Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread
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Have a question about Last Life, the Forum, or our Discord server? Ask here! As with all websites, we're under a continuous process of development and improvement, so we welcome your feedback.
If you'd prefer to ask your question privately, feel free to send an email to veegie@last-life.net!
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You think we'll have themes sometime? Not to knock the black with potion-red design, but I usually kept things on the old Mario/Lemmy's Land theme. Perhaps out of nostalgia, but I did like the blue and green interplay.
Granted, this isn't tech support specifically, but I didn't see any official "suggestions" thread.
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I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of themes, but even if there were, I doubt there would be anything specifically Mario-branded, since we haven't had anything to do with Mario fansites for many years now. This is a brand new, clean-slate type deal.
The most likely outcome is that I'd add a SelfStyle menu, like in the bottom-left corner of the main site. This would let people pick whatever colour scheme they wanted.
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In order to ensure people join the community and engage with one another, you need to find reasons for people to actively use the forum! Because in the end, what does this forum offer that your publically accessible Discord doesn’t?
I'd suggest you direct (and promote when possible) all content creator feedback (For non-LL affiliated members) to be placed within the Art board; thus encouraging public discussion on community member’s creations. Threads dedicated to user made content could be self-contained to one-thread per-user, preventing overspill or mass spam (Like new daily theads from a LPer for example or bumping for attention)
Could even limit how often someone could self-promote content, unless they outright provide feedback a number of times. Actual feedback that helps everyone, none of this “Good job, nice work bud” rubbish! Cannot grow or improve like that.
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@Blastboxer22 said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
I've noticed entering a thread automatically takes you to the most recent post/unread posts. Is there a way to turn that off in case you're looking for something?
To the best of my knowledge, opening a topic brings you to the place you left off only when there are new posts. Loading a topic, going back, and loading it again should bring you to the first post. Not the most elegant solution, I'm aware, but there doesn't seem to be a native setting in NodeBB to disable this behaviour.
@Tentacle said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
In order to ensure people join the community and engage with one another, you need to find reasons for people to actively use the forum! Because in the end, what does this forum offer that your publically accessible Discord doesn’t?
I appreciate your candour! To answer your question, I feel that what this forum offers over Discord is primarily the difference in the intrinsic style of discourse. A forum by its very nature offers a few benefits that Discord and other IM clients simply can't, such as the flexibility to facilitate dozens of in-depth discussions on disparate topics simultaneously, without people drowning each other out, as would happen in a crowded Discord channel.
It also allows for a consistent and relatively permanent record of discussion. Going back to find out what your friend had to say about Kingdom Hearts 3 three weeks ago is trivial on a forum. You then even have the option of continuing that discussion without breaking the continuity of someone else's more recent conversation. Not so on Discord.
I'm guessing your question was more in reference to specific features and draws of the forum rather than potential uses, but I feel these are pretty relevant! We've only had the forum open for a few days now, so I think it's important to give people some time to adjust before worrying too much about driving traffic here. Web forums are largely outmoded these days, I'm aware, so this is at least partially something of an experiment to see if an old-school web forum is still viable for a community like this! I'm interested to see the results.
I'd suggest you direct (and promote when possible) all content creator feedback (For non-LL affiliated members) to be placed within the Art board; thus encouraging public discussion on community member’s creations. Threads dedicated to user made content could be self-contained to one-thread per-user, preventing overspill or mass spam (Like new daily theads from a LPer for example or bumping for attention)
Could even limit how often someone could self-promote content, unless they outright provide feedback a number of times. Actual feedback that helps everyone, none of this “Good job, nice work bud” rubbish! Cannot grow or improve like that.
Not to be blunt, but I'd hope that most users would be aware that these sorts of things are already welcomed and expected, respectively!
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Boards can be marked as read simply by entering and leaving them -- you need not read every topic in a board to remove the unread posts marker from the index.
As for topics, you can actually prevent the unread posts marker appearing for them entirely by selecting the Ignore Topic option in the topic tools at the bottom of the topic page:
The topic will still show up in topic listings, but will no longer be marked as unread, even if new posts are made to it. If you're uninterested in reading a topic, this saves you a step over manually marking it as read.
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What's your opinion on a dedicated "embed video" button? You know, for when you want to catch people's attention with a vid rather than post text with a link and hope it doesn't get overlooked.
It seems the most we can do right now is add a link to a picture, if we have a thumbnail of the youtube vid in question. And I had to quote someone else's post in the Last Life forum (heh) to figure out how he did that.
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@Blastboxer22 said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
What's your opinion on a dedicated "embed video" button? You know, for when you want to catch people's attention with a vid rather than post text with a link and hope it doesn't get overlooked.
It seems the most we can do right now is add a link to a picture, if we have a thumbnail of the youtube vid in question. And I had to quote someone else's post in the Last Life forum (heh) to figure out how he did that.
I thought it was odd embed video wasn't an option so Iooked up the tool that this site uses. Video embedding simply isn't a feature.
I'm no expert so take my words with a grain of salt, but I fear the entire forum would have to be remade using a different code to allow something like video embedding and more customizability. I don't think they'll do that, so adding links to pictures is the best we can manage for now.
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Do you think adding "folder-style" spoilers in in the cards? You know, that kind of thing from the old forum where you'd use spoilers not to hide any actual spoliers but to not stretch pages with huge paragraphs, like when you're listing forum game rules or posting giant pictures, or trying make a joke that requires nesting multiple spoilers in each other.
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Whoops, I meant to reply to this earlier but completely spaced.
@Blastboxer22 said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
What's your opinion on a dedicated "embed video" button? You know, for when you want to catch people's attention with a vid rather than post text with a link and hope it doesn't get overlooked.
It seems the most we can do right now is add a link to a picture, if we have a thumbnail of the youtube vid in question. And I had to quote someone else's post in the Last Life forum (heh) to figure out how he did that.
@Tentacle said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
I was curious as to why video-embedding wasn't an option. Hopefully a work around can be found, especially as more content creators arrive to the site.
@Raeker said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
I thought it was odd embed video wasn't an option so Iooked up the tool that this site uses. Video embedding simply isn't a feature.
I'm no expert so take my words with a grain of salt, but I fear the entire forum would have to be remade using a different code to allow something like video embedding and more customizability. I don't think they'll do that, so adding links to pictures is the best we can manage for now.
The trouble with in-page video embeds (and I'm guessing that the developers of NodeBB noticed this as well) is that they're very heavy elements, even when they're advisably not set to auto-play. Take the latest site post, for example. Just loading that page, without even initiating the video itself, adds at least 11 extra HTTP requests, totalling 734 KB and taking 1242 ms to load on my home WLAN connection:
Also consider the fact that two of those requests were blocked by my adblock plugin, which is rarely an option on mobile platforms (where data transfer tends to be at more of a premium, to boot!).
Then, apply that knowledge to this music sharing topic and we end up with a pretty compelling reason to avoid video embeds: as of this writing, there are 26 YouTube links in that topic (we'll be generous and exclude quoted posts since ideally we would prevent the same embed from appearing multiple times when a post is quoted).
Even on a computer with adblock and assuming relatively generous caching (of common things like remote.js, embed-player.js, the webfonts, cast_sender.js, etc), by my calculation you still end up with 130 extra external HTTP requests, totalling 1788 KB and taking a whopping 15210 ms to load, all without a single video actually being played. Then consider that mobile platforms without adblock will have to make even more requests for ad content. And then, the kicker: a majority of mobile browsers will simply open up the native YouTube app when an embed is clicked anyway. It's a bit of a waste, to say the least!
Regardless, I hope this little rant doesn't come across as an admonishment. On principle, YouTube embeds sound like a good idea, but my decision not to include them was one I made after a lot of careful consideration! I hope you'll understand that they won't be a priority in the near future.
@Blastboxer22 said in Forum/Site Tech Support Megathread:
Do you think adding "folder-style" spoilers in in the cards? You know, that kind of thing from the old forum where you'd use spoilers not to hide any actual spoliers but to not stretch pages with huge paragraphs, like when you're listing forum game rules or posting giant pictures, or trying make a joke that requires nesting multiple spoilers in each other.
There actually is a workaround for this sort of thing already. It's not super intuitive but it does the job.
>> double-quoting something will place the block inside an expandable element. >> just place a double greater-than sign at the beginning of each line.double-quoting something will place the block inside an expandable element.
just place a double greater-than sign at the beginning of each line.Note that this doesn't appear that way in the post preview, but for actual live posts, it should work fine.
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Hiya.
I recently performed some much-needed, long-overdue software updates, including pulling in some updates to the theme that the Last Life forum skin is based on. This may have introduced some visual glitches and problems.
Please let me know if you see anything that looks ugly or out of place. Even things that aren't a result of the upgrade can (probably) be fixed in a future update.
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