Welcome!


This is a membership forum. Guests can view 5 pages for free. To participate, please join.

[ Pitmaster Club Information | Join Now | Login | Contact Us ]

Only 4 free page views remaining.

Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Improvements to The Pit

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    #31
    Subforum consolidation. Moving every subforum with fewer than 20 posts together. If there aren't a lot of posts on the topic, why does it need its own separate place? Keeping common subforums clustered together promotes easier reading and more posts, a virtuous circle. At some point there will need to be new areas staked out, but only when the more specific topic becomes a distraction to the main topic.

    Why are there separate forums for BBQ restaurants in Scotland and Ireland? Why not just "Europe"? Likewise "Asia/Pacific" instead of New Zealand and the rest. There's one for Argentina but nowhere else in South America? Brazil has a huge tradition of its own style of BBQ. Put one for the whole continent.

    Consolidate the US subforums into regional according to accepted styles, only some states need their own. Idaho? North Dakota? 0 posts and not likely to get any. Why are they even there? Butchery forums get the same treatment as BBQ restaurants.

    Beverages all go into one forum under Recipes and Techniques.

    The last thing I would really, really like to see is an ordinary vBulletin forum. Why did this forum have to "integrate" with Drupal? Drupal's forum is renowned for being a hunk of junk. It is just Drupal's node/comment concept applied to a discussion format, something it wasn't made for and isn't good at. This Pit Forum doesn't interact with the rest of the site at all. There is no need for it to be "integrated" with the Table of Contents and the rest. We users don't do anything on that side of the site. We don't log in, we don't leave comments unless it's the Disqus comments, etc. It's just static content that gets read by the greater internet. This is our forum, there's no reason it has to be Drupal-style. Make it a traditional vBulletin forum and watch a ton of problems disappear.

    Comment


    • Meathead
      Meathead commented
      Editing a comment
      Subforums: Remember, The Pit is still young. Most have more than 20 comments and the few with less thematically belong. We are questioning the butcher section which does not seem to be getting much use.

    • Meathead
      Meathead commented
      Editing a comment
      We are not trying to integrate with Drupal. Drupal has nothing to do with anything in here. On this page all mentions of Drupal are by you. What we do want is for the navigation in here to be similar to out there so people will be able to navigate more easily.

    • Lost in China
      Lost in China commented
      Editing a comment
      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.

    #32
    If it ain't broke ...

    Comment


      #33
      We need flying monkeys. That be really cool. : )

      Comment


        #34
        and here we go again 😏

        Comment


          #35
          Great to hear! When it comes to UI, I would really love to see some kind of compact reading view. By that I mean that each "entry" or post takes up way too much screen real estate. Take a look at the attached screenshot of the three posts just above this one:

          Click image for larger version

Name:	readingview.jpg
Views:	147
Size:	54.9 KB
ID:	153267


          So, just to read those three lines, I have to do a lot of scrolling...

          I'm thinking that if we could minimize or shrink the lefthand gray section (user profile), it would be a nicer/quicker user experience. That profile section could be shown on mouse-over (hover) instead.

          It could look something more along the lines of:

          Mbmorgan: If it ain't broke...
          Jon Solberg: We need flying monkeys. That be really cool. : )
          DWCowles: and here we go again

          Perhaps too spartan for some, but you get what I'm after...





          Comment


          • Meathead
            Meathead commented
            Editing a comment
            How important is it to show join date and number of posts?

          • David Parrish
            David Parrish commented
            Editing a comment
            I'd like to keep the join date and # of posts but we might be able to get rid of a lot of the grey space. Would be good to ask Glenn to play around with it in development.

            Everyone - keep in mind our signatures are hidden unless you scroll over them. That alone makes us more compact than most forums.

          • MBMorgan
            MBMorgan commented
            Editing a comment
            "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 ...

          #36
          It's a great forum just as it is now. Why change anything?

          Comment


          • Jon Solberg
            Jon Solberg commented
            Editing a comment
            I concur Ribeye.
            Last edited by Jon Solberg; April 2, 2016, 06:48 PM.

          • DWCowles
            DWCowles commented
            Editing a comment
            I agreed

          #37
          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.

          Comment


            #38
            Welcome John Henry

            Comment


              #39
              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.👍

              Comment


                #40
                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.

                Comment


                • Jon Solberg
                  Jon Solberg commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Zoom would be very cool. : )

                #41
                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.
                Last edited by badf00d; April 4, 2016, 07:49 AM.

                Comment


                • Meathead
                  Meathead commented
                  Editing a comment
                  We will be moving The Pit to a dedicated server in May, I hope, so it isn't impacted by load on the free website. It will allow us to do more with optimnizing for vB. At that time we will be doing more with caching, compression, and minification.

                • badf00d
                  badf00d commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Thanks for the update, Meathead.

                #42
                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.

                Comment


                • Meathead
                  Meathead commented
                  Editing a comment
                  I think we have decided this is a privacy issue that we cannot implement. Some members may not want people to know where they live and when they are at a competition, etc.

                #43
                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

                Comment


                • Meathead
                  Meathead commented
                  Editing a comment
                  This is HUGE on my list. I still can't figure out how to upload pictures best.

                • badf00d
                  badf00d commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Meathead, I'm not sure how vBulletin works or can be extended, but I'd be glad to provide details on some tools I've used for batch updates of photos. If these can be called by vBulletin after an upload that may be a winner.

                #44
                For me, I know this change was intentional, but when I go to my message center, I'd like to be able to read the topic, and keep it my message center.

                Sometime I don't have time to thoroughly read it, and/or print it. I want it to stay on my message center until I delete it.

                JMHO, but feel REALLY strongly about it.right now, my message center is rediculously large until I have time to properly read the messages, like u til 4/19.

                Comment


                • David Parrish
                  David Parrish commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Rich you're right this was a feature that was implemented a vew versions ago. Personally I love it. Makes it a lot easier to keep up with what threads I need to get into.

                • Huskee
                  Huskee commented
                  Editing a comment
                  You should be able to simply click Inbox, then all your old messages show up to read any time until you delete them.

                #45
                I tried to post as a comment, but it was too big...

                I like the member map idea, and I don't understand how it would be a privacy issue. If a member doesn't want anyone to know, they can leave it out of their profile, right? Or have opt-out/in options in preferences? Also, if someone says they live in a certain city, most cities are big enough that you'd still have no idea where the person lives. Another option could be for the map to be non-interactive, or not have labels, so you wouldn't be able to associate a marker with any particular pit member. I would think a decent map plugin would be able to accommodate one of more of those options.

                Comment

                Announcement

                Collapse
                No announcement yet.
                Working...
                X
                false
                0
                Guest
                Guest
                500
                ["pitmaster-my-membership","login","join-pitmaster","lostpw","reset-password","special-offers","help","nojs","meat-ups","gifts","authaau-alpha","ebooklogin-start","alpha","start"]
                false
                false
                {"count":0,"link":"/forum/announcements/","debug":""}
                Yes
                ["\/forum\/free-deep-dive-guide-ebook-downloads","\/forum\/free-deep-dive-guide-ebook-downloads\/1157845-paid-members-download-your-6-deep-dive-guide-ebooks-for-free-here","\/forum\/the-pitcast","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa\/bbq-news-magazine-2019-issues","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa\/bbq-news-magazine-2020-issues","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa\/bbq-news-magazine-2021-issues","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa\/bbq-news-magazine-2022-issues","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa\/current-2023-issues","\/forum\/national-barbecue-news-magazine\/national-barbecue-news-magazine-aa\/current-2024-issues","\/forum\/free-deep-dive-guide-ebook-downloads\/1165909-trial-members-download-your-free-deep-dive-guide-ebook-here"]
                /forum/free-deep-dive-guide-ebook-downloads/1165909-trial-members-download-your-free-deep-dive-guide-ebook-here