It almost works.

On that note, here's an item for the wishlist: alternative board skins. Unless that's a huge amount of work?

Quote from: Pierce Inverarity ;216642It almost works.

On that note, here's an item for the wishlist: alternative board skins. Unless that's a huge amount of work?

I think it's the best I can do without disrupting users on larger monitors.

There won't be alternate skins as a rule, but I will work on getting a minimal skin for low-bandwidth and small screens.

Quote from: brettmb;216636I wouldn't call it clean from a design point of view...

Modern message forum software suffers from feature bloat, often in cases in which no one was asking for the features. So you end up with icons, widgets, and graphical fiddly-bits strewn all over the screen, until you feel like a Euro looking at a row of Japanese houses. Eventually, your mind blanks out what you don't need, so you can always find your way to a friend's house, but the visual cacophony is often striking on first exposure.

I got so fed up with it on phpBB that I once went through all the templates line-by-line, taking out what was unnecessary and finding new ways to fit features in without making it look like someone puked tiny images on my front page. Actually, I guess I did that two or three times. The next time I needed a new phpBB installation, I ended up writing the templates from scratch, and just leaving out everything that wasn't absolutely necessary.

So I guess what I'm saying is: you've done a fine job, I'm just complaining about modern BB software and how much bullshit it forces on the admin, who has two choices: spend the next six weeks coding, or live with a Jackson Pollack of images and links.

I completely agree, Engine. I did the same with phpbb3 when I upgraded to it on my site. The first thing to go was the huge javascript that let you change font sizes on the fly (I can do that with my browser).

Quote from: brettmb;216645There won't be alternate skins as a rule, but I will work on getting a minimal skin for low-bandwidth and small screens.

I think that'll be good. With each post being in its own little box all neatly laid-out almost like a character sheet, that looks good but takes up a lot of screen. The actual text of each post is at most half the vertical space the post takes up.

I think we could safely lose the titles under the names at left, the postcount and join dates. Postcounts and join dates are just cliquey things, "oh u r such a n00b, me been here 4evah".

Quote from: Kyle Aaron ;216653I think that'll be good. With each post being in its own little box all neatly laid-out almost like a character sheet, that looks good but takes up a lot of screen. The actual text of each post is at most half the vertical space the post takes up.

True, but one advantage this has is that you can collapse specific posts and not have to see them again by clicking on the arrow at top-left of a post.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron ;216653I think we could safely lose the titles under the names at left, the postcount and join dates. Postcounts and join dates are just cliquey things, "oh u r such a n00b, me been here 4evah".

Perhaps down the road.

Yup.  Thanks, Brett.

Quote from: brettmb;216651I completely agree, Engine. I did the same with phpbb3 when I upgraded to it on my site.

When I first installed phpBB 3, I got so pissed at the feature bloat I just went out, found a nice theme, and slapped it on. I wasn't going to touch a damned thing on it, I was so frustrated. [And all the work they did to (theoretically) make template design easier!] Both my "production" boards still use my custom variants of phpBB2.x. Argh.

Quote from: Engine ;216647So I guess what I'm saying is: you've done a fine job, I'm just complaining about modern BB software and how much bullshit it forces on the admin, who has two choices: spend the next six weeks coding, or live with a Jackson Pollack of images and links.

Yep.  But I don't expect someone to do much editing of the system unless they're getting paid directly or it is part of their livelihood in some way.  I haven't played much but it looks like the reviews work better than before.
 
The original admin (Spoony and many other names, who is back to admin at ENWorld and Circvs Maximvs) played around a bunch with the code trying to crate a snazzy new system.  But he abandoned the site after a couple of months and some things were left wonky.  Hopefully the new start will clean all that up.

Quote from: Nicephorus ;216664Hopefully the new start will clean all that up.

That was my intention -- to get rid of all the clumsy add-ons and stick with fully integral components. Otherwise, I could have saved myself a lot of work.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron ;216653I think we could safely lose the titles under the names at left, the postcount and join dates. Postcounts and join dates are just cliquey things, "oh u r such a n00b, me been here 4evah".

Really? I don't think I have ever seen that at this site. I would put that as low to non-issue IMO.

Bill

True, it's not really popped up - but it could, and it's best to avoid trouble before it starts.

I have some minimalist tendencies. What do postcounts, join dates and titles add to the forum? Zilch, except perhaps satisfying the occasional bit of curiosity, but you could do that with the info on someone's profile, you don't need it next to every post they make.

And they subtract from the forum in that they clutter it up, like I said, at the moment unless you write a real monster post, at most half the vertical space is the actual text of the post, and the rest is the clutter.

I wrote a user stylesheet that hid all of that stuff on the old forum.

Quote from: Nicephorus ;216664Yep.  But I don't expect someone to do much editing of the system unless they're getting paid directly or it is part of their livelihood in some way.

*looks shiftily from side to side* Uh, yeah. What kind of stupid douche would do something like that?