Wedge

Little known fact: debugging mode also turns on error_reporting so errors aren't captured and hidden away...

It's funny, I thought I'd already made this point?

Nao talked about it more than once, but using boards for different kinds of content, some of the choices of fonts, those were things he felt you'd tried after we talked about them here. *shrug* Multiple discovery is at least as likely however.

(I see also you're as bad as I was about leaving/never returning.)And that's the balance that too few seem to understand.Yes, and I'm not sure exactly what message that is giving. There has to be a reason why no-one else did it, and I'm not sure that the reason isn't because it wasn't the way to go.Yes, it would be more popular. There are way too many people that believe that if they can mimic the look of another site, they will get some rub-off popularity, c.f. all the people who want to emulate the look of Nairaland, all the people who use MyBB because it went quite far in trying to emulate vBulletin.So I was wrong about it being fun for you. I simply figured that you as an artist would appreciate having the freedom to explore it how you saw fit, rather than making something that had quite diverse but limited constraints. It is quite distinct, and that can work against it.

But it also has a lot of similarities, because form follows function. The structure of the board, message and thread indexes follow the same structure as 1.1 and 1.0 and back. And I still believe that is because that is what is expected. You can do unique designs for unique sites but you have to return to the conventions for the base.

(If you're going to argue with what I'm saying, argue the points I'm making, not side points. I was wrong about it being fun. It's different, no argument, but the point I'm making is that its function follows all the others, and that there ARE a lot of design consistencies with other systems, like the fact there's still a lot of blue in it, even if it is accented with orange, it's still primarily blue.)Actually, I'd argue that some greens provide a sense of stability and strength (not to mention being pretty much the only choice that's consistent with positivity in just about every single culture out there) - but that blue is neutral, and in the base of the software you need that neutrality, though of course it can be changed and tweaked to a site's specific needs.Where the hell did we say that adding a sidebar was innovative? Stop putting words in my mouth.I'd argue it was less about people liking change, but that in the interim, what was considered acceptable had changed around them, and thus what was considered desirable.

How many forums do you know that have 65535 boards? Even if we expand that, how many forums do you know that have 65535 boards, blogs and galleries all at once?

If they have that much stuff, they're likely going to run into other problems too.

Here's the fundamental question: do you make life easier for the select few truly huge sites at the cost of making it slower for every other user? You cannot have it both ways.Because that wouldn't solve the problem and would probably be even worse.

Right now the clause evaluates to 1=1 for admins and WHERE b.id_board IN (...) AND b.id_board NOT IN (...) (the last part is not all the time, but it can be, put it that way)

IN() clauses are not efficient, because internally they are evaluated to WHERE value = 1 OR value = 2 OR value = 3 etc.

Now, wrapping it in a subselect won't solve anything at all because all you end up doing is making it WHERE b.id_board IN (SELECT ...) - which ultimately becomes the same thing, except that you're not even making use of any cache this time.

As far as I can figure out, the only way to make it more efficient is to rewrite all the queries not to use a subselect and to force the board stuff to be conventionally joined, and conventionally excluded (where you have deny) which makes all queries that use query_see_board and its friends all get a way lot more complicated.The theory was, as I discussed many months ago, that I wanted to be able to have private repositories that it could call for updates on. But I ran into privacy issues.

I really would leave it alone at this point if you're still planning on doing some kind of release this weekend.For everyone else I figure that alpha releases won't really be upgraded, and it's not like we can't just diff the install file to figure out what's changed - and convert that into something else that's easily usable (even here)It's committed, just needs more testing really. I haven't noticed any funny problems but I haven't been trying to embed. (Unfortunately I'm just in the process of figuring out how to pay for my grandmother's healthcare, is complicated)I didn't initially understand the consequences but I think the result is better for themers to do so, so go for it :)

Home > Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage > Diagnostic & Usage Data > each crash is a separate plist entry.

I'm just very, VERY sensitive to people that come out with statements about how it isn't what they've expected. Bear in mind that I've also been known to write a lot of free mods, give them away for free and then get crap from people because I didn't make *exactly what they wanted*.Fair comment. Though I find it interesting to note that Bloc has actually been taking some of the ideas we proposed here... and it should also be noted that the default theme of every single forum software is bland. That's by design, and with one specific reason: it provides a structure for people to build upon.It is different to the norm. But it also has to perform the same actions as the norm, and on top of that, we will get complaints if it doesn't perform the norm.Because we have to balance a goal that a lot of people seem to have forgotten.

Change for the sake of improvement is great. And there is a lot of change for the sake of improvement. However, change for the sake of change is not improvement.

A forum has certain functional requirements that have to be adhered to. There's only so far you can go from those functional requirements and still remain generically usable for a lot of sites. As I demonstrated on Game Memorial, you can do some very nice customisation but that customisation is simply not suitable for every single site. I applied a setup that turned a board into a blog. But it won't suit most forums. It will make a difference for blog boards, sure, but I guarantee that what I did on GM will likely not be suitable for most sites if any others. (I'm not entirely sure it works on GM at this point, but hey, it's experimental.)It started out pretty much that way.

That said, can you really convince me that the thoughts/conversation system will be suitable for most sites, for example? It's basically reimplementing what's on Noisen, however it's likely to be usable enough for a lot more sites, so it got included.

Also note that there's not a great lot of code that's actually original from 10 years ago ;)Creating a fresh approach does mean so much more than just doing design. It has to support customisations, the entire range of customisations that Wedge will be able to support, as well as all the features that we want it to have. AND it still has to be suitable for a vast, vast range of sites, a criteria that theme designers generally do not have to deal with.

Let's take Bloc as a classic example. How enthusiastic do you think he was when designing Curve, as opposed to all the other creative themes he's done? Can you also imagine *ANY* of Bloc's newer themes being the default for ANY forum package, which by definition has to be a base, rather than the end product?Are they really? Both are on-going works in progress with active users. Both have users with user psychology. The only real difference is scale.

There is a whole world receptive to change. Except they're by far the minority. And even then, they're not receptive to change for the sake of change, they're receptive to change when they're aiming for a specific change or improvement - or getting anyway from a specific bug or issue.Except Facebook's UI has had several major shifts in the last 8 years. The world of websites is quite different to conventional product design and marketing, because conventional products have to do the whole design, user experience testing etc. then the product hits the market. But with a website, the product essentially evolves over time and can respond to user feedback and so on as time goes on.

Yes, there is an overall focus on design/function first and foremost. And that's the crux of this debate. We have a fundamental functional requirement to meet. Major UI overhauls will not change that fact, and there's a reason why forum UI has not significantly altered in over a decade - no-one has yet been able to improve upon it in a meaningful way for the majority of users. Yes, individual users and individual sites might have specific improvements but we simply can't just include major UI shifts in the base software, no matter how much people complain.That's merely a matter of semantics, actually. Most of what is in Wedge is a round of iteration on top of SMF 2.0 which is a round of iteration on top of SMF 1.1, on top of SMF 1.0, on top of YaBB SE, on top of YaBB, on top of UBB, on top of migrating the conventional newsgroup concepts to a web based environment. It's one long line of iterations.

From a user experience standpoint, we're iterating on top of what is in SMF 2.0. There's a lot of iteration in some places, less in others.

Wedge is not really prototyping user experience, it's mostly a technical phase of prototyping. I fully expect way more iteration to occur in response to user feedback - because it's a constant iterative process, not the conventional product evolution process that physical products have.I've been a Facebook user for several years. A great number of changes, large and small, have occurred in that time, not least 'Timeline'. It's an iterative process. Have a read of http://facebooklayout.com/blog/a-look-at-the-changing-layouts-of-facebook/Well done, you've taken on board my argument and turned your own 180 in the process.

Form follows function, quite right. The function of a forum hasn't changed in decades. Small parts of the process have. Specific implementations might also have changed. But the bulk of operations have not changed. As a result, the theme in Wedge needs to follow that approach. There is really very little major change we can do to the form of Wedge as a consequence.Nope. That really is an apples and oranges comparison.I realise that, and I'm glad you feel better for having got it off your chest :) On the flip side, I firmly disagree with aspects of your argument because I think they're valid, but rooted firmly in a different background. I'm also pretty sure you're not seeing it from the perspective that Nao and I have to consider - we're in the position whereby we have to consider how users will use the software.

Point of interest: why do all the forum software packages out there at present have a default theme based around the colour blue? Why do they do this, I wonder? Could it be that they have to be carefully neutral across all the different uses that their software will generate and that they have to remain neutral to allow users to customise for their specific site?