Some feedback from the lovely folk at my forum

a_5mith

Back with another one or two, there's a noticeable delay between pages loading now, happens here and on my place, also the fade out and back in of pages feels like " wading through quicksand", I'm inclined to agree, waiting for a page to fade out when you've clicked somewhere else is a bit silly, would a better option not be wait until the next page is ready and just snap between them? Or is this done because of a limitation?

julian

Will defer to @psychobunny for an in-depth reply, but the fade-out is only happening because NodeBB needs to fetch the data and parse the template. If all that is done before the fadeout is finished, then we'll stop it immediately and start the fade-in with the new content.

There might be a 100ms delay, mostly because wanted to avoid this:

Content starts fading out
While it's at 50% opacity, the new content appears, and user gets to watch the new content fade out
New content fades in

#toofastproblems

a_5mith

@julian Makes sense. When it doesn't fade, it's really quick, but when it fades out, then sits there for a bit, it seems slower than usual. Probably doesn't help my VPS is almost maxed out with the posts I've got (upgrade imminent).

psychobunny

I know we added an extra delay because the pages were loading too fast... over here at least. Maybe that's what is slowing you guys down?

a_5mith

@psychobunny It's kind of like the delay happens after the page fades out, rather than during for me.

julian

@a_5mith Keep in mind that every plugin you install takes time to parse their portion of the post.

So if you're loading a thread with lots of soundcloud embeds, that might take a long time depending on how slow the soundcloud API is.

Best practice is to cache those API calls, so repeated calls load from cache instead of making that network call to the soundcloud API again. I do this with GitHub plugin, which explains why sometimes after a bug is closed, the referenced bug is still listed as "open" in the embed here

a_5mith

@julian Does it from Home to Categories and back again too, I'll look into the caching though, as it would be useful, I already lazyload youtube videos (plugin is coming).

psychobunny

Clear your cache here, does it seem a bit better for you now?

a_5mith

@psychobunny It's absolutely perfect on Canary (Chrome), but Firefox still has a mild delay between the page fading out and the other page fading back in again.

psychobunny

Yeah I see the same thing you do. I need to rework how ajaxify happens, @julian was mentioning a cross-fade, but I'm not sure if it would look good or would look like one of those corny wedding home videos kinda thing

luke

@psychobunny While we're discussing the fading, is there a way to turn it off? It's nice an all but I would like to turn it off for a forum I'm working on.

<baris>

I think putting the following in customCSS will stop the fade in out

.ajaxifying {
	-moz-opacity: 1.00;
	opacity: 1.00;
	-ms-filter:~"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=1)";
}

You can modify the vanilla theme to completely remove the transition as well, not sure which one is better. https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-theme-vanilla/blob/master/less/style.less#L78

a_5mith

@baris Bloody ell that's made my forum quick. I think it may be firefox struggling to transition the opacity in a smooth motion. It still fades in slightly, but it's instant and the page load is definitely snappier. I'm scared to try this in Canary.

Yep, 10/10, would recommend.

psychobunny

Interesting.

If everything is up to par (API vs rendering speed) I just feel that the instasnap between pages is a little bit too artificial (feels like clicking between an #anchor, if you know what I mean)

I read somewhere that NodeBB apparently uses the opacity transition animation to fake our loading speed, but the truth is, we did it so that it slows it down a bit to make it not feel so weird

luke

@psychobunny I definitely could see how the instantaneous loading would feel weird, but I actually find it awesome that things load that quickly in NodeBB.

psychobunny

We spent some time today working on the transition feel... bumped up the speed a bit and reduced the artificial delay. More importantly got rid of that annoying flicker that would sometimes happen

a_5mith

@psychobunny All we need now is to include my one homepage change to include the topic title above the post content and I'll be able to pull latest lavender again.

psychobunny

Doesn't actually look bad at all. What do you think @baris

a_5mith

@psychobunny Thanks for cutting the off topic posts out .

You'll probably want to ellipsis the topic titles to one line with this one. I haven't bothered with that yet.

It goes to the post that's previewed, (might negate the need for the Read More button.)

<baris>

Yeah I like it!