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[Oranjui]

After spending a little time staring blankly at the atrocity that is this forum layout, I became a tad bi-curious as to why it is set up this way. In most forums, the OP (original post) is always the first thing you see, and that is most useful, because that way you don't have to sift through page after page of stuff just to find the original post on page 1034. The fact that new posts are displayed first is nonsensical. What if you just saw the thread and had no idea what was going on? Say a debate was taking place, and all you see is the tail end of it. Nonsensical if you ask me.

...?
On the first page of a thread, the OP is always there, or should be at least. Did you accidentally change your settings somehow? ucp.php?i=prefs&mode=view Set the third group of settings to "All posts," "Post time," and "Ascending."

Now onto the colour scheme.

Runouw has said that he's working on this. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=42112 The theme isn't perfect, and the thread is from over a year ago, but hopefully it's still being worked on.

n to the next subject: The post boxes look awful.

I do kind of agree with you, but on this particular forum, everyone's used to seeing it in the layout we currently have. Besides, who wants to use a boring old default them? Here, usernames and post dates are listed at the top of each post in a compact single line so we can get straight to the content without a clunky userbox in the way. There's no need to see how old and what gender each member is. I generally focus my eyes towards the left, since that's where I start, and I don't want to be distracted by an avatar and a silly location or whatever is there.

Changing it five years in would be far too drastic of a change in this community, at least in my opinion. Unless it's coming with the new layout, this should definitely be held off.

[EDIT] Regarding the chat: Stop using irc. Most phpBB has other chat plugins. Chat keeps members on your forum, because chat gives them purpose. This is a proven fact.

The forum chat is a whole issue that we've been struggling with for quite a while now. There used to be an on-site chat... until Runouw started having bandwidth issues. For a while, we started testing out different IRC hosts and clients before Suyo was able to host the chat on his own servers. That worked out fine for a while until people started complaining about lag issues and joined channels not saving, so the chatbox was just removed from the site finally. Suyo's still hosting the chat, but now it's limited to only IRC clients instead of users having the option of on-site chat OR IRC. If I'm not mistaken, the biggest issue at this point is the massive amount of people using Chrome, which is causing a ton of problems with what Suyo is trying to do. Ask him about it, maybe.


The only thing I really agree with that you said is that the header text should be bigger, or at least should have an option to change the text size.

[Cordelia]

After spending a little time staring blankly at the atrocity that is this forum layout, I became a tad bi-curious as to why it is set up this way. In most forums, the OP (original post) is always the first thing you see, and that is most useful, because that way you don't have to sift through page after page of stuff just to find the original post on page 1034. The fact that new posts are displayed first is nonsensical. What if you just saw the thread and had no idea what was going on? Say a debate was taking place, and all you see is the tail end of it. Nonsensical if you ask me.

...?
On the first page of a thread, the OP is always there, or should be at least. Did you accidentally change your settings somehow? ucp.php?i=prefs&mode=view Set the third group of settings to "All posts," "Post time," and "Ascending."

Now onto the colour scheme.

Runouw has said that he's working on this. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=42112 The theme isn't perfect, and the thread is from over a year ago, but hopefully it's still being worked on.

n to the next subject: The post boxes look awful.

I do kind of agree with you, but on this particular forum, everyone's used to seeing it in the layout we currently have. Besides, who wants to use a boring old default them? Here, usernames and post dates are listed at the top of each post in a compact single line so we can get straight to the content without a clunky userbox in the way. There's no need to see how old and what gender each member is. I generally focus my eyes towards the left, since that's where I start, and I don't want to be distracted by an avatar and a silly location or whatever is there.

Changing it five years in would be far too drastic of a change in this community, at least in my opinion. Unless it's coming with the new layout, this should definitely be held off.

[EDIT] Regarding the chat: Stop using irc. Most phpBB has other chat plugins. Chat keeps members on your forum, because chat gives them purpose. This is a proven fact.

The forum chat is a whole issue that we've been struggling with for quite a while now. There used to be an on-site chat... until Runouw started having bandwidth issues. For a while, we started testing out different IRC hosts and clients before Suyo was able to host the chat on his own servers. That worked out fine for a while until people started complaining about lag issues and joined channels not saving, so the chatbox was just removed from the site finally. Suyo's still hosting the chat, but now it's limited to only IRC clients instead of users having the option of on-site chat OR IRC. If I'm not mistaken, the biggest issue at this point is the massive amount of people using Chrome, which is causing a ton of problems with what Suyo is trying to do. Ask him about it, maybe.


The only thing I really agree with that you said is that the header text should be bigger, or at least should have an option to change the text size.

I think the problem is is that there is too much of a focus on the current forum community, which defeats the purpose of a forum. The community must expand, change, and evolve. Drastic change is sometimes necessary to accomplish this. I've been here since late 2012 and the one thing I've noticed is how small and singular the community seems to be. There seems to be no desire for expansion of the userbase at all, but instead an almost obsessive caterance to the already existing veteran userbase. This hinders any sort of future for a forum, as people come and go, and if more people go than come over time, the forum just fades into nothing.

Also, regarding posts themselves, I believe that I did make the mistake of switching up the ascending and descending post order at some point, and I apologize for mixing it up.

[*Emelia K. Fletcher]

"I've been here since late 2012 and the one thing I've noticed is how small and singular the community seems to be. There seems to be no desire for expansion of the userbase at all, but instead an almost obsessive caterance to the already existing veteran userbase. This hinders any sort of future for a forum, as people come and go, and if more people go than come over time, the forum just fades into nothing."

This is a problem we've been proactively trying to fix for the past two years, and since you're one of the few people so far to express complete and utter disapproval of the current layout, is it really alright to presume that your perspective is the end-all of all perspectives? We're content with this, most new users are content with this, and the new forum layout will be an option soon.


Regarding the chat: coding your own IRC widget to run with phpBB is hard and bandwidth is the exact reason we've not used phpBB's own provided on-site chat plugins

[nin10mode]

This post by nin10mode was thumbed up by:

Cordelia (July 24th, 2014, 6:57 pm)

[*Emelia K. Fletcher]

Hell, I'm fine with the new forum layout being finally available - I'm just not fine with talk of this current one being discarded completely since choice is always good

[Sethster]

[EDIT] Regarding the chat: Stop using irc. Most phpBB has other chat plugins. Chat keeps members on your forum, because chat gives them purpose. This is a proven fact.

The forum chat is a whole issue that we've been struggling with for quite a while now. There used to be an on-site chat... until Runouw started having bandwidth issues. For a while, we started testing out different IRC hosts and clients before Suyo was able to host the chat on his own servers. That worked out fine for a while until people started complaining about lag issues and joined channels not saving, so the chatbox was just removed from the site finally. Suyo's still hosting the chat, but now it's limited to only IRC clients instead of users having the option of on-site chat OR IRC. If I'm not mistaken, the biggest issue at this point is the massive amount of people using Chrome, which is causing a ton of problems with what Suyo is trying to do. Ask him about it, maybe.

Well, I have seen a pretty good IRC off-site, the chat that Minecraft Forum uses. I think it's called irc.esper.net? I could be wrong, but there you go. It's really easy to register, as long you have an e-mail. It even has it's own wiki to tell you all the commands and uses for the IRC. It works fine on Chrome, at least for me. Not saying that we should make it our default, It's just an idea. Went a little comma happy, didn't I?

[Raz]

We're using an IRC run by Suyo himself, there's no point in using another IRC network.

[GrandPiano]

Went a little comma happy, didn't I?

All of those commas were perfectly placed. I wouldn't have it any other way. Except I think the second one could maybe be a colon instead.

[Supershroom]

If you ask me, the forum's layout is just fine as the way it is. It shouldn't be changed, at least not drastically. Well at least I also admit that regular users are hard to see when it says "Users browsing this forum: ...".

Something else should be improved. If you have the last post in any topic and you edit it, there's no information about your edit. That means if you have another important concern you want to tell, you have two unpleasant alternatives:

• Edit your last post normally, but maybe no one will ever read what you've added.
• Double-post, but we all don't take kindly to that, you would really need a serious reason to do it, or you would have to PM staff etc.

So I suggest that if a last post is edited, the forum's or topic's symbol flashes red just as another post would be made.

[GrandPiano]

I actually highly agree with that second one. Maybe the notification shouldn't be the same as a new post, but it would be nice if there were some sort of notification when the most recent post in a thread is edited.