Improvements to The Pit

[MBMorgan]

"How important is it to show join date and number of posts?"

Meathead - Not at all, really ... but to be fair, they don't take up much real estate ...

[fzxdoc]

Oh please, please, pretty please, see if something can be done to set photo sizes (automatically, perhaps?) to whatever fits on the page with a file size that does not take so long to load. Or limit photo size. Often when photos are posted in their original size they are too large to be viewed in their entirety on the page.

For example, I absolutely love the "Show us what you're cooking" topic, but so many of the photos are so huge that they take a super long time to load, and then when they do we can only see a part of them. Then, when they are clicked on to get to a photo-view page where the whole photo can be seen, they take another chunk of time to re-load. It's so frustrating that sometimes I just skip that topic altogether unless I've got a ton of time on my hands. That makes me sad, because, as I said, it's one of my fav topics.

It happens in other topics, too, but that particular one is very photo-heavy.

Kathryn

[RichBrew]

Does the entire forum have to go public? Maybe announcements or something could go public, and have a separate members only section.

[LangInGibsonia]

I left a comment further up the thread regarding a member map. Other forums I visit have used zeemaps.com for member locations. Admittedly, those forums are much smaller than the Pit so not sure how zeemaps would handle the potential number of users here.

[LangInGibsonia]

Other forums I've frequent use maps that allow you to drop a pin as specifically or generally as you like. And it's completely voluntary.

Zeemaps.com

[gcdmd]

ctesibiusulpius, I wish I could "Like" your comment. That is a great tip for any web site.

[gcdmd]

You could do like some sites do and have underscores in place of spaces

[badf00d]

One other area for improvement is page speed. There are some fairly basic things that can be done, but they're not obvious if you're just looking at the site in a browser. The easiest ones to do are caching, compression, and minification. I managed a big round of improvements to our company's site last year and the difference was incredible. Much of what we were doing on our site are common problems across the web, and the same applies here.

A good tool to help identify the problem areas is a freebie by Google: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

An additional benefit to making that tool happy is the higher your PageSpeed score, the higher they will rank you in search results above other sites that are not optimized well. You can also handle more simultaneous users on the site because bandwidth usage drops considerably.

We came up with a few techniques to keep our site fast and they worked out quite well. Our tweaks included server configuration, markup, CSS, and automated image optimization. It was a mix of one-time changes and some ongoing automated processes. Some of it may be useful here. If you could use some help, let me know.

UPDATE: Apparently much of the speed is just related to vBulletin 5.x, so ignore most of what I said above.

[Jon Solberg]

Zoom would be very cool. : )

[Lost in China]

Ok, then divorce the forum from the main amazingribs.com website. We can have a traditional vBulletin forum and we can dump this reply/comment paradigm that nobody gets.

[badf00d]

I would love to see maximum-scale=1 removed from the site's <meta> element. If I don't have my reading glasses I can't read the site on my phone or iPad unless I pinch-zoom. Unfortunately, when that attribute is set to 1 it prevents pinch-zoom. If you need to use a value for it, a better choice would be 10, but you can probably just remove it entirely.

[Breadhead]

I'm not computer savvy enough to know what I don't know.😎

I've always eventually been able to find and do whatever I'm looking for.

A sniffinator would be brilliant though.👍

[DWCowles]

Welcome John Henry

[John Henry]

Thank you, Exalted Leader! No wonder AR is among the most successful sites anywhere. You and your team do a phenomenal job of providing quality, value and innivation. You and your great team--as well as all our wonderful readers/posters make AR the best value in barbecue.

[DWCowles]

I agreed