Topic: Ordbok forums

My forum has already been running for a while; time to announce it here. :)

http://ordbok.lagom.nl/obforums/

The site is for Dutch people learning Swedish and the other way around. I made some modifications to the php code, so I hope that when punbb 1.3 is released, it won't have too many nice new features, because that would mean I have to backport a few things.

My mods:
* Style sheets (in the colors of the Swedish flag); other layout for avatars
* List of active topics
* Auto-sensing the preferred language for guests (Swedish or Dutch; Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox/etc) and Opera users that don't have selected Swedish or Dutch in their browsers will get English.
* Captcha for guest posts and new registrations. I designed the Captcha after reading some papers about how captchas can be defeated. This one should be pretty tough for OCR algorithms.
* Posts can only be modified within 7 days after posting; within the first 30 minutes, there won't be a 'last modified' message.
* Quote length limiter. Posts are refused if more than about 50% of the message consists of quotes. (That needed some finetuning to deal with quotes containing lots of short lines)
* rel="nofollow" in links to pages that shouldn't be indexed by search engines (user info and such). Although these pages contain a meta robots tag, I've also put them into robots.txt, which means that google doesn't fetch the pages, but their URLs will still show up on Google if there's any page linking to them.
* The admin account gets to see the last visit date in the user list.

Re: Ordbok forums

The colors are crazy !

Re: Ordbok forums

Rador8 wrote:

The colors are crazy !

I agree that they are somewhat unconventional. smile But I find the standard color schemes a bit too boring. Judging from the SQL query below it seems that most users aren't bothered changing to one of the standard stylesheets.

mysql> select id,style,num_posts from users where num_posts>=5 order by -num_posts;
+-----+--------+-----------+
| id  | style  | num_posts |
+-----+--------+-----------+
|   2 | Lagom  |       157 |
|  58 | Lagom  |       146 |
|   7 | Lagom  |        66 |
|  11 | Lagom  |        36 |
|  66 | Lagom  |        34 |
|  65 | Lagom  |        32 |
| 106 | Lagom  |        30 |
|  77 | Oxygen |        25 |
|  97 | Lagom  |        21 |
|   4 | Lagom  |        20 |
|  39 | Lagom  |        20 |
|  33 | Sulfur |        18 |
|  69 | Lagom  |        14 |
| 119 | Lagom  |        14 |
|  70 | Lagom  |        13 |
|  67 | Lagom  |        11 |
| 101 | Lagom  |        10 |
| 124 | Lagom  |        10 |
|  12 | Lagom  |         9 |
|  19 | Lagom  |         9 |
|  63 | Lagom  |         9 |
|  74 | Lagom  |         9 |
|  50 | Lagom  |         8 |
| 103 | Lagom  |         8 |
|  45 | Lagom  |         7 |
| 107 | Lagom  |         7 |
|   9 | Cobalt |         6 |
|  38 | Lagom  |         5 |
|  49 | Lagom  |         5 |
|  72 | Lagom  |         5 |
+-----+--------+-----------+

Re: Ordbok forums

iauch...
defenatly strange colors.

Peolple dont usually dare to go on the profile and change it... no mater what skin u use you will allways have a very little amount of ppl changing the template

Maybe the color scheme would look diferent if you dont use those huge leters..

OT:last post is about peps person wink

5

Re: Ordbok forums

I don't know...I personally kind of like that color scheme. It's different, but it is soft on the eyes...doesn't hurt to look at at least.

6 (edited by hankwang 2006-06-25 13:34)

Re: Ordbok forums

pedrotuga wrote:

Maybe the color scheme would look diferent if you dont use those huge leters.. OT:last post is about peps person wink

Hmm, what browser did you use? I tested in Firefox and Opera and the letters don't seem particularily large. In principle the font has size 100% of whatever you have as a default in your browser, and the headings are maybe 120 or 140% of the default. Were you referring to the base font or to the headings?

By the way, I actually think the default font for punbb Oxygen is way too small. The problem is that the font is specified as 'Verdana, Arial, Helvetica'. Verdana is (I think) much wider compared to its height than Helvetica. Since my Linux computer doesn't have Verdana, it falls back to helvetica, which appears much smaller at the same nominal font size. Hmm, I see that I did the same thing, but now it's Nimbus Sans as a primary font in my stylesheet, followed by Arial (=Helvetica) as a fallback for Windows computers. smile [edit: updated stylesheet with verdana]

I don't get what you mean by 'peps person' smile

Re: Ordbok forums

I changed the layout a while back. It took my quite a bit of time to shoehorn the xhtml from punbb into a new design just by changing the CSS. Any comments?

A couple of members complained about the font size. It turns out there is no way to please all, so members can select the font size in their profile.

The reason for the font size problems appears to be that web browsers have standardized on 16px fonts as the default font size, which most people consider too large. So web designers either specify an absolute size of 13px, or a relative size of about 80%. I had set my browser to 13px default many years ago and had forgotten about it. So in my browser, font size 100% looked fine, but for others it looked huge...

8

Re: Ordbok forums

in Opera 9.02 seems very well. And your design simple and nice also seems a little different than other PunBB forums. Congrats.