News from the Front

[Cobra5]

Ok.


Well... everything seems to be updated. I am still going to be making changes.

1)The background still won't work, so Its just a blank color. Feels a little lonely...

2)The board is a little tighter on images. It will resize to fit large images, but try to keep your signatures below around 500px wide (That's just a guess, the actual board with uses percentages, not pixels).

3)I still haven't finished the buttons so its just using the default proboards ones. I plan on making a full set of buttons but these will do for now.

4)If anything isn't working, or is hard to read, or you have better ideas for images/buttons/layout please tell me, I'll try to fix it. Different monitors have different gamma settings, and whats easy to read on one might be practically invisible on another.

5)If you really hate your personal color, I can still change that, too.

6)There is a bug with the buttons at the top, and sometimes clicking on them will make them become replaced with text (Like "[Home]"). Clicking on any link or refreshing the page fixes it.

[Tassatul]

Transparent stuff doesn't seem to be working. Some of the smilies and all the names have white boxes around them. Not sure if that's because I'm on a crap computer right now, or if it has to do with the board. Other than that, it looks pretty cool. New and different is always good in my book.

[daft alchemist]

Some of the names are still huge. Mine, for isntance.

Also, I just realized that some of those smilies are the ones I made! ;D

[Jalathas]

Pretty sweet. The top banner seems kinda big. My color's fine, though. I kinda like it.

[Cobra5]

tassatul said:

Transparent stuff doesn't seem to be working. Some of the smilies and all the names have white boxes around them. Not sure if that's because I'm on a crap computer right now, or if it has to do with the board. Other than that, it looks pretty cool. New and different is always good in my book.

Yes, I removed alpha transparency support for older browsers thinking everyone here had newer ones.

I'll put the code back in now. I hope I can find it again

[edit] Its back in. But I don't have a way to test it, as I don't have Internet Explorer 6.

Let me know if its fixed.

daftalchemist said:

Some of the names are still huge. Mine, for isntance.

Also, I just realized that some of those smilies are the ones I made! ;D

Yeah, some are a little big, but I think they're within "acceptable" range, right?


Nope. I made them all. All of them except for laughing, sleeping, and shocked are just recolored old ones. The three I just mentioned I made again.

jalathas said:

Pretty sweet. The top banner seems kinda big. My color's fine, though. I kinda like it.

Hm. I just relized that the advertisments might make the top of the page too far away from the rest. I use adblock, so I don't see any of the advertisments, and I didn't take it into consideration.

If anyone get's really annoyed by the large top image I'll make a smaller one.

[Fargo Squire]

I'm doing a lot of squinting to read the text. And not just because I'm not wearing my glasses. I'd say the text could do with being lighter to contrast a little more against the dark background.

[copyKatt]

i dont like how narrow it is. is it really necessary? i mean, especially if we start up RPing again (hopefully) the posts will be very very long. and yes, the board looks very empty with the plain blue, but for me, i doubt a textured background will make it feel any cozier. it could just be my res. will the width scale to widescreen or is it standard? if its standard, then i guess there is nothing you can do, but i would like to see it a little wider.

i like the blue on blue, i think the colors contrast enough to be able to be seen.

the buttons on the home page are a bit obscrue. i count tell what they were til i put my cursor over them. i though it was the news fader, just very very unreadable. once you place your cursor over it, its fine though. take from that what you will.

i dont like how i cant use xkcd comics as signatures anymore, now i might actually have to *gasp* make one.

other then that, its cool. i like the custom name tags, but will new users get them too? assuming this place isnt a godforsaken corner of the interwubs yet?

{edit} i think the eyes on the stick-toungey-outy smiley are too high. but i do like the new composition buttons.

oh and, the plain text nav buttons on the very top of the page are too light to be seen against the plain background. maybe that will change with the new background, but just fyi.

[daft alchemist]

admin said:

Nope. I made them all. All of them except for laughing, sleeping, and shocked are just recolored old ones. The three I just mentioned I made again.

Why can't you just use my awesome smilies I made for you?

[copyKatt]

well, he *is* admin, so layout is his schtick. you should get a schtick. like mine is to keep you people in line, rawr!

[Jalathas]

I think my schtick is lurking too much, then every once in a while trying to get some new RPing done, only to let it die because I have no idea where I'm going with it.

[Fargo Squire]

Just an example of what I mean:

[BugHunter]

"woa" wuz my first reaction on coming onto the site. Still too early for me to decide whether i like it yet. And yea, the plain light blue background is definitely rather bland.

[daft alchemist]

Ok. Something happened, maybe it's just this computer at work, though I doubt it, but I can only click on two of the smilies and put them in posts. These two:

All the others aren't clickable. I'm a smilie addict, I need to click smilies. Otherwise I'll have to start doing this stuff: T.T

[copyKatt]

i also beleive that those are the only two animated smilies. it could be the reason why. they are probably a different file format.

[Cobra5]

Ok... phew


Yes the width is fixed. I have been trying a million different things (I have another forum that's just for me testing layouts without messing it up here). By fixing the width, there's a million new things I can do. Most forums use a fixed width of 750px or so, this one uses 800px. I thought 800 was small enough to be seen on smaller Res's and large enough to be seen on big ones... I forgot yours was something crazy like widescreen.

If, for example, we did start RPing. You can resize the board for a single thread (Or single page of thread) by posting an image in that thread. The board resizes to the widest image per page of thread, so you could just put a wide image at the top of each page in an RPG- like a banner or title.

[edit] If posts beign too squished and long is a problem, I can fix that. I don't think that it WILL become a problem... most posts, besides RPs, were only a few lines tops. But, I found a way to fix it with a little extra work. The board would be fixed, at 800, for the title page, but resize for the post and board areas. The large title image at top would probably be removed for those areas as well, though I'm not sure what I would put up there.

Also. I know that a textured background probably wouldn't be enough- and that's why I've been having so much trouble with it. The background I had, had things on either side of the screen. However, I couldn't get it to center properly... I was thinking about just putting a simple texture (like hexagons) in place in the mean time but I figured it may as well be blank. I am upset I can't get it working, although, I was more worried about blue-on-blue and some other things, so I implimented the layout before I got everything working to I could start working on feedback like everything in this thread (which, in my opinion, is more important). I'm sorry for rushing it a bit in that respect... I hate the bland background too... but getting everything working, I'd rather get everything else working BEFORE I get the background working.


The buttons being obscure on the home page is specifically why I implimented the highlighting (Which, by the way, I can play with for hours, so that is definatly staying ) I could brighten up the darkened ones a bit. I've already redone those images SO many times...



I don't know why only two smilies work. They all work for me just fine. The animated ones are gifs, and the others pngs. Never heard of this problem before. Also, sarah, I am not using your smilies. Thank you for making them, but I told you then, as well, I just want to use the ones I made.


I've started a second layout on the test board to start work on a "dark on Light" color scheme- all the images the same, but different colors for the windows and text- to fix the blue-on-blue problem. Switching around colors is pretty easy.


The nav buttons being invisible... yes, originally they were removed entirely But then I realized, that I (and probably everyone else) used them a lot, so I put them back in. I honestly don't like them there, they stick out too much, but they need to be there, so I kinda made them sorta invisible. I was working on replacing them with images, I couldn't think of a good way to do it, but I think I just thought of one. It might take some time to get working though.