smile_walle Posted June 11, 2002 Share Posted June 11, 2002 Wow!! it look really neat, well done Albert!! I really like this forums very much, but it will take time to use it!! One thing missing is icom of Defender on my polfile?? Please help!! Jason Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El Destructo Posted June 11, 2002 Share Posted June 11, 2002 Considering we need six titles (the seventh being Administrator), I submit the following as a complete list, in order: Atari Newcomer Atari Fan Atari Enthusiast Atari Devotee Atari Freak Atari Maniac As for sounding goofy, come on: we're a bunch of adults obsessing over 20-year old videogames. You'd better get used to some ribbing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted June 11, 2002 Author Share Posted June 11, 2002 One thing missing is icom of Defender on my polfile?? Whoops, we only converted over all the custom avatars, which took quite of time by hand. We didn't manually convert everyone who chose one of the stock avatars. I've reinstated your avatar, and if anyone else is reading this whose avatar might have disappeared, all you have to do is go into your profile, scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the Avatar options. You can browse the existing avatar galleries by clicking on the "Show Gallery" button. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted June 11, 2002 Share Posted June 11, 2002 How come the Atari age logo circles (the ones next to the topic that are orange if it's new to you and blue if not) are off center? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted June 11, 2002 Author Share Posted June 11, 2002 How come the Atari age logo circles (the ones next to the topic that are orange if it's new to you and blue if not) are off center? Do you mean how the white AA in the logo is off-center, or is the actual graphic off-center in its table cell? If it's the first, that's just to give them a cool look (thanks to Dave Exton), if it's the latter, can you take a screen capture and let me know what web browser and OS you're using? Thanks.. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted June 11, 2002 Share Posted June 11, 2002 I meant the first, the arrows being off-center inside the circle. But I personally don't think it makes it look "cool," just not centered correctly. Sorry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Zeptari Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Oh and I must ask.... WTF is that little tray of 4 flowers doing just left of the (overly large) "Forums" word? That's actually four little, faceless people, although I got a chuckle out of your description.. ..Al Something tells me they'll be killed off as soon as possible.... right? They really dont fit with the rest of the site, neither do most of the graphics you've used, like the post new topic buttons... they look nice, but they dont look like the rest of AtariAge, so unless your planing to change the grfx throughout the entire site (a mistake in my humble opinion), I'd try to make everything look the same, that is what I loved so much about the old board. He's right! I like the old "post new message" buttons... The new one's look like AOL crap.. But hey, as long as they work... I won't complain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scooterb23 Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in here. I really like the new boards, I think they look very fresh and kind of happy (if that makes any sense at all) It will take a while to get used to the new placement of some buttons, but that will ease in time. I love the bigger avatars; finally got to put up my Aphex Twin pic and have it look ok!! I guess I'm not too much of a power user, I didn't notice any of the missing features others were talking about. Keep up the great work. Oh and by the way, I am on a 56k connection, and the page is loading at least 50% faster than it ever did before. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StanJr Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 I really like that the lights go off once you have read a topic. That used to really bug me about the old boards, I could never tell which topics I had visited. I'm still bedazzled by the whistles and bells and still a little scared. :cry: :cry: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 So far, here's my complaints about the new board: [*]When I go to make a post, the actual test box where I type the message is VERY small compared to the size of my window, like, only about a third of the available space, which is really annoying (I can provide a screen shot if anyone wants to see) [*]On the other side of things, when I get a list of the boards, the names of the boards are on the extreme left side of the screen, and the most recent topic is on the extreme right side of the screen... with my 1024x768 browser, this looks odd. [*]Stuff in 'code' brackets looks like ass. For some reason, it gets double spaced? [*]I tried clicking the "code" button, but my browser crashed. I didn't bother trying any of the other ones yet, I'm content to type in my codes. [*]Although this happened with the previous board, whenever I used to press a button to do anything like insert a smiley or whatnot, the cursor immediately jumps back to the top of the post... Maybe this is just my browser. [*]Smileys are annoying. I'm all in favor of normal smilies like before, but what's with some of these? It makes everything feel kiddy and trendy somehow (In a bad way) [*]The board doesn't have the AA 'feel' to it like it used to... maybe I'm just not used to it. I agree that the graphics look too AOL-esque... especially that "four people" icon. [*]Things are definitely slower... although I haven't yet read that topic that's titled "faster server has been ordered"... [*]The extra subject entry is entirely redundant and useless in my opinion. Atari.net has that too, and I never understood the point of it. [*]Our custom titles are gone. I'm no longer the Double Score Dungeon Master! I guess that's all for now... A number of these might be due to the general suckiness of my browser too (Netscape 4.0... hey, it may suck, but the only faster browser is Lynx!). To be honest, I like the older board more at the moment. Plus, I'm not likely to use any of the new features (Although they sound like they might be useful) --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted June 12, 2002 Author Share Posted June 12, 2002 [*]When I go to make a post' date=' the actual test box where I type the message is VERY small compared to the size of my window, like, only about a third of the available space, which is really annoying (I can provide a screen shot if anyone wants to see) [*']On the other side of things, when I get a list of the boards, the names of the boards are on the extreme left side of the screen, and the most recent topic is on the extreme right side of the screen... with my 1024x768 browser, this looks odd. [*]Stuff in 'code' brackets looks like ass. For some reason, it gets double spaced? [*]I tried clicking the "code" button, but my browser crashed. I didn't bother trying any of the other ones yet, I'm content to type in my codes. [*]Although this happened with the previous board, whenever I used to press a button to do anything like insert a smiley or whatnot, the cursor immediately jumps back to the top of the post... Maybe this is just my browser. This is probably all related to Netscape 4.0. Is there any particular reason why you're still using it? That thing is ancient! I haven't tried the new forums with Netscape 4.x and I'm afraid to install it on my machine now for fear of it breaking something else. [*]Smileys are annoying. I'm all in favor of normal smilies like before, but what's with some of these? It makes everything feel kiddy and trendy somehow (In a bad way) This has come up a few times and we'll probably replace the smileys. I'm not too fond of the default set of smileys either. Fortunately they are very easy to replace, and several "smiley packs" are already available. We just need to take the time to browse through them and pick some we like. [*]The board doesn't have the AA 'feel' to it like it used to... maybe I'm just not used to it. I agree that the graphics look too AOL-esque... especially that "four people" icon. It doesn't feel like the old software, no. We'll be changing most of the graphics and buttons, Dave Exton has already made a nice set, but we haven't installed them yet. We're just using the default graphics for many of the buttons now. We'll also make other changes to make the site feel more like "home". We're still looking under the hood at how this thing ticks, and soon we hope to know it inside and out. [*]Things are definitely slower... although I haven't yet read that topic that's titled "faster server has been ordered"... Yes, there are a few operations that particularly slow everything down, but this should all be remedied when we get the new server online. [*]The extra subject entry is entirely redundant and useless in my opinion. Atari.net has that too, and I never understood the point of it. I agree, it's useless. We might take it out. [*]Our custom titles are gone. I'm no longer the Double Score Dungeon Master! We already have plans to put this back in, and we'll probably even go through and re-input everyone's custom status from the old board. I guess that's all for now... A number of these might be due to the general suckiness of my browser too (Netscape 4.0... hey, it may suck, but the only faster browser is Lynx!). To be honest, I like the older board more at the moment. Plus, I'm not likely to use any of the new features (Although they sound like they might be useful) I think your browser is a big part of the problem with the first several things on your list. I would love to see a screen captures if you want to mail some to me. But I think it's known in the phpbb community that the forum doesn't render very well in Netscape 4.x, and a conscious decision was made to not sacrifice new functionality and features to remain backwards compatible with it. There are some new features that are quite useful and just other items that are implemented much better than in UBB. For instance, digging around through old messages (there are now over 90,000) is a hell of a lot faster and easier with the new forum than in the past. And when you have a forum full of insightful and knowledgable Atari folk, that makes it easy to find the answer you're looking for, if it's already been asked. We are going to take some steps to make the forums fit in better with the rest of the site layout and we think people will be happy with the results. The important thing for me is that the quality of the community and posts remain high. I feel that once people become familiar with the new software, they'll take advantage of the new features to make their visits to AtariAge more enjoyable. Please be patient, we want everyone to be happy with the new forums and we will work towards that goal. ..Al --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StanJr Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 OOO! OO! Can you get ahold of that kickin' Spidey smiley that one dude showed me last month????? That would RULE! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 This is probably all related to Netscape 4.0. Is there any particular reason why you're still using it? That thing is ancient! I've installed various versions of Mozilla before, only to find that they are ridiculously bloated, and take about a century to load... My system isn't exactly new, but a 400MHz system should NOT take more than 1 minute to load a program. Once Mozilla's loaded, it render pages fast enough, but the overly long initial load time pisses me off enough that I always seem to fall back to Netscape 4.0. When Gnome 2.0 for Linux comes out, I'll probably end up installing the new Mozilla 1.0, and this will all be over... This has come up a few times and we'll probably replace the smileys. Well, I sure hope that the final choice ends up being something that doesn't look overly kiddy-ish... smileys always seemed that way to me. We already have plans to put this back in, and we'll probably even go through and re-input everyone's custom status from the old board. Hooray! I would love to see a screen captures if you want to mail some to me. But I think it's known in the phpbb community that the forum doesn't render very well in Netscape 4.x I understand completely, and in fact, some web sites are almost completely unusable in Netscape 4... give me a minute, and I'll take some screen captures.... ..... Okay, I've got them. They're large pics, as my window is almost full screen, but I've reduced the quality to the point where they should load quickly: [*]Posting a Reply. This just looks nasty. The old forum looked WAY better than this... [*]Looking at the Forum Index. Not so bad... but the spacing seems odd to me. [*]The Code Problem. VERY bad spacing! [*]Same picture, without forcing fonts. OUCH!!! So, here's the deal... in Netscape 4.0, I have the option of overriding the fonts that pages specify. If I *don't* override, almost all pages end up with ridiculously tiny fonts like that last page (Why must every page try to force a font size? How would they know our screen size better than us?). If I force my own font size, things are okay though (the first three pics all have my own font sizes) Does the "Post a Reply" window look that bad in anyone else's browser? It's easily the biggest complaint I have about this forum (and other forum's based on the same software). --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted June 12, 2002 Author Share Posted June 12, 2002 Does the "Post a Reply" window look that bad in anyone else's browser? It's easily the biggest complaint I have about this forum (and other forum's based on the same software). Wow, those captures look horrible! I just took some captures of the same windows in Mozilla 1.0, under Windows 2000: - Reply Window - Forums List - Zero's Code Snippet There's definitely a problem with the last picture, it looks like you put in a bunch of HTML formatting by hand, rather than using the BBCode "code" statements. It looks much better in that case, and I've used it before without problems. Here is a picture of some code I posted to the phpbb forum recently (and I just tried the code tags here on AtariAge and they look identical): - How the Code tag should look. This is generally how the site looks in Internet Explorer also, as I've been going back and forth all day between the two. I presume Opera would render in a similar fashion, although I don't have it installed at present. There are lightweight versions of Mozilla you can try, so you get the excellent renderer without all the other overhead. I don't remember what they're called, but you should be able to find them without much effort. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 There's definitely a problem with the last picture, it looks like you put in a bunch of HTML formatting by hand, rather than using the BBCode "code" statements. Aha, you're right! I went in and edited my post to use the "code" tag, and it shows up just like your screenshot now (even in Netscape 4.0!). I must have used the HTML "pre" tag in the first place... although I'm sure I never put the "blockquote" tag or any "font" tags in there! Perhaps the old forum software added that in for some reason? There are lightweight versions of Mozilla you can try, so you get the excellent renderer without all the other overhead. I presume you're referring to Galeon? Yes, it looks great, and I tried to install it once... but I had nothing but problems, and never managed to get it to work. That was a while ago though, so maybe I should give it a shot again... By the way, I've noticed a few more things that may be worth mentioning... the first is that this new "Announcements" board sort of conflicts with the old "Site Change Log" board... will these be kept seperate somehow? I'm guessing the site change log is more for stuff like additions to the 2600 libraries and NOT for forum changes, but still... Also, If you look through the "Jump to:" pulldown menu, you see things like: Announcements ---------------- Announcements Which was confusing to me at first... especially if you choose the first one, and you get a page saying that the forum does not exist! And finally... what is the "Usergroups" item up at the top of the screen? Apparently, we don't currently have any Usergroups at all... but what is this meant for? --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 I've installed various versions of Mozilla before, only to find that they are ridiculously bloated, and take about a century to load... My system isn't exactly new, but a 400MHz system should NOT take more than 1 minute to load a program. Once Mozilla's loaded, it render pages fast enough, but the overly long initial load time pisses me off enough that I always seem to fall back to Netscape 4.0. When Gnome 2.0 for Linux comes out, I'll probably end up installing the new Mozilla 1.0, and this will all be over... Have you tried Opera? It's really small and fast (works nearly perfect even on my old P 120). IMO you should definitely try it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Except that some fonst are a bit to small (quotes and this one while editing) Can you tell me what web browser you are using? Also, can you take a screenshot for me? You can email it to albert@atariage.com. Thanks! I'm using Opera (5.12 and 6.03). But I don't think I need to send you any shots because in IE 5.5 the size is the same. Just a little bit to small for my old eyes. One thing is funny: If I quote, the quoted text is very small, but if it contains another quote, the font gets larger (I want my :confused: emoticon back! ). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Well, I installed Opera... and it's actually not that bad. Although I really dislike the look of the Qt buttons and widgets, I have to admit that it's definitely quite fast, and even this "Post a Reply" window is rendered properly. However, I agree with Thomas about the small font sizes... they're not nearly as bad as my previous screenshot, but they're still on the small side. Perhaps I'll have to check the font options that Opera has... --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted June 12, 2002 Author Share Posted June 12, 2002 I presume you're referring to Galeon? Yes, it looks great, and I tried to install it once... but I had nothing but problems, and never managed to get it to work. That was a while ago though, so maybe I should give it a shot again... Yeah, that's it, Galeon. I haven't tried it, but since it uses the Mozilla rendering engine (Gecko), it should look quite nice. Mozilla's come a long ways in the last year, so I presume Galeon should also be in better shape. By the way, I've noticed a few more things that may be worth mentioning... the first is that this new "Announcements" board sort of conflicts with the old "Site Change Log" board... will these be kept seperate somehow? I'm guessing the site change log is more for stuff like additions to the 2600 libraries and NOT for forum changes, but still... I'm not sure what's going to happen with the Announcements board. My primary motivation for creating that was to post some messages about the new forums, so people would see them first. Another motivation was making another forum other than Atari 2600 first, so people wouldn't just blindly post to it. We have toyed with the idea of making the Site section first also, but then that would add four forums before the whole Atari Systems section. Also, If you look through the "Jump to:" pulldown menu, you see things like: Announcements ---------------- Announcements Which was confusing to me at first... especially if you choose the first one, and you get a page saying that the forum does not exist! Hmmm, I hadn't tried this as I never use the dropdowns. Thanks for pointing that out, it is confusing. And finally... what is the "Usergroups" item up at the top of the screen? Apparently, we don't currently have any Usergroups at all... but what is this meant for? Usergroups can be used to group users together so you can give them access to private forums. We don't have any private forums yet, so no need to assign anyone to them. However, say we wanted to create a hangout for 2600 Homebrew authors. We could create a forum for them, "Homebrew Hangout" (or whatever), and then add all the homebrew authors. Only they would see this forum, it would be completely invisible to everyone else. We could also create a "Moderators" forum for any moderators, where we could discuss various things, like site policy and stuff. This would be another good use for the usergroups feature. If we don't end up using the Usergroups, then we'll probably take the link off the top of the page. ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Albert Posted June 12, 2002 Author Share Posted June 12, 2002 Well, I installed Opera... and it's actually not that bad. Although I really dislike the look of the Qt buttons and widgets, I have to admit that it's definitely quite fast, and even this "Post a Reply" window is rendered properly. However, I agree with Thomas about the small font sizes... they're not nearly as bad as my previous screenshot, but they're still on the small side. Perhaps I'll have to check the font options that Opera has... The buttons will all be changing, probably tonight. I just need to setup a testbed for the forums so I can make changes and test them outside of the "live" board. This will also allow us to more quickly integrate some of the other changes peoplpe have requested (like getting the Custom Status back). I think everyone will like the new graphics. I'll have to take a look at the small font sizes in some other browsers. They don't bother me, but I have only been using the site on LCD panels, where even the tiniest fonts are rendered crisply. We plan on tweaking fonts and colors and more, and we can fix the quoting so it doesn't make the font size smaller (I need to add this to my list!) ..Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Well, I installed Opera... and it's actually not that bad. Although I really dislike the look of the Qt buttons and widgets Do you mean the buttons on AA or inside Opera? You can change the button set of Opera very easily. There are some sites where you can downlaod all new sets. And you can have them in two sizes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ze_ro Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Do you mean the buttons on AA or inside Opera? I meant the ones in Opera... although I found the options to change them about 5 minutes after I posted that This browser is actually quite a bit better than I expected... I might just put Netscape 4 away after all. So far my only Opera complaint is that I can't put seperator bars in my bookmarks like I could with Netscape. But if that's the only problem I have, I'll consider myself lucky --Zero Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tyrant Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 How come the Atari age logo circles (the ones next to the topic that are orange if it's new to you and blue if not) are off center? Do you mean how the white AA in the logo is off-center, or is the actual graphic off-center in its table cell? If it's the first, that's just to give them a cool look Sorry, but it really isnt cool, just looks dumb to me. If the logo at the top of every page all over the AtariAge site is going to be centered, keep it centered on there... also why are they rounded? nothing else outside of the forums has any 3D effect at all, why put it in here? it makes the forum look detached from the rest of the site. Maybe Im going mad but I was allways taught to keep everything with in a product looking the same. Thats not to say change is evil (althogh I dont like these changes much), but a partial change looks amaturish. If your going to make the site look "cool" and "modern" (why have a moden looking site about retro games?), then make the whole site look that way, I would strongly discourage you from doing this since the old look is far superior, but a mish-mash of moden looking boards and classic, simple, clean looking pages elsewhere is even worse than carrying this new look over to everywhere else. If this site were mine, which it obviously isnt, I would strip out all these "cool" soft looking rounded buttons, re-do all the colours to match elsewhere, including these off blue backgrounds, shrink the avatars (they're getting too big now, a 1 line post takes the same vertical size as a 20 line post). I would also take out all the text formating commands and just have a few well chosen ones, that marry in with the site's colour scheme and allow attractive highlights easily. Remembering the old adage that less is most definatly more, the same goes for smilies, when you put in a new pack, set a limit for yourself, that you will include no more than 10, then pick the best 10 that are unique and easy to tell apart, and leave it at that. Less is more... if I have to open windoze magnifier or hover over an emoticon in order to get an alt text explenation of what it meens, then it has failed its life's purpose and wasted my time. Oh and can you please do something about these thrice bedamned scrollbars, they're driving me crazy.... white on white, impossible to see what they're trying to show. Finally the text in this edit box is waaaay to tiny, and having no border (or a thin, 2D black border, is really annoying too). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoahsMyBro Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 Just for the record: * I think the off-center AA in the circular logo at the left of the forum index does look cool. * I don't think I've noticed any change in the speed of the board. If there has been a change, I suspect things are faster than they were. * I'm using Opera 5.12, and have since sometime last year. I like it immensely, and the board works very well with it. * Whenever I add an emoticon to any of my messages, the cursor relocates itself to the top-left of the textbox. *Stylistically-speaking, I'd also lose the Forums Flowerbox. However, I have no complaints about the rest of the board. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted June 12, 2002 Share Posted June 12, 2002 After browsing this forum at home for a while, I must say that rendering the board pages takes a lot more time than before, sometimes it seems nearly endless. But I think my rather old hardware (P120, 64MB) is the main reason. Maybe I'm too retro with that and should finally buy me a new PC. BTW: I have to agree with some previous posts, the off-center buttons don't look cool to me too. And less buttons, especially those at the buttom of each post would be nice. IMO links would do the job better. And make it possible to customize my settings, so that I don't have to see those I'm not interested (ICQ etc.). And (of course) I think you opened pandora's box by allowing larger avatars. Disabling (from loading!) them in the settings is the feature I would like to see first. Yes, I am retro. How about you? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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