11-15-2007, 10:00 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Zune Cards in Our Forums: What's the Solution?
Someone asked in our forums what our plans were for the Zune cards - whether or not we had plans to allow the integration of Zune cards into our forums. I've been thinking about that since they were announced - you've probably noticed our forums here are quite..."clean" in terms of sigs. I really dislike forums where people have massive, ugly signatures with huge graphics. The signatures steal all the visual focus away from the message - they often look like virtual graffiti. It might be great for some forums and communities, but not this one. In our forums, the message the person is posting should be the most important thing - their sig is just something extra.
I'm just starting to think about how we might implement this. At the very least, if I want it to not look terrible, I think we'd have to customize the Zune Thoughts vBulletin template and expand the left-hand column that shows the username, # of posts, etc. The Zune card would have to fit in there - what sucks is how huge they made the Zune cards - I would have preferred to have an even smaller option for embedding, with some sort of a fly-out Flash function. The problem though is that I'm not sure if we can implement that in the template system without having to hack vBulletin - hacks make upgrades PAINFUL, so I never do it. Let me ponder this some more...but I'm definitely interested in ideas from the community, especially from people experienced with vBulletin and vBulletin template design. I still know much more about how phpBB works than vBulletin, so much of this is new to me.
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11-15-2007, 11:31 PM
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Contributing Editor
Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 519
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Why not just have the Zune tag linked under the typical username stuff? We don't need a flashy (get it?) widget, just the link. In the user profile option (going to a member.php page), there could be space for the full ZuneCard.
This is a crappy mockup I made in Paint of how it might look:
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11-16-2007, 12:07 AM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 2
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This guy noted that the zune cards can be resized fairly well - if you look at the way he sized his, it actually holds up well in a smaller format.
I'm not sure how helpful that really is, other than showing that the code can be written so that the cards aren't obtrusive.
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11-16-2007, 12:29 AM
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Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,432
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
I'm just starting to think about how we might implement this....
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An easy, no nonsense, solution would be to use CSS to set a hard height on the signature container as well as setting it to not allow overflow in the signature container. This way if someone does try to use a really large and annoying signature, it will just be cut off 
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11-16-2007, 08:04 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 451
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No. Please. No.
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11-24-2007, 03:48 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 38
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I'm actually a member over at ZuneBoards, where they have incorporated the small ZuneCards into sigs, but the site seems to lag more due to them.... they're a nice feature, but unless you have the resources, they can bog servers down.....
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11-26-2007, 09:15 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 38
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Hey here's an alternative to resource hogging flash ZuneCards (yes it's a link to another Zune site, but that's where the information is: http://www.zuneboards.com/content/view/202/1/
Here's what mine looks like (no flash!)
Last edited by ACE; 11-27-2007 at 03:15 AM..
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