Critique my NodeBB forum!

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The forum (http://nutritionask.com) will be formally launched in the next 2-3 weeks. It's a friendly place in which to ask questions about nutrition (duh, it's called nutritionask), stemming from me being a nutrition PhD student.

The few beta testers alerted me to a couple things that were broken. Does anything seem off/broken/ugly?

For a while you couldn't register, which sucked, but that's back. It doesn't work so well on mobile -- pressing the back button or clicking on the logo leads to a blank page. Some people aren't sure an orange Popsicle is the best logo

a_5mith

@zenkamal

Move the click to Ask in to the header rather than the sidebar, then move the welcome to the sidebar and change the icons to upward arrows. - On iPad your Ask a Question button is at the bottom of the page, not ideal. Or even combine them both into the header, (Ask a Question first)

Favicon - You need one that isn't NodeBBs. Not a huge issue, but when you decide on a logo, make a favicon and upload it into your public folder of nodebb, or if the ACP favicon bit works, use that.

Add this to your Customise CSS in your ACP.

.label-info {
background-color: #7A62D3;
}
.plugin-mentions-a {
color: #7A62D3;
font-size: 0.9em;
white-space: nowrap;
}

I was going to say update your Lavender, but I'm not sure if you've made custom changes to it. So you'd have issues with that.

Give your custom page a class name of "hiddenpage", then add this to your customise ACP

.hiddenpage {
display: none !important;
}

This will stop that invisible blue box appearing next to your users icon.

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@a_5mith Awesome, thanks so much! A couple questions...

Ask button
The ask button used to be in the header, BUT there's no global header for the custom home page plugin, so it would disappear on the recent/popular pages. If there's a way to achieve a global header, I'm all ears

Shoutbox
I wanted a shoutbox on the sidebar, but only on the sidebar for any non-topic page (because it would make a topic+reply page look messy). Haven't figured out how to do that yet though.

Custom CSS
Does the first one fix something concerning the mentions plugin? Can you clarify what the second bit of CSS does?

Lavender
Kind of scared to update it, because stuff broke during the last update and being a dummy, it took a few days to fix.

a_5mith

@zenkamal

Just realised you're using custom homepage, not custom pages. Hmmm. Latest Lavender does have a Global Header

Shoutbox, not sure with custom homepage, as using global would make certain pages look a little dodgy. Will come back to that one.

Custom CSS, the first bit of CSS makes your labels the same purple as the rest of your site, it looked a little off being blue. The 2nd bit in the same block makes your mentions purple as well, so they're not the default blue.

The 2nd block of custom CSS you can ignore, because you're using a different plugin to what I thought you were.

I'm not sure if there's any breaking changes, but if you don't want to risk it then that's ultimately up to you. I'm not sure if @julian can assure you everything will be ok if you did update, but I won't be held responsible.

EDIT: Not sure if it's your site, but my browser keeps "Not Responding". Bloody waterfox. Oh and I think I prefer the button "Click to Ask" as "Ask a Question" what do you think?

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@a_5mith

I think you're right, "Ask a Question" is more straightforward.

Do you think custom pages can accomplish everything that custom homepage can? If so, I can change over.

By "not responding", do you mean that the site isn't loading? The one thing I've consistently seen is bugs on mobile loading, when clicking on the site icon or pressing the back button.

a_5mith

@zenkamal No it's my browser, I've been meaning to reinstall it for weeks, but I'd lose all my fireFTP login details. And logging into numerous hosting accounts isn't something I want to spend an evening doing.

Your homepage button works fine on the iPad for me.

I'll have a look at the custom homepage/pages plugins on my dev server and get back to you on that, as I'm not sure if you can define a custom page as the homepage.

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@a_5mith

Coolio. For the mobile error, it strangely only happens with chrome on android.

By the way, purple color scheme...yay or nay?

a_5mith

@zenkamal Works for me, take feedback from your users, they're the ones you want to come back the next day, and the day after that, if you get everyone making threads saying "THIS PURPLE, WHYYYYY", then yeah I'd probably change it. But until then it's fine.

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@a_5mith

Actually this is like The Truman Show, and all forums are made for you. Whoops, wasn't supposed to say anything

a_5mith

@zenkamal I hereby proclaim this planet Trumania of the Burbank Galaxy.