Reply to First, Reply to Last

[Ronin Storm]

Back in May, I proposed ditching the Blue style, to leave just the 2-series styles and Amber. There were objections based around the removal of the Post Reply button. So Blue stayed while I figured out what to do.

After [thread=1270]some discussion[/thread] (just proving I'm not forgetting, just some things take a while), users from both the threaded camp and the linear camp agreed that a "Reply to First" button would be pretty useful. I've extended that slightly so that there are two buttons:

• Reply To First -- replies to the first post in a thread and is meant for a general reply to the entire thread.
• Reply To Last -- replies to the last post made in the thread at the time you had viewed it (which might mean it isn't the last post any more if someone else posted before you refreshed the page).

These buttons maintain the hierarchy for threaded and hybrid users, while providing the much-asked-for Post Reply functionality for linear users.

Currently these buttons are only available in the 2-series styles but I'll talk with Haven about putting them in Amber too.

So... my real question is "any more serious objections or can Blue die now?"...

(I want to kill Blue off to reduce maintanence overhead as Admin time is generally very hard to come by.)

 

[MadGinga]

You're just talking about getting rid of blue not blue2, yes?

 

[thatbloke]

Kill it!

 

[lt.kirby]

dont delet the ble in need to so much!! the reson why is that the other ones look to dull and boring but the blue looks to cool

 

[Nanor]

Keep Blue! It looks so fresh! KEEP IT!

 

[Ronin Storm]

That's correct. Blue2 will stay. The original Blue is the one I'm talking about killing.

 

[Ronin Storm]

What's wrong with Blue2?

 

[MadGinga]

Cool, glad to hear blue2 is staying, I love it, amber messes with my head something chronic

PS get rid of blue tis the sux0r!

 

[lt.kirby]

keep the blue 2 fixed but get ride of blue 1...

 

[Ronin Storm]

After some investigation, I've narrow down the support for Blue1 to 3 voters. I'm going to give a few days grace ('til Sunday) to those voters to drop me a PM to say why they need Blue1 otherwise I will be disabling that style without further warning and migrating Blue1 users to Blue2 (Scaling) as the nearest applicable style.

So, PM me if this is going to 'cause you serious issues as I believe I've addressed the major block to discarding Blue and I really don't want any more maintenance than I have to have.

 

[Ronin Storm]

The Blue1 style has now been disabled and users who had their User CP / Options set to the Blue1 style have now been updated, in the database, to use Blue2 (Scaling) as the nearest applicable style.

I can't tell if people have just used the style selector to set their style to Blue1 as that is held in cookies. However, my belief is that users using Blue1 via the style selector will now likely default to Amber2.

As always, please let me know if this is causing you serious problems.

 

[T-Bone]

I have told you I was seriously opposed to this. I find the newer blue styles very cramped with the sidebar in there and I think the amber style is horrible. Maybe I'm just being picky but unfortunately that's just the way it is. :/

 

[Ronin Storm]

I understand T-Bone. This decision is driven by maintenance needs.

The thing you don't see from the templates is that the Blue2 templates inherit from each other... in fact, they primarily inherit from Blue2 (Fixed). When I make changes to that template, the rest of the templates largely fall in line (with the most variance in Amber2 because its unusual header/footer layout in comparison to the basic vB templates). So, in reality, I maintain 3 templates, plus smaller changes to 2 additional templates. By trimming 1 out of the equation I slice say 2 hours off every upgrade -- remember the last one took around 8 hours? 6 of that was template upgrades.

I understand that you don't appreciate the 2-column layout and you don't like the aesthetics in Amber1; in this case it's a trade on keeping things maintained versus diversity in styles, and given admin time is always short I've erred on the side of maintenance on this occasion.

I've addressed what was stated as the primary concern with the 2-series templates with regards to Post Reply functionality. It's pretty difficult to simultaneously address aesthetic considerations without increasing the difficulty of every upgrade (I've done two in two weeks, though the second one only took one to two hours as a minor upgrade).

I was aware of your objections. I did not ignore them and tried to get feedback in advance... not sure what more I could really do that still keepings things sensible.