Please review Offwalk the off topic forum

[BlueCheri]

Man, what a details reviews.

Thanx for showing problems and solutions for them also (believe me I could never do that)

I will try to fix all most everything suggested by you.

You have very good knowledge buddy, many thanx friend.

G!

Originally Posted by Max Taxable

107 requests, 11.493 seconds load time on the Patrick Meehan Google web page test:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120216_YN_38REP/

Two 500 errors and a 403 as well.

For reference, native vBulletin loads much faster and has only 55 or so requests, with no errors.. At the Meehan site there's many tips and tricks on how to improve, and you can run the test yourself as many times as you want, from different locations and also different browsers.

For mobile devices, this page is a disaster. Over 9 seconds load time and over 900kb of data. I think you want to find a slick, slithery mobile style and get automatic mobile style assignment enabled, or get vBulletin's mobile suite. Here's the test results on a i-Phone out of Ottawa:

http://www.blaze.io/mobile/result/?t...0E_A4W&src=wpt

In the screengrab below you can see that on my Firefox 10 browser, there's some add-on image conflicts in your navbar and in some other places:



Here's the complete waterfall view of your page on the web from Meehan:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/12...REP/1/details/

General Impressions:
The color scheme and the header logo look nice. It's generally a nice impression, but the chatbox and all the text at the top make it look a bit chaotic and muddy. I concur with others, the sidebar needs attention. I would get rid of the top two elements completely, and move the third one below the fold, opting instead for latest posts and latest threads as the top elements in the sidebar.

Overall, nice board.

--------------- Added [DATE]1329411935[/DATE] at [TIME]1329411935[/TIME] ---------------

Mine is Beavis and Butthead!

[setishock]

I got your PM several days ago. And I've been snowed under at my place try to chase down a sot that's running a scrapper program on my gallery. I really have my knickers in a twist right now so if I offend you sorry about that. Ok so let's get started.
Behind the scenes:
I looked just a couple of minutes ago and you have 79 of those Baidu bots walking all over your forum. You do know they burn up your bandwidth? Once they get settled in they will stay there eating bandwidth until you put your foot in their tails and boot them out the door. If you're running cpanel go in to the IP blocker and enter Baidu then save it. Any critter with Baidu in the user agent string will not be able to get in your forum let alone "see" it. Ain't 404 errors wonderful?
In the public eye:
Dump the chatbox. People would rather post in that than the forums. If it's open to the public for posting it will become a spamming nightmare. Make it members only after posting X amount of posts in a given period if you're gonna keep it.
And what's up with the bloat in the What's Going On box? Do you really need all that? You're just wasting cpu time that could be best used elsewhere.
And the top 10 stats, who cares? It's a waste.
Sidebar:
The top block the text is too small. making it bold would help.
The next block down to me personally is a bit of a waste. If you keep it bold the text to make it easier to read.
Overall:
That sort of site is not my forte'. Anything goes has a tendency to go cold and on down the drain. I haven't seen too many that lasted very long. Good luck with it though.

[BlueCheri]

Many thanx for useful suggestion.

G!

Originally Posted by setishock

I got your PM several days ago. And I've been snowed under at my place try to chase down a sot that's running a scrapper program on my gallery. I really have my knickers in a twist right now so if I offend you sorry about that. Ok so let's get started.
Behind the scenes:
I looked just a couple of minutes ago and you have 79 of those Baidu bots walking all over your forum. You do know they burn up your bandwidth? Once they get settled in they will stay there eating bandwidth until you put your foot in their tails and boot them out the door. If you're running cpanel go in to the IP blocker and enter Baidu then save it. Any critter with Baidu in the user agent string will not be able to get in your forum let alone "see" it. Ain't 404 errors wonderful?
In the public eye:
Dump the chatbox. People would rather post in that than the forums. If it's open to the public for posting it will become a spamming nightmare. Make it members only after posting X amount of posts in a given period if you're gonna keep it.
And what's up with the bloat in the What's Going On box? Do you really need all that? You're just wasting cpu time that could be best used elsewhere.
And the top 10 stats, who cares? It's a waste.
Sidebar:
The top block the text is too small. making it bold would help.
The next block down to me personally is a bit of a waste. If you keep it bold the text to make it easier to read.
Overall:
That sort of site is not my forte'. Anything goes has a tendency to go cold and on down the drain. I haven't seen too many that lasted very long. Good luck with it though.

[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by setishock

I looked just a couple of minutes ago and you have 79 of those Baidu bots walking all over your forum. You do know they burn up your bandwidth? Once they get settled in they will stay there eating bandwidth until you put your foot in their tails and boot them out the door. If you're running cpanel go in to the IP blocker and enter Baidu then save it. Any critter with Baidu in the user agent string will not be able to get in your forum let alone "see" it. Ain't 404 errors wonderful?

What setishock says here is very important. Baidu is the most aggressive and useless bot out there. It does a forum no good at all to have them - what, do we think people in China are going to be searching us up? They do not obey robots.txt at all and they are essentially leeches. Blocking them is a must.

[BlueCheri]

Luckily I could find the modification for it and it's done.

Thanx you both friends, for your help and support.

Edit: Sharing link, if any one is interested for it (Ban Spiders by User Agent)

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=268208

G!

Originally Posted by Max Taxable

What setishock says here is very important. Baidu is the most aggressive and useless bot out there. It does a forum no good at all to have them - what, do we think people in China are going to be searching us up? They do not obey robots.txt at all and they are essentially leeches. Blocking them is a must.

[BlueCheri]

Done many changes.

More reviews please.

G!

[setishock]

I don't see anything different other than the facebook block in the sidebar. Speaking of sidebar...
You have the same video in the sidebar and the news block at the top of the forum index. It's a little redundant. Besides chewing up bandwidth.

[BlueCheri]

The sidebar video was put for test, will change it.

Thanx for your views and comments.

Notes: Forum Icons added

G!

Originally Posted by setishock

I don't see anything different other than the facebook block in the sidebar. Speaking of sidebar...
You have the same video in the sidebar and the news block at the top of the forum index. It's a little redundant. Besides chewing up bandwidth.

[BlueCheri]

Made few more changes and also optimized the site.

Please check now.

G!

[Max Taxable]

MUCH better!