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pfm Outage and major upgrade Monday 2nd Oct 11:00am

On my Googlephone I seem to have lost the ability to select page numbers from the thread index page until I turn it sideways. This means extra effort has to be expended, and old folk need to conserve their energy.
 
Patu said:
Nice update but could we finally get the dark theme on pfm also? This forum is painful to read in the evening. Thank you!
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Dark modes are of the devil.

Marchbanks said:
On my Googlephone I seem to have lost the ability to select page numbers from the thread index page until I turn it sideways. This means extra effort has to be expended, and old folk need to conserve their energy.
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If you click the '1 of X' whilst in normal portrait mode you can specify what page you want to go to. Though you should certainly hook yourself up to some sort of energy monitor to see if the finger clicking expends more energy that the phone rotation. Once you have calculated the average energy figures for each method, you can decide which is the most efficient.
 
@Tony L I’ve not read the whole thread, nor received any message notifications recently (because no one has messaged me) but I was thinking you may wish to leave the content out if these emails… that way you’d presumably get far fewer folk “replying” to you rather than coming to the site to actually reply to the relevant pfm’er?
 
Tony L said:
I need to have a very long and hard think about financing as ad revenue is dropping through the floor thanks to modern browsers having ad blockers enabled by default. I was really shocked yesterday to see Chromium I had running on the Pi 4 upthread, which is a Google software product, has ad blocking enabled by default. Ad blocking that even blocks Googles own ads! I’d never done anything to it and it was entirely blocking my income yet happily displaying my site. No word or warning to the user that it had a content piracy device enabled that will totally deny the site its income stream. It is theft. Nothing more or less.

This being the current situation has seem my income pretty much half over the past two years, certainly drop by a third, and that is against a backdrop of spiralling inflation, i.e. I’ve probably had a pay cut of 50% in real terms. This has been balanced in recent weeks by an astonishing level of donations, for which I’m truly grateful. The record shop is in very good health too with a lot of great stuff waiting to list, but the underlying issue that ad blocking is destroying independent sites remains. As such currently I’m fine, but I obviously need to plan long-term.

This will likely get exponentially worse in January as new legislation requiring ‘Consent Management Systems‘ and that users actively opt-in to ads will take a scythe to every site that is not an active shop fronts or owned by £millionaire political propagandists. So much of the rest will just be strangled out of existence. Once viable sites denied the basic tools of their trade.

There are dark times ahead for all independent websites for sure.
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I don't have an ad blocker, and don't mind the ads at all. Do you get any extra revenue if the ads are clicked on? I'm sure not many will mind clicking a few daily, if it does contribute more?
 
Naim has dark theme pretty well nailed IMO as it is not white on black more light grey on dark grey.



Roon I find a bit harder to read being a slightly more white on black interface.



.sjb
 
Jamie said:
I don't have an ad blocker, and don't mind the ads at all. Do you get any extra revenue if the ads are clicked on? I'm sure not many will mind clicking a few daily, if it does contribute more?
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Please don’t click them unless the content directly interests you. Google has very good fraudulent behaviour detection and fake clicks can cause all manner of issues.
 
There is now a prototype dark mode available. Very much a work in progress, and obviously very green (I’m determined to keep the site identity in some way), and be warned some aspects of the interface may not be visible! It is what it is and will likely change a fair bit.
 
A distinct improvement IMHO, much easier on the eyes. What happened to the "go to first unread" button on the front listings of each forum ?
 
I like the look of the new forum software. I access it variously on an iPhone, Android tablet, Chromebook and desk top PC running Windows 10 and Linux Mint. It seems equally good on all platforms.
 
I check my email and read PFM on an old iPad (IOS 10.3.3) which is fast becoming useless for anything else.
Very happy with the changes here as it actually works better. Whole pages load fully and response to 'next' etc work much better too.
:)👍
 
Tony L said:
There is now a prototype dark mode available. Very much a work in progress, and obviously very green (I’m determined to keep the site identity in some way), and be warned some aspects of the interface may not be visible! It is what it is and will likely change a fair bit.
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that isnt a dark mode - the green is intolerable on the eyes.
 
serendipitydawg said:
Tony, I'm still baffled by this aspect of the changes. Baby steps please
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Once you are browsing a thread the button cluster at the top of the thread directly opposite and inline with the page numbers has a context-sensitive aspect to it. If applicable it will show a ‘jump to new’ button, but it only appears there if there is new unread content for you. It is hard to explain as it is context sensitive, it is not always there!
 
does that context sensitive button only show on the desktop site - not sure i have seen it on my phone.
 
gintonic said:
does that context sensitive button only show on the desktop site - not sure i have seen it on my phone.
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Maybe, it is a hard one to test being context sensitive on criteria I’m not 100% clear of! The button cluster exists on a smartphone; centred above the first post in portrait, in the normal place in landscape.
 
Sloop John B said:
Tony, pfm is the content, not the colour.
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As I say it is a prototype. It will be deleted at some point. It is definitely not staying in that format. The core problem here is I absolutely hate dark modes. They look shit and hurt my eyes real, real fast, so I’m limited to developing in 5-10 minute steps and then having to rest my eyes. I also don’t want my site to look like Naim or some random hacker forum, so I have to find a way of bringing the pfm aesthetic to it. I know the existing one is crap, but this will take me time to implement. I will get there in time, but being realistic it may take me weeks as I’m just not able to look at dark mode screens without extreme eye-strain - I just see lines across everything when I look away. It is really annoying there isn’t a stock XenForo on built in to tweak. I guess I could install a third-party one as a start point, I’ll have a look around at some point.
 
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