Answer me this, my little love worms of the interbutts:

[Triple Zero]

If it's halved in size.

Clicking the emote box already crashes my browser more times than not.  I have to look up the codes via the admin panel.

It's been on my to-do list to fix the appearance of the emote popup box for a long time.

I've made some changes now, I'm pretty happy with them. It's the simplest thing that could possibly work, but it looks kinda okay IMO.

The most important change is that I fixed the layout of the emotes:

Unfortunately, a browser cannot know the true dimensions of a picture before it downloads the first bits of it (the headers say how big it will be). This is what causes all the crazy shifting and jumping around while all the emotes load, the browser has to keep updating the layout of that page as new information on image sizes drips in. I expect this to be somewhat CPU heavy, and it's just annoying because you can't click anywhere if the thing you want to click on keeps jumping around.

Unfortunately, the forum database table that contains the emote info doesn't keep track of the image dimensions either, so I can't fix the HTML to tell the browser what the dimensions of each image will be beforehand.

So the only thing to stop the shifting/jumping was to fix the preview pictures of the emoticons at a fixed size. I didn't want to actually enlarge or shrink them that would make the really small "smiley" style classic emotes look terrible. So what I did was give every emote its own 120x120 pixels box and put the picture in that box, at original resolution, centered and cropped to the box.

I think 120px strikes a good balance between showing enough of the larger emotes, while not having the smaller ones swim in a sea of white-space.

Unfortunately it means you only see a part of the really large emoticons, but I don't think that's really a big deal. The important part is that you can see them in the post, and that you can easily recognize and select the right emote from the popup-box, and I think this solution works for that.

One thing I still notice is that in Firefox, the emote box still slurps quite a bit of CPU. That's probably still because of the large amount of large animated GIFs inside that window. Opera seems to deal better with it, though. Well, try it out, and if it still drags your computer to a crawl, or even crashes the browser, there's still some more solutions I can come up with (replacing the large animations with static JPG thumbnails), but they require more work.

Finally, the emote popup now shows both the code for the emote as well as the description that goes with the emote (as entered in the admin panel). Seems pretty useful that way, and we might want to consider making some of the descriptions a littlebit more ... descriptive, now?

Feedback = appreciated!

[Luna]

MUCH better, I like, thanks, Trip!

[Triple Zero]

Great to hear it works well for others, too

So I've only been able to test this new emote box in Firefox and Opera. If people using other browsers could report that it works or not, that would be great.

I especially fear for those few that are still forced to use the prehistoric IE6 at their workplace (is that still the case for you, RWHN? or did they upgrade to a newer version of IE? cause even Microsoft itself officially stopped supporting it).

[Luna]

Great to hear it works well for others, too

So I've only been able to test this new emote box in Firefox and Opera. If people using other browsers could report that it works or not, that would be great.

I especially fear for those few that are still forced to use the prehistoric IE6 at their workplace (is that still the case for you, RWHN? or did they upgrade to a newer version of IE? cause even Microsoft itself officially stopped supporting it).

Works in IE8.

[Juana]

I was wondering about the emote box. Love it. I find it loads a lot faster than the old one did.

[Cramulus]

Trip, that's bad ass testicle!

[Cain]

New layout = fucking awesome!  Thanks Trip!

[The Wizard Joseph]

 


Just trying to see what this looks like on pixels.


Excellent

[Salty]

PROTIP: hit the Preview button.

This is amazingly awesome. So much faster. Thanks.