Slow site is slow...

[izacque]

Could this board maybe be a little less graphical? I mean, there are times where it feels like all the PNGs and gradients really make this site a pain to navigate. Couldn't we have our BBcode buttons be GIFs? or how about our smiley set? and I've noticed some areas have subtle gradients where a solid background would work just as well. for instance, look to the background of our user name, or our stars, or the bottom of every post. These gradients are, i realize, generally 1x36 pixels or so, but it all adds up and makes this site a tad slow. I've seen a few others complain about this too. so waddya think?

[GGoodie]

lol it only has to load the images once... unless your browser has cache problems. And pngs are smaller than gifs

oh, and the gradients behind the miniprofile and the rest of the tan on the whole site is the same image, and its pretty small.

The largest images here are the header and footer... and also, its the chat that takes the longest to load, especially on slower internet connections

[izacque]

heh, sorry for my ignorance... you can ignore this suggestion. though I suppose making the header a little smaller would help.

[disabled]

I use a greasemonkey script to remove a lot of the scripts and removing the header and other stuff that takes time to load. Combined with a few adblock plus rules the site loads about three times as fast than without for me. They are beta code right now, so something unwanted might get removed. It works for me though, because all I do is browse the SR forums. . If youre still interested, I might share them.

[Qwerty]

That also gets rid of the chat and all the features. Actually, it gets rid of all the features of the forums, period.

If you really want to narrow it down, we have to remove features.

* Multi Colored Names
* Wiki Menu Link
* Forum Skin Codes
* High Staff Account Protection - STAYS
* ODBF Chat
* Dan-Balls
* Custom Stars
* Report Post to Admin
* Code Tag with Line Numbers (UBBC)
* Link-to-profile tag (UBBC)
* Dan-Ball Copyright at Bottom of Page - STAYS
* User Smiles

Not a completely up-to-date list, but still. I think many of these have already been removed.

[disabled]

I didn't say you should remove them, I just said that I will remove them for me and am willing to share the code to others who don't need multi-colored names and just want a fast forum to communicate and nothing more.
If you want to not allow me distributing that, just say so. But I'd like to hear a reason for that.
And:

Feb 26, 2010 18:31:43 GMT -5 Qwerty said:

* High Staff Account Protection - STAYS

I really have to look into that some time, would be about the first time ever, that Javascript protected something for real... speaking of witch: With all this JS i wonder how many XSS and similar holes are in the code...

*edit* Oh and as you locked the other thread, did you mean to take the discussion here? Because I wanted to have a technical topic, that would be ignored anyway so I don't have to care anymore. But we can not talk about it in this thread too.

[Qwerty]

Oh. I thought you meant we should remove them. Feel free.

Anyway, it's not ALL JS, and we've attempted to fix the holes. That account protection doesn't actually work very well, though. Tis easy to bypass.

Yeah, I meant to take it here. Cause this is basically the same thing: About the forum's codes and slowness. Anyway, why would you want to make a thread that will be ignored? Or, you simply wanted to post the alternative, in which case, feel free, and I'll even sticky it for you, although you should name it "Bypass for Forum Codes to Increase Loading Times", or something.

[disabled]

I just wanted a new technical thread. This one could have been about removing stuff on your own to speed up the forum, the other could have been technical stuff the mods can do to increase the loading time. I still think there are some useless things loaded that don't provide any features, for instance governorheader.js seems pretty useless to me. I admit I have no Idea how these forums work, Ie how you do things and what you can change. But I bet there are at least five as useless things in the code as the above.

[Qwerty]

The governor code doesn't even work, which is why we removed it.

I thought you wanted to make the thread about stuff to do on one's own to speed it up, this one was already talking about the admins removing stuff to speed it up. Specifically, the skin.

[necrodoom]

a good one would be removing chat from the pages on guest accounts and have an option on profile to load chat or not.

[Qwerty]

That one actually sounds pretty good. To only give registered members chat. For guest accounts, we can have it say something like "Register to see the chat".

Okay, that's a great idea. I have no idea how to program it, though. I think maybe it would add something to the display name (Like dan-balls do to the custom title) for the members, which is accessed by the code...

We need someone with javascript experience for this one. Chrono? Pickle? You here?

[disabled]

I just wonder, how does programming the forum work anyways? You can add custom Javascript right? But can you only add them to every forum page, or can you differentiate between "logged in" or what page is viewed? And is JS the only thing that can be added? Or can you add CSS? Or change the forum template? Or what? I realize a lot layout is changed via Javascript, which generally is a bad idea, unless its the only possibility you have. (But there is an option to change the templates in the profile settings, so you probably can upload custom templates too.)
And right now I should be doing other stuff, but in about two weeks, I have more free time and then I could help with the forum coding...

[Qwerty]

You can pretty easily differentiate between different boards by the way the headers and footers work, we can differentiate with specific pages with some if;then statements, and we can not only differentiate between logged in and not, we can differentiate in a small change in the person's name and remove that change (visually speaking). The effect of this is like dan-balls: They have something in their display name that is changed when they change the "show chat" setting, that is removed by the javascript everywhere, including "modify profile", and can be accessed via the HTML DOM by the javascript to use whether the chat is displayed or not, and it replaces the message if the person isn't logged in to "Register to have access to the chat." We can also add CSS and HTML, but only in the header and footer, not anywhere. To change the forum template, we have to use a lot of javascript and CSS. So our javascript is pretty much a bunch of HTML DOM work and really tedious.

[ggoodie not wanting to log in]

Ksoo i shall explain this:

Choosing the skin in the profile page is just the colors, not the coding. You would wind up with the same thing as you see here but with some other colors every here and there.

Coding is done in the H/F. The Headers and the Footers

Header is coding that goes in before the forum
Footer is after

There is global (everypage), main (main page), and a page for every board.

In the H/F you can put in CSS, HTML, and JS. (maybe more but im not sure)

It is not possible to do any of this stuff without JS. Since you cant edit the actual forum, you have to use clever JS to modify it in the Footers and/or Headers. This can be pretty hard for certain things. If you look through the source you'll see my css.

As for forum loading time, its not the images doing it. Its the custom name colors and star codes. They are gigantic. There is also are a large amount of images required for the custom stars, futher lengthening loading time.

If you want to help with the coding you need to know how it all works, so i would recommend looking through my coding a few times.

[disabled]

Year sure you can differentiate all that with Javascript, that wasn't what I meant. I meant can you include different JS scripts depending on those variables? But your answer suggest no you can't. So you just load JS in the header, then find out what the scenario is and act accordingly - all in JS.
And with the different skins, all you can do is change the header/footer?

[Qwerty]

Turkey is helping to make the code, he seems really good at it.

And, yeah. You have to move things around via javascript.

[oh ya]

Oh, and you should probably just stick to cookies if your gonna do the chat open/close thing. Not some weird thing with the members name.Your request has been filled.

PM a staff member if you are not happy with the result.

[hiyah]

BTW somebody is disorganizing the h/f...

You can see if someone is logged in/out with JS too.

if (pb_username.match('guest')) { } else { }

[Qwerty]

Cookies are awesome, that's a good idea.

The request is filled? If Turkey could kindly PM me the code, I could pay him his 2000 dan-balls in full.

[asldkfj]

who is turkey