AdminAddict - WebmasterAddict

Odd Code When Making a Thread Sticky

PlopCat — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 04:41:10 GMT

I get this when a thread is stickied at the top what the name of the thread is:

Title of Thread

We have no ads up. Sticky it & you get that. Un-stick it & it's gone. I've seen 1 or 2 posts in the middle of a thread with that too in it. When I edit it, the code is not there. I Googled this but no find.

Where would I start to look into removing this?

Thanks

Changing font families

Demo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:30:27 GMT

For my revamped site, I switched from Verdana to Arial. A pleasant change, I must say :)

Quote:

Font Family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif

Anyone ever changed it too or never bothered thinking about it?

Community/Multi-user blogging

Nick — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:24:14 GMT

Have any of you successfully setup and maintained some sort of multi-user blogging platform where members can create their own blog within your site? I've always wanted to set up some sort of WPMU installation but I've always been discouraged because it seems like it takes a lot of effort, work, and tweaking just to allow people to create individual and unique blogs.

I think it would be great for my Linnie Forum because people often maintain journal threads on my forum in which they keep the rest of the community updated in regards to a growing baby chick, or a breeding pair, or something of the like.

What are your experiences with multi-user blogging?

Examples of good and bad usability?

cheat-master30 — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:01:00 GMT

For me, I'd say some good examples of usability include the standard vB WYSIWYG editor (or to be fair, ANY such editor), partly due to the sheer ease of use and general good interface design they have, the standard Style Manager for vBulletin and any form of plugin system for any forum software (again, due to how easy and efficient they are for non tech savvy users). The modules part of Drupal is great in terms of ease of use too.

But for bad, I'd say possibly the Style Manager in vBulletin 4, and the final install page in Moodle (which is linked here as a picture, if you can print it correctly, it's about 60 pages long)

What such stuff do you think is well/badly designed?

Tearing down the (likely bad) design of Moodle

cheat-master30 — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:35:19 GMT

Now, I don't know how many people here have heard of Moodle and other (semi community based) eLearning software, but as someone who's used it and hated it for the last few colleges I attended, I thought I may as well write what's basically a case study/experiment on how well (or badly) the software actually works.

It's not a great field when it comes to well designed community software, and it seems every single provider is either selling/giving away an extremely buggy poorly coded piece of software, or selling for way above what's a logical price range. Okay, they're almost all apparently poorly coded, buggy software, so it's almost like every software maker is the equivalent of Internet Brands (parallels with the UI design comes as well, it's about as poor on the graphics and design front, along with the bug count).

Never the less, I can't judgement software without installing it, so I decided to check it out myself via the free download on the official site. Well, first bad sign. Requires PHP and MySQL 4 and above. Considering the former is at least a year past end of life, that can't be a good thing, but at least it apparently does work on PHP/MySQL 5.

But I downloaded it. Possible mistake number 1... the download file is about 20MB in zip format. That's the equivalent of the full vB 4 Suite download as seperate files all together, and when extracted, it's about SEVENTY MEGABYTES in file space. That's not including the database, which leaves a new install at apparently about TWO HUNDRED MEGABYTES of space used off the bat. People on low grade shared hosting will have to give this a miss, because if their hosting amount isn't oversold, that'll take up a good chunk of the available space. I almost fear for the Inode count bit, because the amount of files in the download by default is 5159 files. And 909 folders. It's supposed to be a CMS, but Drupal is only 500+ files and about 50 folders. Joomla is more, but nowhere near as high. Even vBulletin 4 only has about a thousand files and what not.

Never the less, you're probably wondering why I'm not saying much about the useability yet... Well, it takes about an hour to upload the files through File Zilla, that's why. And because my first two installs went horribly wrong with no help to be found on the official website/forum/documentation. But never the less, a few problems cropped up.

Base folder has to be writeable. Aka, the whole site at 777 for permissions. That's not good security wise. It also requires a data directory, meant to be above the file root. Why? Because you can use it on the site root, but anyone who accesses it can basically get access to the admin accounts or something. It's probably like PHP Nuke all over again...

So okay, I got to the install page. Time 1... massive errors everywhere. All these PHP warnings, access denied warnings, database problems... it was a right pain to try and install, and eventually I had to nuke the first installation attempt and try again because it was just messing up so badly.

Time 2... installation went well, but then the whole site and admin page were just blank. No help on the official site, because the error I experienced had apparently never happened before, and all this despite having a host which said it should work fine with the software. Errors were stuff like 'no site found' or what not, which is almost impossible to figure, especially as I never even got the set up chance in the first place.

So while I'm trying to reinstall a demo for the third time, I'll let people know about a few things I found out about the software from my use as a normal user and from internet articles.

Adblocking...

cheat-master30 — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:12:14 GMT

It's a controversial issue, about whether it's 'right' to block advertisements on websites and such not, but one part of this kinda bugs me about the responses...

That they assume ads not paying will mean every website will become paid. Short answer... no it won't. A decent amount of people for example are running sites purely because they want to, other websites just wouldn't get enough paying visitors to cover server costs so wouldn't bother until at least they became popular, and the whole premise assumes the internet is like a monopoly and nobody does something 'different' (aka, free website access) to quickly snatch up a ton of members, or does the Invision Power Board style bait and switch (keep service free, charge when it becomes massively popular).

In that sense, I don't think adblock will ever really 'destroy' the internet as some naysayers suggest. Heck, consider the next point too...

Most people don't use such programs or add ons. They're not currently built into most browsers, and many people don't have much expertise in that area of the internet or technology. Many for example just use Internet Explorer and Windoes straight out the box without changing or installing anything. Those won't be blocking advertisements, will they?

Nor will the people in school/college, or at work who actually can't add programs or add ons to programs due to the security settings and archaic browser choices made by the computer techs.

So in my opinion, unless Internet Explorer or Firefox suddenly have adblock built in out the box, it won't even make a tiny bit of difference to the internet in general, and even then, websites won't suddenly go the paid subscriptions route (because you need to give people an incentive to pay for content or services).

Anyone agree?

Some advice on blog archives...

cheat-master30 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:47:30 GMT

Or archives (the actual kind, not the vBulletin kind) of any sort...

Please, for the love of... use categories and display the page titles of each entry at minimum. Never at all use a calendar for this, it's ridiculous hard to navigate, and plain infuriating when people simply display a calendar and expect you to check each and every link blindly to find content.

Anyone else agree?

iframe width/height in IE and FireFox

Tech — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:24:43 GMT

Last week I brought a more "designer" template from themeforest for Design247, A couple days ago I integrated a wordpress blog within a page using iframe, However using width="100%" and height ="100%" but that displays perfect in chrome however doesn't in other browsers.

How can i make it so it doesn't scroll and so it displays it full.

Design247 | Blog

Adsense Alternatives

Michael — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:09:28 GMT

What are some good Adsense alternatives?

:)

I need some ideas on how to redesign my own website...

cheat-master30 — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 21:50:08 GMT

Ignoring the forum and other interactive stuff, because most people there think they're fine enough, and hey, they actually get most of the traffic.

Basically, I want to know two things:

1. What kind of CMS would actually work for my website? Yeah, I was planning on using the one with vBulletin 4, until it actually was released and the amount of bugs and queries put a stop to the idea. Basically, here's the whole deal:

Any such CMS must be HTML/CSS valid. Don't care quite what version, preferrably not XHTML Strict.

Must have some easy import from HTML files, and actually able to handle a decent layout with the sheer amount of pages my site has. That's a problem, because the site has a good couple of thousand pages, and probably a few hundred sections. Most CMS software seems to be written for sites with a very top down heirarchial structure or such like.

I don't actually care for forum or software integration, I always thought it too much effort to maintain bridges for too little reward (again, because software is updated at different times, and waiting for one element to get updated to update the other can be a security issue).

I tried Wordpress for a blog before, but I don't particularly like it (because you basically have to build themes from scratch and it comes with no form of spam prevention, meaning you have to go and get Akismet and half a dozen plugins). I've never tried Drupal or Joomla or anything like that, so I have no idea what they're like. Any good?

2. What to do about a layout? I'm really bored of all the three column layouts, and it's a pain to even change because so many members liked the fixed width one I had before. But the problem is, I want something that's usable (or at least, doesn't clash with anything mentioned by sites like Webpagesthatsuck), validates (HTML and CSS), and looks remotely themed towards my site's content. The problem here is that I can write, modify and code HTML and CSS... but I cannot particularly make images for my life (only sprites in the video game sense), and don't have anything like Photoshop, having to rely on members of my own site that can design quite well.

So, any ideas? I'm trying to find something better to replace the main site at DS Ultimate- Nintendo DS Game information and Glitches. I also want to do this preferrably before I try adding things like a topsite and what not.

Anyone think it quite funny when... (web traffic related)

cheat-master30 — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:52:22 GMT

People talk of 'hits' as if that means unique visitors? You don't know how funny it is when people on TV when boasting about their achievements online talk about having say... 100 average hits being some fantastic metric to go by for success. Or when sites say you need one thousand hits average to be on their affiliates list...

Indeed, I'm quite close to telling some of these people of a true site with 1000 hits average per day... which is a simple HTML page with 999 images on it.

Bunk. WP site that charges?

Peacelily — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:57:33 GMT

Dang, we should start a wordpress addict forum.

The wordpress forums suck and now this site charges you to ask and answer?

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT.

WP Questions

Bogus.

/rant

What happens when you are banned from Adsense?

Michael — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:53:37 GMT

I was wondering if you are notified when banned from Google Adsense?

Thanks.

Headquarter type websites

Michael — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:40:37 GMT

Do you have a headquarter type of website, if so what is its main purpose and does it drive any traffic to your forums at all?

I have seen quite a few of them and many seemed to be rather useless, basically a registered business name with a site on the business names domain with a logo and few links to their websites so I have never understood why people choose to have these, no offence to those who do, I just dont understand their main purpose.

Internet Brands headquarter sort of site I understand as theyre a team and have hundreds of sites and are involved with stocks etc I wonder if it is all about branding.

I quite fancy getting my own team together, consisting mainly of family and doing something like this if there was ever a good purpose for doing so in the future at some point.

Thanks for any input :)