HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.

Vanilla 2 Critique

edited October 2011 in Feedback
So, a forum I frequent just decided to go Vanilla 2. I'm pretty disappointed, not only because of the moderator's ham-fisted stupidity in dealing with suggestions and critique of the changes made to V2, but with some issues I've noticed in the forum software itself:
- Buttons for easy-insertion of videos, images, and links are gone. He insists that if you can't do it via HTML then you don't deserve to post anything but text, which aside from being beyond elitist and extremely arrogant, will alienate non-programmer types from the forum community by making it harder to post. Why would anyone eliminate something that makes a forum easier to use?
- The layout is god awful. There are several inches of wasted space on either side which creates a longer format, and there is even more empty space between sections of the forum itself. Less appears on screen at a time because everything is compressed to the middle. Fewer comments appear at a time, and fewer discussions appear at a time.
EDIT:
- Additionally, the login says that you need to type your e-mail as the login. Seeing as the forum doesn't use e-mail as a login, it confused some people. Took me a minute to figure out that we could still use the old login names. Is there a way to change that?
- The 'edit' feature seems to occasionally remove what was being typed instead of opening it in the window below.

Comments

  • Sounds like its your particular install you have issues with. There is a WYSIWYG plugin for posting but it seems its turned off on the site you are referencing. Regarding the layout issues, Vanilla is probably the easiest forum to customize the skin on which is why I'm using it. Another instance of choices made by the owner of your site.
  • Most of the issues greatteachermacross is having with the forum he's visiting frequently can be solved easily.
    @greatteachermacross I can suggest to download vanilla yourself and try out some things, for example changing the layout, like DirtyDog suggests.

    Most of the items you are having problems with are generated by plugins. Maybe the site owner is having problems with those plugins.
    Figure out which version of Vanilla the site owner is using and figure out which plugins he is using. Recreate the situation for yourself on your local computer (localhost)

    Now you can either reproduce the site owners problems one by one (which is good, because then they can be looked into with details about plugin and vanilla versions)
    or you can even find answers for those problems if you like.

    There was an error rendering this rich post.

  • What forum software were they using before?

    Add Pages to Vanilla with the Basic Pages app

  • We were running Vanilla, and the mod decided to upgrade for some reason. He says there are no plugins available to fix the issues. Other things that have popped up:
    - Name with spaces in them are unquoteable.
    - Quote button seems to be completely borked, only letting you quote the very last person in the thread.
    - Images do not re-size properly, as indicated in the update.
    - ACSII text does not function properly, and almost anything that involves the @ symbol has issues.
  • That's a lot of issues. Let's say, like DirtyDog says, that the install of Vanilla of the forum you're using is a troubled install.
    I don't even think you can reproduce those issues if you do a clean install on your localhost with all the plugins the mod (site owner) is using.
    The 4 issues from your second post could be checked if you have the same problem with a default theme.
    @ symbol and quoting names with spaces seems a regex problem.
    Images not re-sizing properly is probably the reason why your mod upgraded (is it a fix in the changelog?)
    ASCII text not functioning properly needs more details once you can reproduce it on your localhost.

    There was an error rendering this rich post.

  • I've discovered that the 'wasted space' issue seems to change with the setting of the monitor. For example, at work, the forum fills then screen neatly and wastes far less space than my home PC which has a much higher resolution. So I think it may not be as much of a Vanilla 2 thing as much as a 'Firefox' or 'different computer' thing.
Sign In or Register to comment.