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Looking for Ideas for our New Look!


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Sounds good to me. I really like the idea of using the wings! Will that narrow vertical menu be something that scrolls down the side of the page with you? In all that black space that you get with a screen res greater than what the forum is designed for I mean.

 

And is there any chance of doing something about mobile browsing on the site? Currently on the Ghost Ship theme my phone which doesn't do text rewrapping to fit the text in posts better on the screen means I have to move swipe side to side to read a full post. However, the basic IP.Board skin appears to do this itself so I was wondering if it would be possible to display the IP.Board skin if as phone is set to request the mobile version of the site and then whichever skin I have selected as my default if I set the phone to request the desktop site?

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I'm glad this is happening. I don't know the history of the site (would be cool to know), but this is not a dark place. The subject matter (both Sacred and casual topics) is not dark, the community is not dark... just the color scheme is. Skin of gloom. I have no problem with dark color schemes, just the current look is like a gothic poetry site.

 

I have no suggestions on what kind of changes to make. I'll try to think of something.

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This is sort of a nitpick, but have you guys had problems reading walls of text? As in, white letters on black background cause white lines to appear when you close your eyes? I have, and it can’t be good for the eyes.

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It was interesting to see this old skin. Forum software changed since then and this skin looks somewhat outdated now, but the design is so different from what DM exploited all the time I've been there it comes as a surprise.

 

All the functionality I see currenly lacking or misbehaving is certainly not your fault and most probably not a skin feature at all, so I don't know how much you can do about it. Still, it would be nice to have working wiki tags, in-interface ability to insert title/caption for external links without having to type BBcode by hand and more comfortable quoting (right now it's a bit annoying when you edit quoted text to take only a part of it and then see quote caption suddenly popping in random places of the reply post and other things along these lines).

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Cheers you two! Oh boy Flix. We need to get gogo to ressurect some topics of our old skins. We had soooome fun. Remembering the "Happy Place" we had to live in for a while when we were transitioning from free to paid forum software. It was... Perhaps a little too happy, lol.

 

Sadly it's true. That skin is dated now. But it's spirit lives on! As for the functionality you mention Silver, can you tell me what you mean about the wiki tags? Is it the apostrophe thing? If so then it has already been fixed within the upcoming IPB update. So as soon as they release the update it will be fixed. And then we will have new bugs to worry about, lol... External Link titles. Are you using the rich text editor? In rich text mode you just type the title, highlight it and then click the link button. To change a link title you highlight the link and then type over it. It's weird. Quote boxes make me crazy too. That's an IPB dev issue that I hope they worked on. I'll check it out. I sometimes switch to the basic editor when customizing quotes. But we shouldn't have to do that and didn't have to in the past.

 

So here's our shopping list so far. No sparkling graphics yet!

  • Light skin
  • Light weight skin (low file size graphics)
  • mobile skins
  • wiki skin should be more simple than other 2 sites
  • possible "editor's" skin on wiki for even faster load speeds
  • handy follow menu "autohide taskbar"
  • optimize text to background contrast "easy on the eyes"
  • Create or find a bbcode to better control image thumbnailing on the forum. Like wiki...
  • Code forum sigs to sit at bottom of post
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If so then it has already been fixed within the upcoming IPB update. So as soon as they release the update it will be fixed.

Good to know that at least some issues will be fixed in IPB updates and you don't have to come up with your own solutions and workarounds.

In rich text mode you just type the title, highlight it and then click the link button. To change a link title you highlight the link and then type over it. It's weird.

Now, it is weird. Would have never thought to try typing over link text as most editors treat it as text replacement. Or maybe it's just my personal problem - when I don't see an interface option that does what I need, I tend to think about typing code by hand before trying less intuitive approaches to the interface. Probably that tendency to solve all problems by manual coding is just a side effect of my occupation as a programmer. I'm glad to find out that the interface is working fine, so don't mind me asking about it.

 

The TO DO list has already grown big enough, and I see nothing that is missing and can be added to it. Though maybe when you start working on it you'll see more things that can be done to improve it.

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Cheers you two! Oh boy Flix. We need to get gogo to ressurect some topics of our old skins. We had soooome fun. Remembering the "Happy Place" we had to live in for a while when we were transitioning from free to paid forum software. It was... Perhaps a little too happy, lol.

Grooveeeeyyyy. These were on the house.

220px-RayBanAviator.jpg

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When I looked at my various posts again, it dawned on me to ask if we can choose which information we have on our profiles is displayed on forums beneath the avatar and which is not. Right now, whenever we change specific fields in profile settings, they are immediately displayed in posts, even if we reset them to defaults or otherwise make them not informative. For example I got stuck with quite silly (and a bit corny) gender label because after one of skin changes my profile suddenly started telling that I'm a girl, though I never made such a setting (probably because new skin had different default than the old one or something like that). I reset the profile so that people wouldn't get wrong ideas - and ended up with a new setting following me everywhere. Likewise people sometimes have second thoughts about telling real name or location and have to come up with some joke to replace these fields with because it's hard to prevent them from displaying at all. Also, gaming platform is now an exclusive field, while nothing prevents people from owning games for several different platforms at the same time. When S3 would be released it would become even more complicated, as some people would have, let's say S1 and Sacred 2 for PC and S3 for console. Maybe we can allow multiple selection for this field, or at least allow to clear it entirely.

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Awe look. Flix's eyes have the happiness now. Yup. That was more or less everyone elses reaction as well. lol *hangs sign over Flix's gaping mouth expression, slides him on dolly platform and rolls him into the happy tank for de-happinessing* Alrighty!

 

 

 

Cheers Timo, haha! It's STILL up. Wow...

 

I like it. C'mon, feel the funk!

 

Care for a jelly bean? ^^

 

 

 

If so then it has already been fixed within the upcoming IPB update. So as soon as they release the update it will be fixed.

Good to know that at least some issues will be fixed in IPB updates and you don't have to come up with your own solutions and workarounds.

>In rich text mode you just type the title, highlight it and then click the link button. To change a link title you highlight the link and then type over it. It's weird.

Now, it is weird. Would have never thought to try typing over link text as most editors treat it as text replacement. Or maybe it's just my personal problem - when I don't see an interface option that does what I need, I tend to think about typing code by hand before trying less intuitive approaches to the interface. Probably that tendency to solve all problems by manual coding is just a side effect of my occupation as a programmer. I'm glad to find out that the interface is working fine, so don't mind me asking about it.

 

The TO DO list has already grown big enough, and I see nothing that is missing and can be added to it. Though maybe when you start working on it you'll see more things that can be done to improve it.

 

 

It is. It really is wierd. It was purely by chance that I found that. I need to write a guide on how to use the editor...

 

When I looked at my various posts again, it dawned on me to ask if we can choose which information we have on our profiles is displayed on forums beneath the avatar and which is not. Right now, whenever we change specific fields in profile settings, they are immediately displayed in posts, even if we reset them to defaults or otherwise make them not informative. For example I got stuck with quite silly (and a bit corny) gender label because after one of skin changes my profile suddenly started telling that I'm a girl, though I never made such a setting (probably because new skin had different default than the old one or something like that). I reset the profile so that people wouldn't get wrong ideas - and ended up with a new setting following me everywhere. Likewise people sometimes have second thoughts about telling real name or location and have to come up with some joke to replace these fields with because it's hard to prevent them from displaying at all. Also, gaming platform is now an exclusive field, while nothing prevents people from owning games for several different platforms at the same time. When S3 would be released it would become even more complicated, as some people would have, let's say S1 and Sacred 2 for PC and S3 for console. Maybe we can allow multiple selection for this field, or at least allow to clear it entirely.

 

Ah, interesting. Yup. I'll look into that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you need help with something from the layout, I'm a professional web developer, so I know my way in CSS and the like.

(yes, I'm back, kinda).

 

1) Signature displays at bottom of post, not directly below post text. This could help make all the empty space (caused by the heighth of our avatars/titles) at the bottom not seem so odd and empty.

What is the max-height of the signatures? I think I can do something about getting these things at the bottom of the post.

Edited by Arperum
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