The new site needs some work (details inside)

Support Blender Artists Website Support
1

  • The Topic lists are way too vertical space hungry. Shrink them down – not enough content fits on the page (just 10 threads) and resolution / aspect-ratio isn’t to blame. It’s the finger-friendly touchscreen style that has to go.

  • The Categories list needs a way to be configured. I’d personally hide away / collapse the “Jobs” section as well as the “Game Engine” section if it’s a must that it stays around… Additionally, there’s some sub-categories that would be nice to hide / collapse too – the Coding section is pretty large for what’s of interest to me so I’d hide some, but not all of them.

  • The “Users” column is a complete waste of resources and screen space as well. They should be removed from the main listings

  • As you noted in Known issues, the organization on the main landing page needs some work. Heavy usage sections like those in “Support” are “below the fold”… drop the Game Engine section for obvious reasons

  • The “Latest Posts” column on the landing page is completely useless… “What are you listening too” is a top thread nearly all the time… no thanks :-/ Remove the column and give the Categories/Artwork the space it needs.

  • The “forever scrolling” aspect is pretty awful. How do you clearly delineate ‘pages’ which is sometimes still important to do? Sometimes I know that something is on page 3 of a thread… how do I get to page 3?

2 Likes
2

Can’t do pages, mate. The lack of them is hard-coded into this thing, whether we like it or not. The only way you can get them is to disable js, which screws all sorts of things.

3

vBulletin_posts_per_page = 10 (example)

page_3 = vBulletin_posts_per_page * 3

Append /30 to the thread url.

blenderartists.org/t/some_thread_title/thread_index

becomes

blenderartists.org/t/some_thread_title/thread_index/30
4

Just tried it. That takes you to any post in a thread, in that the number suffix will connect to a reply number, but it doesn’t appear to have any correlation with pages.

5

Exactly, it doesn’t in implementation, but conceptually it’s equivalent… just meant it to get you in the ballpark if you’re searching things by page number. J and K keys jump one post down and up respectively from there. Happy hunting.

6

The J and K keys are a handy tip. Thanks for that.

Re the pages: if you disable js the site will actually revert to a paged format. Not that it will do you much good, because just about all functionality will be broken (yay!!) but it will have actual pages. I thought you might have been referring to those, in that the number suffix would correlate to Discourse’s internal (hidden when js is enabled) page numbering.

But no worries. I get what you mean now.

7

Thanks for the js tip, sounds intriguing. Now to see what we can see.

8

Playing games with knowing how many threads are on a page is quite dumb; it should be a built in feature since the site knows.

In any case, I’m toying around with the following client-side tweaks. Get yourself a browser extension that allows for js/css manipulation and do the following to help a bit:

CSS:

html {
    font-size: 12px;
}

.topic-list th, .topic-list td {
    padding: 6px;
}

.list-cell, .table-heading, .category-list td, .category-list th {
    padding: 6px;
}

.latest-topic-list-item {
    padding: 6px;
}

.badge-wrapper {
    font-size: 1em;
}

.posters {
    display: none;
}

tr[data-category-id="10"] {
    display: none;
}

tr[data-category-id="14"] {
    display: none;
}

It at least makes the site a bit more desktop friendly. If the site remains dumb, I’ll just inject a “Jump to Page” button into the page as well… but it’ll be a pain since I also need to add a Page counter to know which page you’re currently on in the first place etc.

9

I believe this one can be done via CSS too (so everything is kept in same place):

.posters {
  display: none;
}
10

I love the “ forever scrolling ”.
I don’t remember pages and I don’t like clicking on them. I almost never went past page 2.

I think the only way to please every one is to make everything optional !

11

I’ve edited my post above with some other personal tweaks…

Does anyone know if it’s possible to hide/collapse some Categories on the main landing page? The old site allowed me to hide away the ones that I rarely if ever go into (the Jobs or Game Engine section which is still here sigh) In the absence of config, I’m just hiding those sections completely right now.