FreeOrion

Well, it all seems very shiny and web 2.0-ish. Which is certainly not bad.
I think there are several new features i'd like to use.

Two issues i noticed:
1) After a spammer's post is deleted, they are still listed in the index as the last user to post. It treats the topic as if there is something new there, even if the new stuff was deleted.
2) bold red type for identifying admins? That seems excessively obvious.

3) not entirely related, but a quick look through the last page of the member-list indicates there are quite a few spam accounts still around.

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Yeah the red is quite excessive. Probably a way to change that, which I might look into later.

I'm aware that the last posts information is still showing spammer's names even though they and their posts don't exist. This is a relic of the conversion, and to remove it would take more time than it's worth. Instead, just going to let this oddity fade out of existence...

As for the spam accounts, we are able to do a cleanout easily of users who have never posted who are more than x days old...so will probably use that regularly to take care of the spam accounts.

My main problem is that you seems to be no way to tell if there is a new topic/post.

The old forum had the buttons glow orange.

There is something called "Google [Bot]" logged in right now, greyish in colour.

You are saying this will not occur with future deleted posts? Then it's not a big deal


Then grey is the color used for bot names.

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I must say that I truly hope this new forum will prevent spammers, since if you ask my honest opinion about it; it looks and feels quite horrible. This might be of course do to the fact that it is a new system, but still the overall quality level of this forum design seems to be as good as it would be, if I was the person in charge of coding this forum, and since my experience with coding is quite limited, that isn’t a good sign. Or is this just some sort of a really early demo?

In my opinion the biggest difference with the old and this new forum is that the old forum could offer information with a glance, was very clear and was not an Arab forum, where the details of the poster are displayed on the “non normal side” of the post, if you consider that you read or at least should read posts written in English from left to right. With this new forum I find it difficult to even find familiar threads from the forum, as when you pick a section, like the brainstorming section for example, you are presented with a huge amount of blue text on a colourful background and some animations about text rolling on some of the topic pictures. So the only thing that really separates from the blue mass at first is a red text that says Geoff the Medio. Now I of course realise that Geoff is a very important person to this project, but it would be nice if you could focus your attention on something more useful, like to the threads, than to the glorious redness of the name Geoff the Medio.

So in short I haven’t got a technical issue with this new forum, but I am not a big fan of its overall messy look.

[copied from other post by Geoff the Medio]

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What is your favourite alien species and WHY?
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You can go to your User Control Panel, then to Board Preferences page, and change "My board style" from "prosilver" to "subsilver2". This should produce a theme closer to the old forum style.

The new theme does have a way to view whether there are new posts or not, but it's not as obvious - since it's just a foreground colour change in the icon.

Anyway, I've changed this to subsilver for all users by default, but the other is still available as an option.

Excellent, much better.

I agree. By the way, are the avatars working normally for you all? I would like to know this, because on my screen some avatars, like my own and utilae`s, look a little stretched, so it would be nice to know if this is just a problem with my resolution or if it is a general problem? But even if it is a general problem, it naturally isn`t a very significant one.

_________________
What is your favourite alien species and WHY?
Preliminary thoughts about diplomacy
Some unfinished ideas for specials

It's not just on your computer.

Mine looks stretched from here (as well as yours).

It seems like they are all scaled down to 80x80, which is a good thing in my mind.

That just means Google's indexing the forums, phpBB3 recognises common search-bots and lets you redirect them to cut-down pages and things

I rather like the fact that my ship model pictures are in the avatars section. So, since I designed them, I chose one as my avatar. Oh, and perhaps there needs to be a link to "Mark all posts as read". This way spam-bot posts that are deleted don't keep showing up as unread. Thanks!!

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I agree.

So, what happens when we click the "report this post" button?
Under what circumstances should it be used?

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—