Seems ok to me... except the Project Cars area is just a gray square... 
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Aug. 12, 2010 7:26 a.m. Ian F Dork
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Aug. 12, 2010 7:31 a.m. 4cylndrfury SuperDork
Streetwiseguy wrote:
Its new. People will bitch. If you change it back, people will bitch. Just do whatever makes you happy.
^^extra winsauce for you!
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Aug. 12, 2010 10:17 a.m. DILYSI Dave SuperDork
Toyman01 wrote: Not sure why everyone wants to change the board software. I'm kind of partial to this one just because it's easy to use without all the irritating crap that most other boards have. Then again, I'm not a "computer" guy.
Try to make a list.
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Aug. 12, 2010 10:37 a.m. 4cylndrfury SuperDork
Ok
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Uno
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Dos
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Tres
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Catorce
Bono is a Dbag
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Uno
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Aug. 12, 2010 10:50 a.m. zomby woof Dork
Is
it
that
simple?
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Aug. 12, 2010 10:50 a.m. zomby woof Dork
It really is. Who knew (somebody, not me)?
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Aug. 12, 2010 11:11 a.m. 93celicaGT2 SuperDork
zomby woof wrote:
It really is. Who knew (somebody, not me)?
Hrrrmmm.... ORLY?
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Aug. 12, 2010 3:03 p.m. Jeff Dork
DILYSI Dave wrote:
Marjorie Suddard wrote:
This is not the final, forever by any means--it's a stopgap that addresses our "back end" usability issues with the former main page. We're planning a real overhaul that should solve lots of long-term problems, included our limited choices in, among other things, forum software. Stay tuned...
Margie
I can has vBulletin?!?!?!
+2. There is a reason it's so popular. I know the last guy who did the site didn't like it.
I work with Mass Spectrometers. There is a reason Bruker, Waters, Finnigan, Agilent, ABI, and just about everyone uses a software interface that is very similar.
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Aug. 12, 2010 3:55 p.m. Toyman01 Dork
I've never had a problem with the lists.
1 Not
2 that
3 Ever
4 make
5 them.
Of course it probably won't work now.
The above screen shot is a little surprising. They all come through correct for me.
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Aug. 12, 2010 3:56 p.m. Toyman01 Dork
Must be an IE incompatibility thing.
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Aug. 12, 2010 4:15 p.m. Tom Heath Webmaster
IE is the devil. IE6 is especially difficult to code for. Not that I'm the code guy, but I get the chance to work with him A LOT lately.
Better days are coming. vBulletin is on my radar, but no promises.
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Aug. 12, 2010 4:30 p.m. Tim Baxter SuperDork
Jeff wrote:
+2. There is a reason it's so popular. I know the last guy who did the site didn't like it.
I work with Mass Spectrometers. There is a reason Bruker, Waters, Finnigan, Agilent, ABI, and just about everyone uses a software interface that is very similar.
Much like Windows, it's popular mostly because it's what other people already use. That doesn't make it good (or bad), just common.
Personally, I find vbulletin to be bloated and clunky, but that's not really the point either. The REAL question is how suited is it to the task at hand. In the case of this site and what we were trying to accomplish when I was working on it, vbulletin wasn't very suitable at all, for a whole lot of reasons.
Of course, those priorities may have changed. Personally, after dealing with one discussion board after another since 1998 (back when they were written in scary Perl), I'm pretty agnostic. They all have more or less similar features, they all suck in one way or another, and no matter what you pick, people bitch and moan because it's not their favorite. What I care about is:
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How well does it fit in with your larger goals -- most serious sites at the very least want the forum to integrate well with other site functions, and some do that much better than others.
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How bad does it hammer the server. The more full-featured the board, generally speaking the worse it beats down a server. vBulletin is NOT kind to servers.
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How hard is it to maintain. If I want to make a tiny change, do I have to wade through miles of spaghetti code to get there?
And that's kind of the point of web design. It's not about what you like, or what I like. It's about what set of solutions best addresses the goals of both the site owners and the site visitors, keeping both in balance.
Sure, there are tons of rules and guidelines one should keep in mind about information architecture, interaction design, good coding practices, interoperability, browser quirks, typography, principles of good visual design, color theory and so on. And a good web person these days has to know all that, along with having an understanding of content out of context, the underlying technology stack and a whole boatload of other things, but really, it's all about aligning the owner goals with the visitor goals.
One other thing to keep in mind: asking you guys about the site as a whole is like asking Motorhead fans directions to a Lady Gaga show. Board dorks are completely unrepresentative of the general site traffic in pretty much every way, and that's doubly true for the home page. Different traffic patterns, different times on site, different places you go to, different familiarity with GRM, different EVERYTHING.
Cartoon illustration:
In the case of the home page changes removing the latest topics might be a very good idea IF it makes more sense for who actually goes to the home page (newbies) and getting them to that sweet spot between what they want to find and where you wan them to go. You guys know already where the board is. Different audience.
I have no real personal opinion or data to back that up, just an observation of what COULD be true.
Whew. Really long winded way to say that the question probably isn't whether vBulletin is good or bad, and it's definitely not a question of whether I like it, or any other one person likes it. It's whether or not it's the best solution to fix the most problems.
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How well does it fit in with your larger goals -- most serious sites at the very least want the forum to integrate well with other site functions, and some do that much better than others.
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Aug. 12, 2010 10:31 p.m. Jeff Dork
Tim, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I love the cartoon. If you want to see a clustered University website, check out Troy State in AL. You cannot find anything!
I get your point about common. Sometimes that's not a bad thing. In my mass spec example, common elements are exactly the point. It makes things easier to do.
I like vBulletin because I like the search function. You can search in a forum, all forums, topic only, and body and topic. To me that is the value of internet boards, the collected knowledge (some wrong, I know) of the community. Not being able to easily tap that is a real problem for me.
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Aug. 13, 2010 6:15 a.m. JoeyM Dork
Tim Baxter wrote:
Personally, after dealing with one discussion board after another since 1998 (back when they were written in scary Perl), I'm pretty agnostic.
regexp is not scary, but it is ugly
My opinion is worthless. I was once told by a coworker that perl had infected my brain to the point that, "Even your C looks like perl"
Tim Baxter wrote: asking you guys about the site as a whole is like asking Motorhead fans directions to a Lady Gaga show. Board dorks are completely unrepresentative of the general site traffic in pretty much every way, and that's doubly true for the home page. Different traffic patterns, different times on site, different places you go to, different familiarity with GRM, different EVERYTHING.
Funniest analogy ever.
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Aug. 13, 2010 7:25 a.m. Tim Baxter SuperDork
Jeff, I'll grant you the current search on here is mediocre at best. Search is tough, especially when you're searching. Mutliple content types ( boards, articles, issues, etc ). That said, there are at least a couple of different ways that would work better than what I cooked up. One of them, using woos or solr on the back end, was mostly done when I left, but it's not easy to figure out at all. Another option would be to limit it to only the current content types and drop down into raw SQL. You still run into the thorny issue of indexing importance, bit it would be fast and probably effective within a narrow scope.
And regex doesn't scare me. Use em daily. But I'm still scared of perl
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Aug. 16, 2010 10:14 a.m. TJ SuperDork
In reply to Tim Baxter:
I love funny venn diagrams. I doodle them in my notebook when I am stuck in meetings. That is a good one.
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Oct. 29, 2010 5:43 p.m. Osterkraut Dork
Accidentally went to the homepage today. It's still busy, and looks decidedly unprofessional. A strange face for a company dealing in a media that needs to be increasingly intertwined with the web to survive.
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Oct. 30, 2010 12:41 p.m. JoeyM Dork
Osterkraut wrote: Accidentally went to the homepage today. It's still busy, and looks decidedly unprofessional.
I agree. Compare it to the Car and Driver website. Theirs looks much nicer than ours.
The similarities: Both have a banner with the magazine logo across the top. Both sell advertising space in this banner. They have similar types of content (blogs, articles from the magazine, advertisements). Both organize the content by placing similar stuff into rectangles with a white background that contain links.
The difference: Car and Driver has a thinner, less obtrusive banner. The content areas in C&D's site are separate by thin grey lines that don't take up much space. The content areas in GRM's site are separated by thick black lines and have ugly maroon tabs....very 1990/free website stuff.
Here's my quick and dirty photoshop of what the GRM website would look like if it was modeled after car and driver
That is, in my opinion, a big improvement
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Oct. 31, 2010 1:36 p.m. JoeyM Dork
for comparison
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Nov. 3, 2010 1:14 p.m. Marjorie Suddard General Manager
We're in the final stages of project planning with a web design firm right now. Patience, grasshoppers.
Margie
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Nov. 4, 2010 5:49 a.m. JoeyM Dork
You did notice that http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/latest-topics was back on my photoshopped front page.
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Nov. 4, 2010 9:12 a.m. Tom Heath Webmaster
It's going to be a very thorough redesign. The most popular items will get premium placement; this includes the Forum (both GRM and CMS flavors) and latest topics.
When we're a little closer, I'll have more information to share. It is coming and will give us a much nicer and more usable place to hang out, but it's not ready yet.
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Nov. 4, 2010 3:27 p.m. JoeyM Dork
Cool....not to give a laundry list, but the other thing that would be awesome is if the page fit my monitor....it is always too wide. To take the picture above, I had to resize to fit it in......the C&D fits my screen without an issue.
