PlanetCatfish.com

this is a new thing or something,
but now whenever I want to react, next to the empty place for text are about a zillion smiley's
and they all move

i have over 2Gig RAM memory on the mainboard and 512MB on the vid-cart and the whole PC drows......

cursor goes awol, keyboard is beyond proper control; it's like running headlong into the worst animation adds possible.

they used to be hiding behind a purple link, even when making a new post

can this be fixed please?

for those who have even less RAM on mainboard and vid-card; posting on the forums will be an ordeal.....

Planetcatfish already has THE most "heavy loading" forum I've ever been, this isn't helping at all.

I've just seen them when I was placing a reply. A bit to much I agree.......

Certainly - too much

Can't see the cursor, and now I need to scroll in order to post anything

Not an improvement. To put it mildly

Agreed. Rather distracting imo.

I have no complain (yet). One minor thing is that I could not find the good old "shocked" smiley. Perhaps, simply more of them could be hidden behind the "view more smilies" link and only most common ones may remain visible at all times?

Graphically, the forum is very lite, am I writing this from a remote connection into my home machine over a mobile phone link and it's perfectly usable. However, there are more there than there should be and I am going to remove a lot of them. The plan is to reduce to the yahoo standard pack but many more are available from the "more..." link.

Jools

Fixed.

Jools

unfortunately, no

there are still 57 smilies (yes I counted) and the real problem is that almost every single one of them moves

it's still a hit or miss: "where did my cursor go?"
it turns into a stroboscope cursor.

it's also very distracting. puts the hurt on my eyes.


the old smilies were stationary.
why did they have to go?
they were very user-friendly non-invasive.

I feel for Alex's problems but just wanted to state that, again, I, for one (or rather for two - see Jools' reply), am not bothered (which does not mean that leaving them as they are is a good idea because others are indeed bothered). Also, smilies make the exchange closer to having a face-to-face conversation so the larger choice of smilies may liven things up more. Me likes them but they do not interfere with my cursor...

sidguppy wrote:it turns into a stroboscope cursor

this one is pretty cool

I have no problems and my computer is an old one. Everything is working fine. They are a little bit confusing because they are moving but I guess we should get accustomed to them in few replies.

What browser are you using Sid?

at home I have Firefox, updated, and it's fairly OK; mainly because Firefox is good, I have "No script" running (although I allow most of planetcatfish), also Adblocker, and I got a huge monster PC

at work we have smaller PC's and they have IE installed, latest version.
FF is not allowed because the Dutch government is in bed with Bill.
we have to use all things Microsoft, sad as it may be.
and at school reacting to anything on the PC forum is not funny or workable.

I think it may be that although your system is performant in many ways, the drawing of "animated GIF" (which is what the smilies are) is slow for some reason. Not sure why that would be - could be that it requires some funny stuff in the driver that requires a full-chip-sync (sorry if this is way above what you know about graphics cards and their drivers - I work with these things...)

But I can't see any problem on my nVidia middle of the range work PC and ATI lower-range based home computer.

I'm absolutely not saying there isn't a problem - just that the problem is restricted to SOME combination of software and hardware, but doesn't affect others.

I'm personally not too bothered whether the smilies are animated or not, and whether there is LOTS of a few smilies - I type them in anyways, not clicking [at least for the three or so smilies that I regularly use].

--
Mats

Mats
you missed my point completely

I have nothing against the use of smilies.
period

the old set I used plenty, especially the green one, the little bearded guy with the eyebrows, the thumbs up and the wink.

the problem here is that as soon as you open the "reply" function, next to the white field for text are a LOT of new smilies and unlike the old set almost all are moving and hence drowning both vid-cart memory and mainboard memory

this was NOT the case with the old set where only a few were animated and the lot were just unmoving ones.

why was the old set replaced? it worked just fine.....

OK, so there are actually fewer smilies displayed than previously. However, more are animated and they take up a bit more space (but not a lot).

There isn't a general performance issue with these. Alex, your issue is a local one. I want to use a (standard) set and I want to make them appealing to a younger (<30) audience. I also want to ease away from a perception of stuffiness from some parts of the forum. The default set still exists from a legacy post point of view and there are loads more added but behind the "view more" link.

I'm happy to remove 10-15 or so of them from the reply page unless there is a "remove the * from pleco" type feeling against it. By all means make suggestions for removal. I'm not sure about .

If it's a real issue for folks, start a poll like the "remove the * from pleco thing" and I will go with the masses.

Jools

hehe

the * in Pleco was overwhelmingly voted out and it's still there.....

pleco.

Really?

Jools

I like the smileys jiggling away over there and i miss the pl*co

just for info

I think I understood what you meant, but thanks for clarifying...

sidguppy wrote:the problem here is that as soon as you open the "reply" function, next to the white field for text are a LOT of new smilies and unlike the old set almost all are moving and hence drowning both vid-cart memory and mainboard memory

Right, I had a look a random sampling of the smilies. The five I downloaded were ranging from just under 1KB to just over 8KB (that's the file-size, not the uncompressed content, but I still don't think the 50 or so imaged that move at about 30 Hz will seriously load your system. My cheapo laptop runs at about 20% CPU usage during this reply.

I will edit this to indicate the CPU usage when not replying.
Edit: CPU usage does indeed go down to a more reasonable 2-4% when not replying. However, I should point out that the 20% or so CPU usage is when the CPU is running at 800MHz, not the maximum 2.1GHz.

My cursor is certainly not flickering/flashing.

--
Mats

Thought you'd like this one Sid: :auto-sportbike:

Jools

It's probably closer to my ideal motorbike than Alex's - I certainly like it...

--
Mats

maybe it means your computer needs more ram or whatever the other one is , virtual memory?

the smileys don't jack up my computer. But my last computer before it died it froze on smiley stuff alot

Dudes, Guys and Chaps,

The total memory used by the "bad50smiles" (tm) is around 0.00068 MB and less than half the size of the cartoonish 24bit graphics used at the top left of every page. :happy-wavemulticolor:

Jools

I have no technical problem with them.

All works fine for me.