Suggestion Couple of suggestions

Avazene

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As a new user, my opinion might be dismissed or kept; but I think there should be a few improvements to this website:

175x350 avatars, example:
33dcf03b04.jpg



Allowance of up to 2MB avatar file sizes. 50KB is way too little IMO.


-A dark theme, please. This hurts my eyes.

-A chat thread instead of a chat box. (link wise, but keep the IRC). It makes archiving easier and one can be made for each month. It works well and keeps communities close rather than thin and spread.
 

FAST6191

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No big avatars please -- they just clutter up forums for no good reason (the fewer things that users can change and have other users see the better) and we have many members in China, on mobile phones and other countries where downloading 2 megs of pointless GIF that someone stuck in their avatar/sig would not be cool.

I am all for losing the shitbox but there is a history between it and IRC so I will leave that one for now. I do keep meaning to finish up that greasemonkey script to get it more apparent (I rarely go to the front page). Also half the point of the shoutbox is to avoid the need for archiving.

There is a dark theme, bottom left of the website (tempstyle) or if you have an account
http://gbatemp.net/account/preferences will get you to the selection.
 

Avazene

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No big avatars please -- they just clutter up forums for no good reason (the fewer things that users can change and have other users see the better) and we have many members in China, on mobile phones and other countries where downloading 2 megs of pointless GIF that someone stuck in their avatar/sig would not be cool.

I am all for losing the shitbox but there is a history between it and IRC so I will leave that one for now. I do keep meaning to finish up that greasemonkey script to get it more apparent (I rarely go to the front page). Also half the point of the shoutbox is to avoid the need for archiving.

There is a dark theme, bottom left of the website (tempstyle) or if you have an account
http://gbatemp.net/account/preferences will get you to the selection.
Gif's don't work as avatars unless they are resized and you have a separate plugin - I don't agree with your "less expression the better" point though. Don't say stuff about 2MB avatars and other countries when in fact Xenforo is one of the most bloated as ever forum softwares, if you're looking to optimise then Cobalt/IPBOARD would be a better choice. Also, this site doesn't have a mobile version, it's just that Xenforo re-adjusts depending on the size of the screen/window, so it still loads the entire page, not being optimised.


Personally, if you complain about avatars potentially spamming up the forums, then I don't think you can talk without hypocrisy, a few spaced out links in your signature is quite big, and most of the information is irrelevant.


EDIT: TYVM for the dark theme
 

Sicklyboy

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The few spaced links he has at the bottom of his signature don't take up nearly as much bandwidth as an animated gif for your avatar and signature. When I'm moderating from my phone over mobile broadband the last thing I want is for 50MB of avatars and signature assets to load every time I load a page.

Click my avatar on this post, then open my Profile in a new tab. You can have a tall image as I do, just for your user thumbnail inline in posts you have to pick a cropped portion.

Xenforo being bloated or not - it's what we use here, and unless someone else starts paying the licensing fees and server rental it's what we're sticking with. We've had a few security breaches that resulted in major forum downtime after using IPB so we're trying something new now and we have yet to have an issue.

[...]I don't agree with your "less expression the better" point though. Don't say stuff about 2MB avatars and other countries when in fact Xenforo is one of the most bloated as ever forum softwares[...]


Right. Let's just keep throwing resource intensive object after resource intensive object at the forum to make it worse then.

"The transmission in the car I rely on for transportation is already going bad, so let's just thrash it non-stop and make it worse."

Oh, and chat thread, go make something in General Off-topic Chat (if it's not shitposting), or the Edge of the Forum (if it is a shitpost).
 
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FAST6191

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Xenforo might be marginally bloated on the server side (I don't manage that side of things) and its approach to the DOM is... odd but text wise it works and spits out things of acceptable size for most people. This is all somewhat besides the point however. I will leave it to you to sell the admins on going back to IPB though ( http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100225070240/http://www.gbatemp.net/index.php?act=idx ), I wonder if they improved their abysmal security in the subsequent years.

"I don't agree with your "less expression the better" point though"
If you spend your time in web dev forums then maybe, these are not web dev forums though. No argument that there are many which would have great things but for the sake of curtailing a few, a few that could and would do better to have a thread to showcase their art, to spare the many the lows.
Have a wander around http://jul.rustedlogic.net/ and http://acmlm.kafuka.org/board/ and possible some of the Chinese console hacking boards if you want some examples of why not to have such things.
That was also where the GIF stuff came from -- I know they do not work as things stand now (and hopefully will going into the future), it was more that as soon as such options are given they immediately trend towards massive nonsense. Doubly so now animated GIFs have sprung back to life.

I am not sure what goes with mobile proper these days (I do not handle that side of things either) and tapatalk was going on at one point.

I do need to sort out my signature though, I half remade it after the forum upgrades broke it, added a few things as they came up and never fixed it all back properly. Everything there wants to be there though, save perhaps the spider stuff as that was for a previous avatar but that is OK.
 

Foxi4

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You already have all those things except for the huge avatars, and thank god that we don't have those. I don't feel like waiting 15 minutes for a thread to load just because there's 30 butts with huge avatars and even bigger signatures clogging the info-highway with their stuff that I don't care about, blocking my access to the stuff I actually do want to read. Just use PNG's, they're small size-wise as it is. Anywho:
 

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