Forum layout and structure

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#10

Okay, so with the category section now featuring prominent, it is important for to note a few things when posting new threads:

  1. Add thread to the correct category. At the moment we have a very limited amount of categories, so if there is any additional categories that should be added, feel free to post here about your ideas.

  2. Add an appropriate tag to the thread. These tags further help filter and structure the site and help people find the right type of content they are looking for.

I know this is pretty straightforward info, but if we can get into the habit right now we will have a much easier time in the long run.

#11

Thatā€™s weird. Iā€™ve also enabled the setting that forces Discourse to serve HTTPS everywhere. Not sure where an HTTPS downgrade like what youā€™re showing in the screenshot might happen.

#12

Im still looking for a mark all read even when I didnt read the thread - I havent found one that really works yet. Cos I dont read posts about consoles since I dont own one.

#13

Does the Dismiss New button not clear everything for you? I tried it now and it seems to clear everything that I havenā€™t read.

#14

Not always nope, will wait till the threads have piled up again and try again. I think its just my mind, I want it on the front page not have to click new and then dismiss :stuck_out_tongue:
Ja ek is vol stront ek weet

#15

You can change your settings to make the Unread things your front page. For instance I had categories as my front page since the beginning. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#16

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I love this as my front page but yea I can do it on unread/new and dismiss.

#17

Ah alright. :smiley:

1 Like
#18

See that page soothes the voices in my head.

#19

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Ok see the topics I dont follow is light, the ones I have read is grey and new replies is white. I cant dismiss the ones I dont follow - it drives me insane

#20

Iā€™m with those above who prefer the Myg style layout but change is good sometimes. Wheres the chat box?!

#21

Or the closest to. :slight_smile:

#22

A post was split to a new topic: Facebookā€™s annoying auto-playing video embeds

#23

(not sure if this should be here or somewhere else?)

@SIGSTART when you have a spare few minutes eventually, could you look at maybe adding an Events Calendar plugin to the forums? Something that we can use to track scheduled events, MEWME evenings, League races, birthdays, etc. Found this one on the Discourse plugins page, for example:

And also, while youā€™re fiddling around in the back end, any chance of making the default size of YouTube embedded videos a little bigger? Or even better, fluid?

5 Likes
#24

Sounds cool

3 Likes
#25

Cool, Iā€™ll take a look this weekend sometime. The Wi-Fi at this guest house is actually pretty good.

3 Likes
#26

So, about that Calendar Plug-in bossā€¦

Iā€™m guessing you found more interesting things to spend your time on at the guest house - as you should have! :wink: But how about nowish?

2 Likes
#27

Part of the issue is that installing plugins will take the forum down for awhile. Hopefully just five minutes, but it could be longerā€¦ 10 to 15 minutes.

Iā€™ll dose up on coffee tonight and do the install sometime between 22h00 and 23h00 (Eskom-willing).

2 Likes
#28

Installed. Had a bit of trouble getting the plugin enabled. There are a few bugs, especially after Discourse apparently made several changes to its core last year.

I havenā€™t tested it, but at least the button to add an event appears now, so it should work.

3 Likes
#29

I looked into making YouTube embeds look prettier. Letā€™s test if it worked:

There is an interesting discussion about this on the Discourse Meta forums, which is where I got the CSS that will hopefully enlarge YouTube embeds.

Here are a few key quotes from the discussion:

Guy who wrote the custom CSS: The real ā€œeasierā€ solution here would be for Discourse to make this the default. Most embeds (large images, oneboxes, GitHub code embeds) display full-width and making video embeds behave similarly would look better + be a lot more visually consistent.

Dev reply: A change is incompatible with our view of Discourse as primarily a discussion system, not a video distribution system.

And then later another dev gives a more in-depth explanation:

I spent way too much time researching YouTube APIs, and in order to make LazyYT use better thumbnails (which can fit our 690px post width) we would have to ask every admin to signup for Youtube API keys, implement logic of falling back to the current thumbnails since old youtube videos doesnā€™t have HD thumbnails and it wasnā€™t really worth the effort. So if you just want it to look cool, just run a simple rm -rf plugin/lazyYT in the run hook in your app.yml.

Totally #pr-welcome if someone who cares about this and want to implement a better thumbnail logic to LazyYT which accounts for all the cases:

  • Admin doesnā€™t have an API key configured
  • API key is invalid
  • Video is too old
  • Video has thumbnail, pick the higher resolution one (maybe make it configurable so people can match their forum width)

Personally, Iā€™d prefer to keep the functionality of the Lazy YouTube loader, so letā€™s see if the CSS makes the thumbnails look as bad as this dev saysā€¦

3 Likes