Wedge

I don't get people who complain that something is done one way and they can't disable it, but they won't even consider doing something very simple like creating a sidebar-less skin for their forum. (Which is probably when they realize they don't really need it.)

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I don't get people who complain that something is done one way and they can't disable it, but they won't even consider doing something very simple like creating a sidebar-less skin for their forum. (Which is probably when they realize they don't really need it.)

You can make such a skin, however I forget what happens when things want to put things into the sidebar will do when there isn't a sidebar.

In which case some stuff that expects the sidebar should be able to detect if there is one and appropriately either drop their content (and not go through the queries etc.) or reposition it elsewhere.

Now I'm not tablet constrained, I'll explain a bit further.

1. You're pretty much the only person that's complained about it in the 10 months we've been using a sidebar on this site. It is somewhat rude to barge in and demand we change it just for you. If you were part of a majority that demanded it, we might reconsider, but I doubt it.

2. There is such a thing as optimum reading width - note that most books are of a fairly standard size, and even when they're not, the text is still set to roughly the same number of words per line and per page, just with bigger writing. I wonder why that is... could it be that they understand people best respond to a certain number of words on a page at a time? Having very wide screens is more tiring on the eyes and the brain than having shorter lines.

3. I respect that you have a list of requirements that you have to be seen to follow. Barging in here and expecting that we follow your to-do list is not going to happen.

More importantly though, there's actually very little fundamentally wrong with SMF - if it's working for you, stick with it, you don't have to upgrade past 2.0.x if you're happy with it. There are plenty of people still using SMF 1.1.x which debuted 7 years ago. (And what about all the people who still use Windows XP which debuted just over 11 years ago?) You don't have to have the latest and greatest, and it seems to me that you're looking to move on from SMF because you think you're missing out, rather than because it doesn't do the things you need.

I'm pleading and arguing against it.  It's your project -- I haven't "demanded" anything.

Not at all.  For example, my favorite laptop that I use most of the time (my 17"), I bought in 2004.  I'm a buy and hold type of guy.  I, actually, _want_ a system that I can let run forever and just update as updates come along.  I love software and systems that stand the test of time.

No.  I'm going to have to find another forum platform, like vBulliten or something, which I'm certain I will hate.  We just got the latest SMF update a few weeks ago or so, and the one before that was a year ago.  That is insane, and isn't me "wanting to stay with the latest and greatest".

As for the latest and greatest, don't get too ahead of yourself.  It took you 2.5 years to get to alpha.

Why you don't have more help is beyond me, but whatever.

It tells me this project is more of a hobby, which is fine, but you should tell people that up front.

Then I come on here, fall in love with what you guys are doing, simpy ask "gosh, can we just have a hide option for the sidebar if we want", and I get told to go jump in a lake, like they did to you, for my "demands"

I'm asking for a little checkbox that tells the rendering to just not display the sidebar.

By the way, can we have more than one sidebar?

I don't trust they have their shit together -- especially after you told me they are still on PHP 4.

I hope that's the case.

Managing developer egos is difficult.  I've been to hell and back with that, so I understand.

That's great.  And I can't understand side consequences for that.  I don't have sidebars on our forum, and I read them just fine on my 17" and 24".  Maybe I'm missing something.

Again, I'm missing something.  Why have I not heard a single complaint on our forum?

I guess I'm thinking of it from a Drupal mindest -- and I'm not familiar with the architecture you're working with, so I concede that.

Let me say this... I just scrunched my browser in, and the sidebar dropped to the bottom -- that looks perfect.  Is there a way to make it do that on default (as opposed to hiding it)?

That isn't what I said. I said that had compatibility code in there from back in the PHP 4 days. The fact it supports older versions of PHP isn't inherently a bad thing, just as it's not a bad idea that software works on Windows XP when 7 and 8 are the current versions.

It's the case. Trust me, if there were issues with SMF security, it would have been fixed in Wedge by now and very likely someone would have told them about it.

Except that was the complete opposite of what I meant, and in fact of what I said. The problem isn't developer ego. It's everyone else who believes that their say is as important as the developers' say except they're not the ones doing the work.

As far as mobile posting on SMF, you could do a lot worse than smf-media.com's offering.

As far as blogs go, notice that it's not exactly prominent here and amounts to nothing more than a custom theme, and can't be made anything like what you're after without a serious rewrite, so much so that I've thought about dropping core blog support because it's too limited for most uses.

And are they full width or fixed width?

Let me put it this way, I have a 17" laptop, with 1920x1200 resolution, and most forums being that wide (at, say, 95% width) just become hard to read. So many forums I know actually have a fixed width to prevent that being an issue anyway. But even though I have a large resolution, I invariably run my browser window at around 1000px wide because that's how the web seems to work best, not to mention the fact that it keeps the reading width about right.

Because you're dealing with a very specific subset of the forum population. I however have had the interesting experience of providing support on sm.org, which doesn't have the sidebar out of the box and between there and here, I know which is more popular. You might not have had a complaint but I guarantee that if we make it an option, it's going to provide a plentiful source of support issues for us to deal with.

And therein lies the other difference: Drupal is incredibly modularised. Ordinarily I wouldn't complain about that, but what that means is each module does its own work in terms of databases, as opposed to a flatter structure that gets all the data it needs for the current page or thereabouts. The result is something much more efficient for its own use (I've seen Drupal installations demanding quite literally hundreds of queries from the database to render a single page) but less directly configurable. But in any case, Drupal should not be a benchmark to measure against, except to measure how much faster you are. The ideals of pluggability are wonderful but the practicalities just don't stack up.

I thought we'd already explained it did this before? Anyway, not without a code change and not a nice one. See if Uncle Nao is prepared to expend more bytes per page, every page.

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