Forum update

Zephyr · Post by **Zephyr** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 11:06 pm

The forums were updated a moment ago. The update includes:

1) Tags. You should see them in every post now. The default is SPAM, but this is because Stalker suggested it. Not that I had any better ideas. If you have suggestions for tags that should be added, tell so in this thread.

You can filter posts by tags, as you should see in the forum view.

2) The old icons indicating new posts were removed. Because of this, another type of indicator for new posts was added: the slightly varied red color in those forum / topic / private message rows that are new or unread.

3) The icons attached to each post (quote, email, etc.) were replaced with text. This is for two reasons: to save bandwidth and to make the forums look cleaner. Until someone makes new, good icons to replace the old ones, the text will stay.

Whine, comments and bug reports in this thread.

Post by **Swiftoak** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 11:20 pm

A. What are tags.

B. For some button ideas, to save on bandwith and look, i can make really good forum buttons with photoshop. Im good at graphics and such you know.

C. A suggestion, maybe you could arrange the tags so they fo not make the page longer horizontal-wise. Thats kinda annoying having to scrool from left to right.

Nice guys.

Hermit · Post by **Hermit** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 11:38 pm

The tags are a tad colourful, but with the new, clean and sober forum looks (which I really like) they will surely get noticed. Have smilies been taken off?

Overall, I like the new look, the highlighted sections and all. Makes TR's Forum look a lot more .. clean. Pretty.

Zephyr · Post by **Zephyr** » Fri Sep 09, 2005 11:46 pm

Hermit: One point of the tags is to make it easier for people to find threads. I think most people will associate the tag of the thread more easily than the thread title, so that they'll look for a particular image rather than just the thread title. At least I do so in another forum, and there it really helps to have colorful tags aside posts. If all the tags were blended into the forums, this visual aid aspect would be lost.

Swiftoak: yeah, you're right, I'll make the tags not span all the page width when I update it next time (tomorrow).

Morden · Post by **Morden** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 12:49 am

Thanks zephyr.

Anonymous · Post by **Anonymous** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 3:07 am

I think there should be no tags and i think the buttons should be text to stay.

every time i enter i have 2 wait 4ever for it 2 load.

If we keep everything sweet and simple, and no faciness, i think the bandwitdth will be less.

Vernon · Post by **Vernon** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 10:18 am

Mmmmmm so clean and textified... That varied red for unread posts is lovely. All in all, the portal is looking a whole lot better and it loads much more smoothly on my slow connection. I'm a little skeptical of the tag idea, but we have to give these things a try, or we'll never know. I don't access posts through subforums anyway, so I guess I won't see them much.

Btw the default should definitely be blank, not spam, because (1) I can think of a whole bunch of posts that wouldn't fall under those categories and (2) It's sort of harsh to call a post spam if it doesn't fit under some preconceived category.

Zephyr · Post by **Zephyr** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 10:51 am

Vernon:

I disagree about having a blank default tag for these reasons:
1) It's only old posts that will be marked as spam. For any current thread, mods or the thread poster can edit the tag to their liking by editing the first post.

2) Having a semi-offensive default tag will probably encourage people to select another one, so we can have at least some benefit of the tags by a structural sense.

It could be changed to less offensive version though, like Discussion, but I don't know if people would bother selecting another tag then, but if a lot of people want it, the spam picture can be changed to something else.

I will mass change all tags of certain subforums though (like newbie forum, technical, sound, music) so that those forums can be merged, which is half the point of this tags thing. We have far too many forums, each with relatively small number of posts, and if the tags can add to the organization, some forums must be merged. Because you all can filter posts by tags now, this shouldn't be too much of a problem at all.

For now, I'm thinking of having the following merges:

Sound + Music
Finished BoT Books + Finished Spellbooks
Provinces + Lore discussions (one tag for each province and one for lore)
Possibly guilds should be added to the lore as well, with guild tag? I'm not sure yet

Any suggestions to this? Other forums to be merged? Whining about "I don't want any forums to be merged" is not really an option here, we must cut down the front page load, it's a pain to navigate and looks frightening for new members. [/code]

Vernon · Post by **Vernon** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 11:04 am

No, you're right. There are too many forums, and tags is a clever way of merging them. I completely agree with these merges:

Finished BoT Books + Finished Spellbooks

Provinces + Lore discussions

Sound + Music

But others might not, for whatever reason. I'm unsure about guilds aswell, but a merge makes sense. Is lore the right one to merge it with?

I think changing SPAM to Discussion would be much healthier. Seeing all of those topics classified as spam is going to a lot more frightening than all of the sub-forums. :)

Seriously, the portal looks so much better. One suggestion: in a thread, where your post date is located, the right is just empty space, whereas the post time has the buttons on the right. Is it possible to nudge the post time and date elsewhere or will that bugger up the spacing?

nakai · Post by **nakai** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 11:44 am

why are there 2 attention tags?

Gez · Post by **Gez** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 1:13 pm

Zephyr wrote:I disagree about having a blank default tag for these reasons:
1) It's only old posts that will be marked as spam. For any current thread, mods or the thread poster can edit the tag to their liking by editing the first post.

2) Having a semi-offensive default tag will probably encourage people to select another one, so we can have at least some benefit of the tags by a structural sense.

I'm an old member of a small general discussion forum (www.nothingland.com) where this approach has been tried before. At first with a blank default tag. Few cared to use them, so the default tag became rather offensive ("Shit Post" or "Shit Thread", don't remember). Didn't incite people to use tags anyway. Eventually, the admin just gave up and stopped using tags.

On another forum I'm registered to, www.enworld.org (a big D&D discussion board), the solution adopted was simply to have no default tag. When somebody don't chose a tag for his new thread, he gets an error message, just like if he forgot to put a title. And it seems to work correctly this way.

Zephyr · Post by **Zephyr** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 2:10 pm

nakai: The blinking attention tag is for mods only. If you slide your mouse above it, you should see text "Attention! [Mods only]".

Gez wrote: ...
the default tag became rather offensive
...
When somebody don't chose a tag for his new thread, he gets an error message, just like if he forgot to put a title.
...

This is an interesting point. In a forum where I'm registered to (SA), the default icon is also Shit post but there, people actually care to choose the tag for some reason, probably because they don't want to appear like total morons.

The error message is good as well. It would be more official than the offensive default tag and might suit our particular forums better. What do others think? I'd prefer the default tag myself, but the error message idea is very good as well.

Hermit · Post by **Hermit** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 2:16 pm

I like the error message idea better, myself.

Arthmodeus · Post by **Arthmodeus** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 2:20 pm

Error Message wins my vote.

Anonymous · Post by **Anonymous** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 3:09 pm

Aye, and put it in the rules that you should mark your message with a correct tag.

Post by **Swiftoak** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 3:26 pm

Can someone send me the pixel dimensions for the buttons?

Arthmodeus · Post by **Arthmodeus** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 3:27 pm

I don't want buttons. It looks clean and fine as it is.

Lady Nerevar · Post by **Lady Nerevar** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 4:16 pm

this is seriously bothering me... looks a little to clean for my taste(dont listen to me, if just goten up)

as for constructive critisim, theres an submit tag, but since i cant use tags when i write a submit messege, its ratehr useless to me.if it was made for the moders to notify that it need submitting, then just ignore my ramling.

maybe there should be a lock tag? to put on post in threads u want locked... and we need a discusion tag for sure.

[edit] when i makr a forum read, the forum dosent change color on the index page(but does inside the actual forum)

[edit2] the mark all forums read feature dosent work eitehr

Theo · Post by **Theo** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 4:16 pm

I WANT buttons

We will have to make a poll.

Animunculi · Post by **Animunculi** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 4:23 pm

I like this new clean look, but I think we could use some new tags such as: 3D Art, Discussion, etc...
My vote goes to the error message.
I think there's just one thing wrong with these tags: they're too colorful! In my opinion SPAM tag is the only one that goes with the forum colour scheme.
But that's just my opinion.

Post by **ko2fan** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 3:44 am

How about having a lo-bandwidth and hi-bandwidth theme. One without icons, and the other with. So dialup users can select lo, and broadband users select hi.

--
garfield

Vernon · Post by **Vernon** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 5:13 am

The discussion tag is much better. Thanks, zephyr. And the OoT merge mentioned on IRC is fine by me if it is fine by Stalker. Also, can we get back sticky and announcement icons so there is an icon for each, rather than 'attention' for both? The exclamation marks probably aren't clear enough by themselves. Maybe another way of unclogging the portal would be to sort out the usergroups so the Moderator's name isn't below the sub-forum title.

Zephyr · Post by **Zephyr** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 10:33 am

garfield wrote:How about having a lo-bandwidth and hi-bandwidth theme. One without icons, and the other with. So dialup users can select lo, and broadband users select hi.

Yeah, that's all fine with me and stuff, but as I've said in previous discussions about templates, I'm not going to maintain any other template than the default one, it's just too much work for very little benefit. At least two people have all the old .tpl files because they wanted to make them work again. Now, I'm very satisfied with the fact that they actually haven't made anything out of them, because then I'd have to coordinate with them every time I'm making an update. I hope this is how it stays, really.

Anyway, the bug that swiftoak suggested fixing (tags spanning the whole page horizontally) is now fixed.

Also, as some have might noticed, the tags are now forum-based so we can have different tags shown up in different forums.

Vernon · Post by **Vernon** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 6:30 am

1) In 'Last 10 Active Posts,' 'Forum' and 'Views' have jumbled themselves up again.

2) Could we get sticky and announcement tags? I'll make them myself if that is better for you.

3) When something is moved to the archives, will it maintain its tag? Because that would help a little when navigating the archives and would surely only require enabling all tags there.

Thanks muchly

edit: I've attached some tags, PNG-8 files optimised as much as I could without them looking like shit (Each around 400 bytes).

fanfas · Post by **fanfas** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 3:31 pm

I have a problem (is it only me?) when i login and there are new posts in a forum, all threads get marked as new and thus staying red.... not good

Inferno_str1ke · Post by **Inferno_str1ke** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 10:35 pm

I never liked the forum design since we were kicked off the ST forums, and when the skins were dropped as well I didnt like it even more. But now its much nicer, looks clean etc. So well done.

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