Heyo. Here's a thread for forum updates and stuff for 2013.
Oh yeah, if you haven't heard, we're redesigning the site!
For now, I'd like to test the waters here for what would be future changes to the way the Nolan Fans Forums work. Needless to say, it's our call in the end. Valid arguments/thoughts are welcome.
Avatars:
- Avatars must be uploaded to NF (the feature is broken now and will be enabled)
- Avatars must be either JPGs or PNGs. No GIFs.
- High-resolution avatars would be wicked. Something like 360 x 200 for high-resolution displays, automatically scaling to 180 x 100 (current size) for normal screens.
Signatures:
- Maximum of one image at a 130px maximum height.
- Whatever width you want.
- GIFs allowed!
Ranks:
- Rebalanced rank levels are likely.
- 10,000 posts and you can set a custom title.
------
Explanation for avatar changes:
The bottom line is this: animated avatars usually have ridiculous file sizes and they're slowing down the site, especially on mobile devices.
We want Nolan Fans to be extremely lean and completely usable with any device. Usage statistics are showing an incredible jump in people using all sorts of devices other than desktop computers to visit Nolan Fans. We'd like to encourage this and make those experiences better.
GIFs require excessive computing power to render continually. If you're curious, monitor your system while you're viewing any forum page that's cooking up at least five gifs. Now think about how a mobile device is handling that. If you can see a difference on your desktop, imagine what that's doing to a phone.
GIFs are huge. Here are some numbers.
A certain user's .gif avatar [561 KB]
Another user's .gif avatar [586 KB]
...and the crown [5.7 MB] that's right
On the other hand, my avatar [7,081 bytes].
We'd also like to host all of the avatars ourselves. By doing this, we can speed up the site by using fewer external HTTP requests to fetch all of the data when you want to load a page. The goal is to download as much data from our servers and rely less on places like imgur and Photobucket. And since we're serving the images, we can set the cache timeouts. Avatars don't change very frequently and we'll be caching the shit out of them.
These won't be the only changes to the site or the forums, but I wanted to talk about this stuff first.
Oh yeah, if you haven't heard, we're redesigning the site!
For now, I'd like to test the waters here for what would be future changes to the way the Nolan Fans Forums work. Needless to say, it's our call in the end. Valid arguments/thoughts are welcome.
Avatars:
- Avatars must be uploaded to NF (the feature is broken now and will be enabled)
- Avatars must be either JPGs or PNGs. No GIFs.
- High-resolution avatars would be wicked. Something like 360 x 200 for high-resolution displays, automatically scaling to 180 x 100 (current size) for normal screens.
Signatures:
- Maximum of one image at a 130px maximum height.
- Whatever width you want.
- GIFs allowed!
Ranks:
- Rebalanced rank levels are likely.
- 10,000 posts and you can set a custom title.
------
Explanation for avatar changes:
The bottom line is this: animated avatars usually have ridiculous file sizes and they're slowing down the site, especially on mobile devices.
We want Nolan Fans to be extremely lean and completely usable with any device. Usage statistics are showing an incredible jump in people using all sorts of devices other than desktop computers to visit Nolan Fans. We'd like to encourage this and make those experiences better.
GIFs require excessive computing power to render continually. If you're curious, monitor your system while you're viewing any forum page that's cooking up at least five gifs. Now think about how a mobile device is handling that. If you can see a difference on your desktop, imagine what that's doing to a phone.
GIFs are huge. Here are some numbers.
A certain user's .gif avatar [561 KB]
Another user's .gif avatar [586 KB]
...and the crown [5.7 MB] that's right
On the other hand, my avatar [7,081 bytes].
We'd also like to host all of the avatars ourselves. By doing this, we can speed up the site by using fewer external HTTP requests to fetch all of the data when you want to load a page. The goal is to download as much data from our servers and rely less on places like imgur and Photobucket. And since we're serving the images, we can set the cache timeouts. Avatars don't change very frequently and we'll be caching the shit out of them.
These won't be the only changes to the site or the forums, but I wanted to talk about this stuff first.