Forum update

[cins]

Its been almost a month (minus 2 days) since I wished our forum developers good luck with their endevours.

I'm sure they're working very hard at the moment to fix the balance of colors in the new scheme and not at all thinking meh we said vaguely nice things that should be enough to keep them silent until the mediocricity becomes the new norm because we can't be assed to fix our screwups. Yes, I totally believe that.

Also it's very good. A more conanly, blocky, curveless font for subforums would be more fitting, but still much better than the current.

[Tomium]

@All,

Its been almost a month (minus 2 days) since I wished our forum developers good luck with their endevours. In this time we got 1 background image that isn't very Conan immersive, neither in color or theme. So today I'll post another teaser, just to give some (in my humble opinion) much needed inspiration to whoever is struggling to customize our forum.




Cheers

The transparency does not work. It's just that simple. I know in THEORY it should, but realistically, and as has been pointed out before, our forums won't support it. We have TRIED. Anything under .97 is unreadable and anything over .97 is the same. Telling us "nuh-uh! I see it here just fine!" doesn't help anyone. You can either believe me, or not- but it doesn't change the reality of what is here.


As for the image, we needed something A:Big enough, B: Something that fits the color scheme we have and C: Is "ours," if that makes sense.


Fancy fonts are nice, but in this version of vbulletin, and given our limitations, we can't do custom fonts. It would require some sort of php call that we're just not able to do.

I know you all are being as patient as you can. I know that this is frustrating. All I can continue to say is that we actually have been working on it when we can, and whether you choose to believe it or not, we really are trying to make the experience here better.

[Halfdead]

Hire Waldgeist to fix it imo.

Honestly, what good was the upgrade if nothing works.

I honestly think you're either hiding something, dunno what your're doing, or just making excuses for someone else.

I think some people would be glad to fix the forum for you. Your're not the only company with a vbulletin license.

[cins]

Considering even the smiley box hasn't been fixed during all this time, is it any wonder why we're in doubt? We don't even know why it needed to be changed, surely it would've been cheaper to not touch it at all. The only noticable change after our complaints has been the picture, which is all kinds of ridiculous looking at these stated reasons. B doesn't work (how does blue-green fit with beige-brown?) and C is wrong (there's nothing "yours" about a beautiful pastoral scene, at least use one of the pulpy actiony load screens that screams AoC). It is big though, I'll give you that.

Fancy fonts and transparent panels can't be done? OK. Worthless tiny buttons can't be enlarged? Fine. Smiley box refuses to be fixed no matter how much you try? Uh, all right. Colors can't simply be changed? No, gotta draw the line somewhere, you should've done at least that by now. How much manpower is needed to make quote boxes a different shade of beige than post backgrounds?

[Foxcat]

@Tomium,

First of all, nice with the swift replies. As you say, we're impatient and to be honest, with good reason. The main issue is the contrast of font and background which as far as I seen, haven't been touched at all the past month. Now let me reply to a few of your statements.

The transparency does not work. It's just that simple. I know in THEORY it should, but realistically, and as has been pointed out before, our forums won't support it. We have TRIED. Anything under .97 is unreadable and anything over .97 is the same. Telling us "nuh-uh! I see it here just fine!" doesn't help anyone. You can either believe me, or not- but it doesn't change the reality of what is here.

Do you find the text in my picture difficult to read? I don't. What you do is you set the postbit_background stylevar background color to transparent and then set the postbit_userinfo_background stylevar background color to eg. rgba(248,227,189,0.8). This will make it easy to make the background somewhat transparent while keeping the text completely opaque. I did do this in a vBulletin 4 theme, it can easily be done.

As for the image, we needed something A:Big enough, B: Something that fits the color scheme we have and C: Is "ours," if that makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense. But you have so many nice Pictures that are way more conanlike in both theme and colors than the picture you chose. And you can scale a well sized 1920x1080 picture if needed without any real noticeable effect as it is only used on the background. You got plenty of wallpaper art in that size.

Fancy fonts are nice, but in this version of vbulletin, and given our limitations, we can't do custom fonts. It would require some sort of php call that we're just not able to do.

You can define custom or online fonts in vBulletin just as well as on any other website. You simply apply your font definition in css and use it whereever you like. A quick link, you can find plenty similar on the net... http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/using-font-face.

Last, great to hear that you're still working on it. Lets hope we see some fruit of that soon, as the lack of contrast still gives me a very nagging headache everytime I try to read these forums.


Cheers!

[Khaletohep]

What if you allowed Sifie to design you something...? If we all ask really really nicely, he might help. And it seems he's a.) motivated and b.) skilled. And give him a custom avatar and title ("Forum God" or sth.).

[Foxcat]

What if you allowed Sifie to design you something...? If we all ask really really nicely, he might help. And it seems he's a.) motivated and b.) skilled. And give him a custom avatar and title ("Forum God" or sth.).

No thanks! I'm not that motivated, so I vote for Waldgeist as well.

[Bibik]

What if you allowed Sifie to design you something...? If we all ask really really nicely, he might help. And it seems he's a.) motivated and b.) skilled. And give him a custom avatar and title ("Forum God" or sth.).

No, i find its choices of fonts/background horrible.

[Foxcat]

How much manpower is needed to make quote boxes a different shade of beige than post backgrounds?

One, 10 minutes if you know your way around vBulletin 4. Which I'm starting to feel that they don't.

About the font colors though, it is true that many of the font colors are inherited by default and dosen't have stylevar support for individual changes. This is where you need to know some PHP to redefine the font datatype for stylevars in the vBulletin code to support it, if it is important to you to manage stuff in the backend style variable editor. It can be done, I did it. This is not obligatory though, as I already stated in the reply to Waldgeist's post, you can simply edit the bbcode.css template for styles related to quotes and add your coloring.

No, i find its choices of fonts/background horrible.

Good!

[Jaedelyia]

The transparency does not work. It's just that simple.

Good. It diminish the visibility and readability of everything. I like the first work of Sifie (green background in-between beige tiles) way better than the pictures with a background image of some sort (or transparency).

I would just like different shade/color for the quotes, and yeah, better separation of post and suck. Also, better fonts visibility is a big plus.