New Sponsors Skin is back

#1
Freak

Freak

VolNation's Grand Poobah
Staff member
Joined
Oct 22, 2003
Messages
97,148
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116,711
#1
As you may have noticed, I've put our sponsor skin back up on the board. Hopefully all the previous issues have been fixed. Please let me know if you have any issues. There is a normal version of the skin and a version for those of you running a resolution of 800x600. You can choose your skin from the dropdown box in the bottom left corner of the board.

The VolNation 2k (a favorite of many) skin is in the works and should be back very soon.

If you have any issues with the new skin or see anything that looks abnormal, please let me know.

:hi:
 
#2
#2
Alright, I have a VN 2k7.1 skin which is the old 2k7 skin with a few tweaks. I welcome any feedback on any of the three available skins.
 
#4
#4
Aiee. Not having the content centered is throwing me off pretty bad. Is there any way you could keep the content+railad in a div that can be centered, so that it doesn't result in massive empty orange space solely on the right? I can't get it to center on either skin now.

I also noticed before I changed that support.gif had a dead link to /support.

It is interesting your ads link to your sponsor page instead of using their banner ads directly.
 
#5
#5
I also wanted to say you are doing a great job of getting some unique content here and keeping everyone happy.

:rock:
 
#6
#6
Ok, i see what, you are saying. I didn't realize it wasn't centered. I'll fix that now.

I'm not sure what you mean by support.gif? Can you be a little more specific? It's late and I may just be missing it.

Yes, they do link to the sponsors page.
 
#7
#7
FYI volley, the board is always slow between 3am and 4am. It's when the server backs up everything.
 
#8
#8
volley, check out the new skin VN 2k7.1 Centered. It will still appear a bit of center because it's centering the board and the skyscraper banner together.

What resolution are you running?

Let me know your thoughts or if you have any other ideas.
 
#9
#9
vol_freak said:
FYI volley, the board is always slow between 3am and 4am. It's when the server backs up everything.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have noticed that some. No biggie.

The support.gif used to be on the banner of the boards (on the right of where the flash ad is now) and said something about support volnation, and linked to volnation.com/support. I was actually running a firefox extension you probably know of and was missing some things....but that .gif was still there. I did disable that this morning to see what you were cooking up.

I can't say I'm a big fan of the ad along the side. It sort of seems out of place, all by itself. I suppose you gotta find a place for them somewhere though.
 
#10
#10
volley said:
Yeah, I have noticed that some. No biggie.

The support.gif used to be on the banner of the boards (on the right of where the flash ad is now) and said something about support volnation, and linked to volnation.com/support. I was actually running a firefox extension you probably know of and was missing some things....but that .gif was still there. I did disable that this morning to see what you were cooking up.

I can't say I'm a big fan of the ad along the side. It sort of seems out of place, all by itself. I suppose you gotta find a place for them somewhere though.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok. I'll check the link on that. I believe I only used that only the VolNation skin.

It does seem a bit out of place. I've tried putting in a sidebar in the board like we had on the main forum page before, but it seems to cause some other issues. I'll keep working on another solution.

Thanks for the feedback and let me know if you have any other ideas.
 
#11
#11
vol_freak said:
volley, check out the new skin VN 2k7.1 Centered. It will still appear a bit of center because it's centering the board and the skyscraper banner together.

What resolution are you running?

Let me know your thoughts or if you have any other ideas.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that is better. It is still a little awkward to be off centered, but much better that I am not crammed directly on the left. Thanks for fixing that so quickly!

I'm at 1600x1200 (x2) lol, so plenty of horizontal real estate. Hence my browser being open so wide.
 
#12
#12
Yeah, I figured the biggest issue would be from those with very high resolutions. Would you prefer a skin that stretches to 100% or 1200px? The header may look a little empty up there but I could definitely do that.
 
#13
#13
No, I think the width now is pretty optimal for readability. I just keep the browser open for other sites that take up more horizontal space. As long as it is centered, I'm happy.

I just noticed this in 'similar threads'

No, they will be back. I just had to remove the script for now until they can troubleshoot why it was slowing things down for some people.
Click to expand...

Were you previously running their flash ads directly?
 
#14
#14
Yeah, the flash banners are still running off of their servers. There were a handful of people that were experiencing slow load times because of it. I never personally had any issues so it must have been a dns or routing issue. That's the only thing I can think of anyway.
 
#15
#15
Have you given thought to another horizontal ad placed within the thread as opposed to the current vertical? I have seen this on other forums. You could place one halfway through each page of the thread somehow. Or perhaps only every few pages, or some kind of algorithm to insert them. It would be nice to have a few variations eventually also.
 
#16
#16
Yeah, I would probably prefer another horizontal ad inserted in the threads somewhere also.

The issue is that it becomes a coding nightmare to place the banners per page like that. You have to add it within the threads, within the thread list, on the main forum page, the search page, the user cp page, etc. Doing it this way, it's displayed on every forum page with a small simple line of code.

I may try to look into something else in the future.
 
#17
#17
vol_freak said:
Yeah, the flash banners are still running off of their servers. There were a handful of people that were experiencing slow load times because of it. I never personally had any issues so it must have been a dns or routing issue. That's the only thing I can think of anyway.
Click to expand...

So you scrapped their flash ads and made your own? I mean before, they were developed by carmax or sportswar? Why are you even bothering hosting them externally if you are just using the 2? I suppose it will save some bandwidth costs, but they should cache in the browsers. Or am I missing some others?
 
#18
#18
vol_freak said:
Yeah, I would probably prefer another horizontal ad inserted in the threads somewhere also.

The issue is that it becomes a coding nightmare to place the banners per page like that. You have to add it within the threads, within the thread list, on the main forum page, the search page, the user cp page, etc. Doing it this way, it's displayed on every forum page with a small simple line of code.

I may try to look into something else in the future.
Click to expand...

There must be a plug-in for this, because I have seen the same thing on a few sites that all seemed similar. Not sure if it was for vB or not.
 
#19
#19
No they are the same basic flash ads and there will be others served from the actual sponsors (carmax, etc) as things get rolling.

The reason (I suppose) they are hosted externally is that allows them to ad or remove sponsors from the rotation at anytime and I don't have to keep fooling with it. Just as the actual sponsors page is hosted elsewhere so it can be updated at anytime. I'm just pulling that page down each time it's requested.
 
#20
#20
volley said:
There must be a plug-in for this, because I have seen the same thing on a few sites that all seemed similar. Not sure if it was for vB or not.
Click to expand...

There could be something like that. I'm sure I could code it myself at some point when I have the time. We'll see where it goes.
 
#21
#21
vol_freak said:
No they are the same basic flash ads and there will be others served from the actual sponsors (carmax, etc) as things get rolling.

The reason (I suppose) they are hosted externally is that allows them to ad or remove sponsors from the rotation at anytime and I don't have to keep fooling with it. Just as the actual sponsors page is hosted elsewhere so it can be updated at anytime. I'm just pulling that page down each time it's requested.
Click to expand...

Ah, well that makes more sense then. It seemed odd to link to a sponsors page instead of a direct referral (although I would say less tricky and more polite and the ads are not intrusive or annoying).
 
#22
#22
It's a little slow for me this morning. Not as bad as the other day though. I get a few seconds of orange screen on each page I open.
 
#23
#23
MyBloodRunnethOrange said:
It's a little slow for me this morning. Not as bad as the other day though. I get a few seconds of orange screen on each page I open.
Click to expand...

Keep me posted, it really shouldn't be a few seconds. A split second at most.

What browser are you using? Where are you posting from? Do you have high speed internet?
 
#24
#24
Runs just fine for me. I switched it to the "centered" version and looks much better.
 
#25
#25
Thanks for the feedback utvolpj. People running different resolutions will prefer different skins. Which resolution are you running?

Something else I just noticed is that it seems (to me) to load a tad faster in firefox over ie.
 
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