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PunBB Forums → Posts by sirena
A nice tight tstyle, although I always reckon the usability of these dark styles is not great.
You might like to tweak your CSS a bit though because the text from the breadcrumb navigation line in viewforum.php and viewtopic.php runs over the bottom of your header image of that guy - and the whiteness of his hand in the background makes reading the text of the beginning of the breadcrumb navlist very difficult.
Very neat, technically. And very neat visually.
But in practice it makes accessing your site (to me - YMMV) very slow.
And since it requires Flash, it may not suit everyone. Esp people like me who normally don't allow Flash to run in my default browser.
Firefox also reported the following upon accessing your site, FYI:
The stylesheet http://www.chopaway.com/rov2/style/impo … itcher.php was not loaded because its MIME type, "text/html", is not "text/css".
http://www.chopaway.com/rov2/
Line 0
ANyone - aside from the Facebook guys - done an install or plugin of recaptcha for a punbb. I notice recaptcha.net have plugins for phpbb2, vb, wordpress etc, but no punbb. 
Nice and simple.
Interesting CAPTCHA too on the registration page - http://forum.developers.facebook.com/register.php - using http://recaptcha.net.
Must look into that.
Obviously phpBB3 looks more beautiful to the original poster than PunBB 1.3, if their own site is any guide: http://chita.us/community/
What do you think we should do to make it clear to a first time visitor?
A simple one-liner somewhere that says something like 'Welcome to the world's greatest foobar foobar something forum' would be a good start, as well as perhaps a message in the forum header (perhaps using the Announcements plugin) inviting me to register and telling me what wonders I would experience if I did so.
Quite a gloomy, monochromatic style. Could do with a little more sparkle, colour or highlighting, or some sort of visual interest.
It's also not at all clear to a first time visitor what the forum is all about and why they should spend any time exploring the forum. If I landed on the forum home page after following a search engine result I would probably immediately hit the back button and go away.
Very elegant. Smooth, subdued colours, clear fonts, snappy performance, light and very modern design.
It isn't so bad in IE6 Win either.
Only dislike is the big vacant space on the right hand side. I guess you are reserving that for a skyscraper banner ad or something?
Also the design suits itself very well to using fluid width, but you've designed for 1024x768, and smaller screens aren't catered for at all.
Umm, in the forum check your CSS font specifications. In IE6 Windows the fonts are a disaster - they look about 3 pixels large and can't be enlarged using the browser either...
FF, Safari, Opera are OK.
Also suggest in the forum you apply a bit more jpg compression to your header image to shrink it down from its current 135k - it would improve your page load speed.
I also find the colours for viewing text within topics in the forum not optimal - when you have black text on a dark gray background, as you do, the text doesn't stand out enough - suggest you lighten it up a bit there.
After a visit to phpbb.com today, I notice that in their latest release - phpBB 3.0 RC7 - they included a whole bunch of fixes recommended by a security auditor who gave the previous RC6 a once over:
This release is mostly the outcome of an external security audit performed by SektionEins. All items tagged as [Sec] were found by the company doing the audit and revealed some fundamental problems we were able to fix. We are proud that the audit revealed no sql injection vulnerability or critical command execution vulnerabilities.
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi … p;t=585093
Once the punBB v1.3 code base gets more stable, it may be worthwhile for punBB to do the same.
I get the impression that the auditors the phpBB group used - SektionEins, the developers of the hardened-php project - do a range of work probably gratis for many open-source projects: http://www.sektioneins.de/content/en.26 … tent2.html
Since they are already punBB users - see http://forum.hardened-php.net - I suspect they may be quite inclined to help out if requested to audit PunBB v1.3.
Yes, it is a risky course. Look at the experience of the Mambo/Joomla fork. 3rd party developers got suspicious of the whole operation and wondered why they were working for free developing code for a product that a commercial entity owned the rights to. That's the kind of perception you don't want.
If AdSense ads + some sponsorship links (ie like phpBB.com) had been running here for the last few years, maybe these commercial issues needn't have come up.
Hopefully this development won't damage punbb, but as bingiman suggests, it probably will.
A bit too dark for me visually.
I don't want to sound negative but best of luck attracting users when there are well-established mega-resources around like the WebmasterWorld forum and others occupying exactly the same turf.
Attractive and fast.
If bots eventually find their way past your CAPTCHA, you might like to also try something like this:
http://www.punres.org/desc.php?pid=400
...adapted to ask a custom question every Christian should know, perhaps.
Just have a look at http://secunia.com/product/3700 to see Punbb's security history, which is pretty good, you will note.
However while the core punbb code may be pretty secure, as soon as you start applying any 3rd party mods and patches, security may start to suffer, depending on how those mods etc are coded. It usually pays to have a good look at their code before you add any of them to your board.
A 'classic', and slightly simpler, way to achieve this is described at: http://punbb.org/docs/dev.html#syndication.
Example of usage: http://www.punbb.org home page
Hi again.
I do agree that it's rather flat, but I have a hard time adding subtle texture, partly because I don't what are good background or border image or styles, and partly becaue I'm slightly design impaired.
As someone who is also a little design impaired, I always find it useful to play around with one of the many punbb styles downloadable from punres.org.
One attractive style that could probably be adapted to your needs for example (ie it's primary colours are red) would be something like RedLife for PunBB 1.2: http://www.punres.org/viewtopic.php?id=3770 . Just dump the (rather large) header image, dump the crazy body background image, add your own header image and adapt the title font and size, and you have could another style option for your users.
Maybe also have a look at http://www.arsamania.ru/forum/ - a Russian fan site for British soccer team Arsenal. It is a very nicely styled punbb forum that is similar in concept to your Redsox site, and the Arsenal colours are even the same as the redsox ones. The developer adapted one of the VB style themes from punres to get his look, and it works well.
A final snippet: while the forum width has been reduced from 100%, the whole forum is still left aligned, so I now only see a space on the right-hand side only of the forum. The whole forum probably needs to be centred, or equal padding applied to both left and right of the main box containing the forum.
Agreed that a WYSIWYG editor mod makes a big difference to users, esp non-tech or casual ones. Pity they add weight though to the page. Which one did you use?
My 2c:
Aside from the technical issues of how to implement this, and as you say
I'm a writer, not a programmer, and I don't have a lot of time to devote to this each day
I think I'd reconsider this project, as it is likely to involve a lot of up-front technical effort to set it up, and then there will probably be a LOT of ongoing work managing the content on a daily basis, including moderation and also managing the **relentless** assaults of spammers on your forum(s). The more forums you have under one roof, as it were, the bigger these problems will be.
Quit while you are ahead, or change what you want to do to something more modest than re-inventing Craigslist using punbb
Likes:
- fast
- variable not fixed width
- easy to read fonts
Maybe-could-be-better:
- design is a bit stark and flat. Could do with some more accenting (eg introducing a few more colours that are complementary to your core grey and red palette, using a gradient background image in some CSS elements, subtle shadow effects here and there etc). This can be done with no performance hit at all
- maybe also could use a (well chosen and fast, small compressed JPG, centred) redsox image (logo, player image etc) as the header background
- not so fond of forum width going 100% - maybe 96% to allow left and right to be set back from the page edge a bit would look a bit better
- announcement box doesn't stand out distinctively enough. Maybe give it a light grey border or something
- banner ad at the bottom would work better centred rather than left aligned
Saw this today on a support forum for a web server (Nanoweb):
Forums are down, I don't have time anymore to filter spam on a daily basis, sorry for the inconvenience ...
A sad sign of the times. I think it was a phpBB2 site, not punBB
At least this guy was monitoring the site and took it down. I've come across some forums that seem to run as 'ghost-ship' forums for too long and allow spammers to run rampant.
There are a lot of more precise ways of finding out exactly what a webserver is running, without having to look at icons.
Security through obscurity is a complete and utter fallacy. Security is gained through security, and nothing more.
Security = security, you say. Can't argue with that
But 'security' is a process and concept that may legitimately include many different forms of obscurity, and has been the case for thousands of years. Millions even.
Think of the value of camouflage as protective mechanism employed by military types for many many years and indeed in the animal kingdom to mask, confuse and conceal things, to blend inconspicuously into the background. That's a pretty useful form of security by obscurity.
Security by obscurity is also the concept behind stealth technology (think F-117, B-2, F-22 etc etc), which is of course pretty popular with many security and military systems - ie if my enemy can't see me, he can't hit me, or as a general strategy to improve survivability in complex threat environments. Sounds good to me, since the web sure is one of the latter
And yeah, hard-core baddies won't rely on buttons, which may be decoys anyhow. But they sure may help some folks start their target profiling...
Umm, do you really need all those buttons down the bottom of the forums home page etc?
I could never figure out why people do that - to me it's like people who drive cars with stickers on them showing their tyre brand, oil brand, petrol flavour and brand, light-globe maker, air-filter brand, shock-absorber maker etc etc. Handy to know if you need to do some emergency repairs ???
In web site terms I guess having those buttons there may be handy to hackers, so it's probably not completely useless
To insert it for each post you would need to modify viewtopic.php and/or header.php, I think, and do something like php echo the relevant database fields for topic posts into the <head> section, esp the meta description section, truncating the output of course...
But I agree to a degree with Smartys. Meta keyword and description are not that influential in search engine ranking algorithms anymore, since they (esp meta keywords) are so regularly abused as to be useless information.
If you really need this, why not put out a bid at http://www.getafreelancer.com or something? I'm sure some PHP coder on that site, in between programming web site scrapers or forum spamming tools or email address harvesters , could find the time to help you out for a small fee.
Aha.
Maybe part of the problem for me is that your whole top menu (home | ---> learn | ---> forum | ---> gallery --->) is not visible **at all** in my usual browser, which uses the IE6 engine. This is perhaps to be expected, as you have the menu links commented out in your HTML:
<!---- <li><a href="http://www.pictureaweek.com/words/">home<span></span></a> |</li> --->
<!---- <li><a href="http://www.pictureaweek.com/words/photography-articles/">learn<span></span></a> |</li> --->
<!---- <li><a href="http://shutterweek.com/forums">forum<span></span></a> |</li> --->
<!---- <li><a href="http://www.pictureaweek.com/words/wpg2">gallery<span></span></a></li> --->It's visible in Firefox 2 though, so it seems you are doing something weird with your HTML comment tagging that FF tolerates but IE doesn't. Safari also ignores the top menu, BTW, so your HTML needs to be fixed up here I think.
Using Firefox I can see that Punbb is indeed in there under /forums, so sorry about saying it isn't in there. It's just likely to be invisible to many people.
Also under Firefox, when within the forum the top menu doesn't sit properly horizontally - it is displaying on two lines for me: there is a line break or something just in front of the 'forum' menu item. It looks pretty ugly. It sits OK horizontally when outside of the forum though.
Edit - actually I see what's happening here - in the forum header you've attempted to comment out the 'learn' link, but FF is still displaying it. Hence the menu turns out wonky. But funnily enough, the menu in /forums now renders OK in IE, but it still dissappears when you go back to the site home.
Testing across browsers of any site you launch is a good idea...
Where's the punBB on this site? I can't see any punbb forum there at all.
Furthermore, when you go to http://www.pictureaweek.com/forum/, what you see is vBulletin® Version 3.6.8 ... not punBB.
The 'Show Off' on punbb.org is area is meant to show off your **punBB** work, not any old site.
Very nice indeed.
Fast and very minimal, whilst also being colourful, visually attractive and distinctive. Not bad for 22218 bytes total page weight.
Stripping out some of those other interface elements improves speed too and also makes it a very user friendly forum.
Lots of people could learn from your design approach, I think...
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