set??? What the heck is going on here?

The new admin CP, especially with the dark theme looks really good. The whole thing feels "fun" to navigate. Browsing marketplace items looks really good, especially with the dark admin panel theme. Very nice.

No, but the default theme exhibits the same issue.

I understand the design is made up of rows, and some of the stuff like "follow this content" is probably a global row that gets added across all types of content. And then you have to have a "responsive" design thanks to Google's mandates, which makes it more complicated. So I understand it can never be "perfect". Still, I think for the most commonly viewed parts of the forum, having three inches of white space below the forum title, something needs to be done about that. The only reason I am pointing this out is because we are moving away from our heavily customized skin in order to make updates easier, and because the default IPB skin is now good enough that I feel it's okay to use. (We just replaced the header and footer with out own.) Ideally, this is what it should look like:

This is really excessive. It looks even worse if your forum background is set to white.

My users almost never add blog or blog entry images when they write articles. Without background images, the default theming for these is really ugly, to the point where I am considering removing this functionality from our site. It's very obvious looking at the official IPS blog, they put a lot of time into selecting blog entry photos from a common source of stock photos with a certain consistency in the theme. That's cool, but the current design of the blog system creates a big burden to select good images that look consistent. It's more suited to an official company blog than to a site with user-generated content where people sloppily post whatever comes to mind. Any time you allow users to customize the appearance of anything, they will f*ck it up. Think about those awful custom profiles from MySpace.

I am curious what others think.

I'm getting an endless number of these errors: Column 'rss_import_showlink' cannot be null

Okay, so when will it be really released?