Casebier wrote:
1. Give an option in our Profile settings to hide Smilies by default. I know this can be done, as I've worked enough in PHP to know most of what can and can't be easily implemented.
Well, the forum could just skip the step where it replaces the smiley tags with actual images, but is this really worth it? Also, "
Insert smilies issues"
reads to me like you're actually having issues when inserting Smilies while posting, where this wouldn't help anyway...
2. Preload the Smilies. Preloading is a function that JavaScript handles well, and the pages already have JavaScript in them, so it shouldn't be a problem to implement. Just have the smilies preload with the header.php file and they'll always be loaded up.
But why exactly? After all, the first thing that gets loaded is the page itself, while images only start loading when they get referenced first. (At least that's the earlies possible time; what happens exactly depends on your browser - and I thought that browsers where you can't use the page unless it's fully loaded were a thing of the distant past already...)
Unless you've totally disabled any caching in your browser, this should happen only once unless the smiley graphics got evicted from the browser side cache. Not to mention that preloading all smileys is actually wasteful if only a handful of them are used on the page, and the extra requests might even slow down loading the rest of the page.
So where's the problem if the smiley images take a few seconds to appear before they're cached? I think the text is more important, and that is already loading before the smileys even get into the picture...
So if you are having a specific problem with the smileys, would you mind telling us what it is?
np: Nine Horses - Darkest Birds (Snow Borne Sorrow)
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"
I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better."
- Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)
