New style HF Blue Classic Open Beta

[HongFire]

Click here to use HF Blue Classic Style . It's still in Beta stage so you might encounter some bugs. If you do Please report it here or in the bug report forum. Also Please give your feedback here too. Tell us what you like and don't like about the new style.

We are have a Banner design contest in the Creative Corner We will pick 1 or a few entries to become the new hongfire.com banner. For details please click here.

Don't forget to check out the new FlashChat and new Social group as well. Social group leaders please update your social group logo and move it into the right category. If you can't find the category for your group then please leave it for now. Until we discuss and add more categories later.

If you have trouble and would like to use the old style please scroll down to the bottom of the page and select HongFire Ad Style.

[maumastoks]

Bug: no male/female icon

[8getter]

no "gender undisclose" icon.

by the way, where is member list?

[Ragnax]

Originally Posted by HongFire

Also Please give your feedback here too. Tell us what you like and don't like about the new style.

Like:

• The new icons on each board category are a kind of nice touch.

Not like:

• Wasted screen real-estate due to forced left and right margins. (I specifically warned about this in the screen resolution thread, damn it!)
  
• Ugly 2px wide borders surrounding each content block in an off-color to the blue hues used everywhere else.
  
• Posts have become separate blocks (each with that ugly border) wasting even more space.
  
• Posts being separate blocks also contrasts with the thread summary below the Reply to Thread window, where the posts are still all connected in a single block. Sloppy!
  
  
• White header text on light-blue header images is not very readable. In fact; it's quite unreadable. I'm already squinting to make out some of the smaller text.
  
• Entire content body fails to display with standard ad block list subscriptions due to use of the css class 'advertisement' on one of the containing blocks. This block and all the site's content inside it end up being completely hidden by AdBlock Plus.
  
• The site is still a gigantic clusterfuck of nested tables, so with respect to that the update certainly wasn't an improvement.
  
• Images are re-requested for download with each and every request (most visible on the header image at the very top) which means something is killing the clientside caching mechanism.
  
• A plethora of broken javascript references being spit back by Firebug when trying to use the quick edit. I basically have to 'Go advanced' to assure myself I can get an editor to show up and work.

I'd comment further but "The server is too busy at the moment.", so I should "Please try again later." Maybe it's being overloaded due to all those images not being cached properly? Or due to everyone with an ad-blocker desperately F5-ing trying to figure out where the site's content has gone?

PRO-TIP:
People hate having to opt-out of a forced beta version. Make the old style the default style and the new style the optional style, instead of the other way around as it is now. (I was not pleasantly surprised when the site up and vanished due to the new style using that 'advertisement' CSS class.)



[EDIT]
Oh great! And now it starts duplicating everything I typed when I go to edit a post...


[EDIT2]
Btw. You have 94 errors and 11 warnings when validating the main page alone. Guess where some of the funky layout issues are coming from, ey?

[asdu]

i got a problem cant display correctly the site whit firefox

[Sutorippu]

It's slow to load, as it seems it won't allow the local caching of images.

I have to turn off my ad-blocking software in order to see the forum itself.

The new theme is too generic. (Yes, I know, it's in beta.)

There don't seem to be any graphics for the reply links.

The server is overloading far too often in part because of this "new theme".

In short... so far, I don't like it.

[sailabc1]

For my IE8, caching of images looks okay.

But whatever the reason, yes, the server busy issue IS getting unbearable, even as I type this... Do not want Hongfire Vista Edition

EDIT: lol, noticed the word "Gender/Sex" before the gender icon is missing It's just a colon then the icon

[Ragnax]

Originally Posted by 8getter

by the way, where is member list?

Go to that little left-aligned drop down box at the very bottom of the page and switch to the Hongfire Ads theme. The old theme still has the members list.

Originally Posted by sailabc1

Do not want Hongfire Vista Edition

The semblance with Vista is striking: The new theme is a resource hog, is buggy as hell and switching back to the old theme is actually an upgrade...

[sailabc1]

^ And just when you said that, somebody decided to change it back to "HF XP". Senkyuu~ ^_^

[HongFire]

Originally Posted by maumastoks

Bug: no male/female icon

Fixed.

Originally Posted by 8getter

no "gender undisclose" icon.

by the way, where is member list?

Fixed there is no icon for undisclosed yet. I will have to make one later. The members list is there. Click on community and you will see a pop up menu.

Originally Posted by Ragnax

Like:

• The new icons on each board category are a kind of nice touch.

Not like:

• Wasted screen real-estate due to forced left and right margins. (I specifically warned about this in the screen resolution thread, damn it!)
• Ugly 2px wide borders surrounding each content block in an off-color to the blue hues used everywhere else.
• Posts have become separate blocks (each with that ugly border) wasting even more space.
• Posts being separate blocks also contrasts with the thread summary below the Reply to Thread window, where the posts are still all connected in a single block. Sloppy!
• White header text on light-blue header images is not very readable. In fact; it's quite unreadable. I'm already squinting to make out some of the smaller text.
• Entire content body fails to display with standard ad block list subscriptions due to use of the css class 'advertisement' on one of the containing blocks. This block and all the site's content inside it end up being completely hidden by AdBlock Plus.
• The site is still a gigantic clusterfuck of nested tables, so with respect to that the update certainly wasn't an improvement.
• Images are re-requested for download with each and every request (most visible on the header image at the very top) which means something is killing the clientside caching mechanism.
• A plethora of broken javascript references being spit back by Firebug when trying to use the quick edit. I basically have to 'Go advanced' to assure myself I can get an editor to show up and work.

I'd comment further but "The server is too busy at the moment.", so I should "Please try again later." Maybe it's being overloaded due to all those images not being cached properly? Or due to everyone with an ad-blocker desperately F5-ing trying to figure out where the site's content has gone?

PRO-TIP:
People hate having to opt-out of a forced beta version. Make the old style the default style and the new style the optional style, instead of the other way around as it is now. (I was not pleasantly surprised when the site up and vanished due to the new style using that 'advertisement' CSS class.)



[EDIT]
Oh great! And now it starts duplicating everything I typed when I go to edit a post...


[EDIT2]
Btw. You have 94 errors and 11 warnings when validating the main page alone. Guess where some of the funky layout issues are coming from, ey?

I took note of those issue already. will look into them. The default theme has already been set to the old style. The 94 errors and 11 warnings were from the old style not the new one. because the old style is not updated to work with latest forum script.

Originally Posted by asdu

i got a problem cant display correctly the site whit firefox

Can you take a screenshot because I've been using firefox all day on the site and I didn't see any problem yet.

Originally Posted by Sutorippu

It's slow to load, as it seems it won't allow the local caching of images.

I have to turn off my ad-blocking software in order to see the forum itself.

The new theme is too generic. (Yes, I know, it's in beta.)

There don't seem to be any graphics for the reply links.

The server is overloading far too often in part because of this "new theme".

In short... so far, I don't like it.

The Ad block issue should be solved it was causing by 1 of the scripts. Currently the new style doesn't have any ads. The over loading issue is the server and has nothing to do with the new style. Infect the new style should use less resource than the old one. because the old one is out of date.

Originally Posted by sailabc1

For my IE8, caching of images looks okay.

But whatever the reason, yes, the server busy issue IS getting unbearable, even as I type this... Do not want Hongfire Vista Edition

EDIT: lol, noticed the word "Gender/Sex" before the gender icon is missing It's just a colon then the icon

Server busy issue is what we are trying to fix at the moment. Most likely I have to upgrade the server. But currently I don't have the money yet. There was over 7000 people on the site. and imagine you have 7000 people keep hitting F5.