Hemebond on 23/7/2003 at 11:32
Although it's extremely common for people to post in inappropriate/wrong forums, it's not always obvious where a post should live.
I was curious what anyone thought about merging the System Shock 'General' and 'Hints/Spoilers' forums. It's fairly difficult (restricting) to talk about System Shock without mentioning something that may be regarded as a spoiler by those who haven't completed the game (though it's unlikely now).
There are still spoiler tags for those who wish to hide real hints or cheats.
Just a thought...
Rogue Keeper on 23/7/2003 at 12:10
There are many spoiler topics in DeusEx General Discussion, too.
Hemebond on 9/8/2003 at 06:00
Hmm. I have another question regarding the whole of the forum.
Have the devs considered optimising the underlying html? Perhaps even moving to an XHTML+CSS design? Why was this decided against (chances are you've already thought about it)?
Just curious...
Wuggles on 9/8/2003 at 06:06
Obviously, you've never run pre-made forums before.
The people here at ttlg did not write this forum. They purchased it, from Jelsoft Enterprises Limited (see bottom of page).
To rewrite a large portion of the forums, requires intimate knowledge of how everything works, and in this case, of PHP. The chance for screwing something up is large.
"Don't fix it if it isn't broken". Whats wrong with what we have now? I have dialup, and the only thing that takes extra time is when someone includes big images in their posts.
Hemebond on 9/8/2003 at 06:31
Actually I do know how these forums work. I also know that a lot of the html ouput can be optimised/customised.
For instance, even in the manual for the script, it recommends moving the CSS into an external file once you decided on the values. This hasn't been done.
I'm just thinking about the times TTLG was down or out due to bandwidth problems and such. Also, it never hurts to have the page load twice as fast does it? I've been playing with it and I've managed to do this.
I'd be more than willing to help out if they need it (though I can't see the being the case).
Vigil on 10/8/2003 at 04:54
He has a very good point. There is an awful lot of page-bloat going on, and simplifying the presentation structure using CSS could cut the bandwidth required by as much as 50%; not to mention make the pages a whole lot easier and more responsive for dialup users. I'm also willing to offer my help cleaning up, as I do my professional design in PHP and XHTML/CSS.
mopgoblin on 10/8/2003 at 05:19
Yeah, the forum pages do seem relatively inefficient. From looking at the source of this thread, it appears there is already some embedded CSS defined, which could probably be moved to an external stylesheet with very little effort. It also appears there are a lot of elements with several attributes which are repeated quite often (mostly all those table/tr/td elements which control the structure of the replies), and could benefit from using an external stylesheet as well.
Vigil on 10/8/2003 at 08:01
Because I have nothing else to do with my evening, I cleaned up this page using CSS and XHTML Strict. You can view the cleaned-up version at (
http://www.washboardabs.net/examples/ttlg_css.html) - the original version is at (
http://www.washboardabs.net/examples/ttlg_orig.html).
Before:
HTML: 37.3kb
After:
HTML: 22.3kb
CSS: 3.5kb
Total saving: 11.5kb/30% for one page.
The CSS file will only need to be loaded once for the entire site, and will then be stored in the browser cache for all future pages: Hence, its impact on the weight of the site is negligible. If we leave it out of the reckoning, we've saved 15kb on this page: this represents a weight saving of 40% which should be pretty consistent throughout the forum pages.
<strong>Notes:</strong>
The CSS version validates for XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS-2. The two versions look pretty much identical in all modern browsers I've tested on, save for a few margin inconsistencies that can be easily tweaked. There's bound to be layout bugs in some of the older browsers, but they will be simple to fix with a little testing. The CSS file obviously only contains styles for showthread.php - a site-wide one would be a lot larger.
Most of the remaining page bloat is coming from the hoards of images that vBulletin insists on generating for each post, for things like posting replies and emailing members. This is a very inefficient policy for messageboard software, but perhaps it's not possible to get vBulletin to replace them with text links.
Hemebond on 19/8/2003 at 23:49
Another thing I've noticed is that (
http://ttlg.com) doesn't work (for me at least). Is there a reason for this?
David on 20/8/2003 at 04:07
We've been having a few DNS problems that have been affecting email and the daughter sites. It could be related :)
