New forum - getting started

[Ssnake]

I hope that all regular visitors of the old forum will register here soon. This is going to be the new forum, it will replace the old one, and that's a definite decision.

You will have to register anew. Once that you have filled out your basic profile, you get an email with the password, and you just follow the links to edit and customize your profile. Once that you have received the password, you're free to post. If you have a specific question or problem with this new forum, feel free to send me an email.

It isn't that different from the old UBB forum, really... :)

[Olympian]

A User review of Steel Beasts is also possible, if anyone cares to give it a go.

[Brad_Edmondson]

Is this one of those forums where we can load up a gif image to use with your profile? I see an 'avatar' section but I don't see the means to load up my own.

Pretty please? :D

[grdn_7]

:casstet: Whew, made it... But darnit, it took me 2 years to reach the rank of gunner on the old board. Oh well, maybe this will spur me to be more active. :o

A question: What's this avatar bussiness? Is it those huge smiley faces on the left?

Thanks for the new boards, SB.com team!

[Bob]

Brad,

If you come up with some tank related avatars, I'll just replace all the smily faces.

Is that ok?

Sean

[Ssnake]

Exactly, that was one of the ideas discussed. You submit avatar suggestions, we add them to the selection. :)

[Keiler]

Hell this forum rocks already! Nice thing, many bells and whistles to play with :D

Btw, Avatars, is there a possibility to use a personal Avatar, or will there be?

[Skip]

...You submit avatar suggestions, we add them to the selection. :)

Are you taking "verbal" suggestions, or are you looking for actual images? If images, what are the constraints (size, nbr of colors, etc.)?

[Hell_Hound]

Mine's ready, what format, resolution, etc? And where do I send it?

In a related vein, can we get the old smilies back? I dearly loved that
little green guy with the shit-eating grin...

[Hell_Hound]

Holy shit, the new forum won't let me say shit!

[OddBall]

Holy shit, the new forum won't let me say shit!

Do you mean fuck or shit? ;)

[Wolfman]

I think he meant shit, not fuck.

[Ssnake]

What a fucking shit - we don't need this damned profanity censorship, this is a mature audience!
;)

[Ssnake]

Damn it, you can't even say "Damn!"... :P

[Keiler]

I mean, it might sound egoistic, but when I design an avatar that is sound for me, I would be a bit pissed if someone else uses it as well, unless I dont explicitely tell its "public property"...
Ummm.. ?
Will there be, in addition to upload avatar suggestions for public use, the possibility to upload a personal one for one's own use only?

Cheers, Keiler

[Ssnake]

That's something I'll leave to Sean, RnR, and Tankboy to decide. Page load speed may be an issue if there's too many people with individual avatars. It can become a bit of an annoyance as much fun as it might be.
Should we allow animated GIFs etc. (I think: No)...

[Brad_Edmondson]

I'm with Keiler on this one. I have an avatar but it's my personal 'ghost' logo I use on ICQ as my picture. I can probably find pics to send in for general avatars but I was really hoping I could use my own.

[Hell_Hound]

The animated gifs are a hoot, but in deference to the many users on 56k connections, I'd say leave 'em out.

I'd love to have an exclusive smiley, but having my custom design available would be so neat, it wouldn't bother me if it were available to everyone. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... :)

[Sean]

Heres the scoop on avatars:

1. Postnuke doesn't allow custom avatars yet.

2. This forum's avatars are tied to postnuke.

3. The avatars aren't working correctly and I can't figure out why. :casstet:

4. So, I just turned them off.

5. You can always put something in your sig. :P

[Brad_Edmondson]

Ok, next loaded question is HOW do you put something in your signature?

[Hell_Hound]

This is a test.

Rest assured I'll make that thing a little smaller as soon as I get to work and have access to a decent graphics editor. And a transparent background, I think.

[Sean]

Ok, next loaded question is HOW do you put something in your signature?

Go up to the top of the forums and hit profile.

For an explanation of how to add the pic, hit the red faq button. img adds a image, and theres another command to resize an image to a certain size.

Sean

[Hell_Hound]

Specifically, the syntax is:

(img) http://www.mypage.com/mypic.xxx(/img)

only replace the parentheses with square brackets. (Clicking the BBC code off button doesn't seem to work for me.)

My sig is a bmp and works fine, I assume that jpg, gif and png would work as well. And your picture has to be stored someplace online before you can call it, of course.

[Hell_Hound]

This is only a test.

http://www.jfahy.net/laser.gif

[burner]

Signatures -

I can see this getting competitive & being lots of good old fun!!!! Might be good to set some standards for the size (width="xxx" height="xxx") so the download is reasonable.

Profile Web Site Link -

Don't use "http://" in the link as it's already there.

[Ssnake]

I think it's time to discuss image sizes that we want to allow for the signatures.
We can probably do without personal avatars (although I've seen PHP boards with personal avatars), but I would prefer them in the left area where they disturb less when reading the threads.
But for the time being, IF we do want to allow images in the signatures (or images at all in the discussion threads), then the questions are
1) Should the images be tank related?
2) What size limits (both pixels, and file size) are acceptable. I'm thinking of the 56K analog modem users here.
3) Even tiny animations can be quite disturbing/breaking concentration. I admit that they can be fun, but do we really want to allow them?

[Keiler]

1) Should the images be tank related?

I would say not necessarily, but I bet most of them will be anyway. But why restrict them?

2) What size limits (both pixels, and file size) are acceptable. I'm thinking of the 56K analog modem users here.

Good question! How big is your sig, Ssnake? Think its a good size, but momentarily I cannot coonect pixel sizes to actual size in appearance out of the guts.

3) Even tiny animations can be quite disturbing/breaking concentration. I admit that they can be fun, but do we really want to allow them?

I would say no. On other boards some guys have nasty animations done, and I hate it when the screen is moving like in one epileptic's worst nighmare :D
Maybe a restriction to max frames and size would be a compromise.

[burner]

1) Should the images be tank related?

I would think if we agree to unit, call sign & related tank logo's that everyone will agree.

Problem always is if HTML is enable & folks start posting links to huge pics rather than having them as attachments. This is not enabled right now except in the Signature.

2) What size limits (both pixels, and file size) are acceptable. I'm thinking of the 56K analog modem users here.

File size should be under 15KB with a 150 pixel width & height.

3) Even tiny animations can be quite disturbing/breaking concentration. I admit that they can be fun, but do we really want to allow them?

The professionally done smilies here are 1 - 4KB in size & about 15 pixels width & height. Item 2 size & pix's should be fine.

[Moggy]

this sucks...it took me a month and a half to get to company commander.

LOL
:P

[Hell_Hound]

This is mostly a "me too" post, so briefly:

Don't bother requiring that the avatars be tank-related; as already mentioned, most will be related to tanks or online personae anyway.

10-20kB would be a reasonable limit, and maybe restrict the height to 150px or less...with GIF compression you can get a pretty good quality image into that amount of space. Restricting the width to 150px would disqualify my sig graphic and make me sad. :D

I'd much prefer to have the sigs on the left; this would make a significant difference to the amount of scrolling required in a thread. There's already a lot of scrolling because of the ******* left-hand menu taking up a quarter of the screen.

Secondary point for Sean or whoever else: Since I know you have tons of spare time and your first priority is making me happy, is it possible to make the backgrounds around the interface buttons transparent? Currently I have the drab-green background and each button has a block of sky blue around it. This is functionally insignificant but objectively, speaking as an amateur web designer, I must say it looks cruddy.

The above notwithstanding, thank you Sean for a herculean effort to get this all working. I can just barely imagine how much work it must be. :thumbup:

[Dewman]

Since most of this is done using modules and PhP. I looked at the code for the webpage that I could save to my machine. 622 lines of code not including the little pics that need to be saved with it :) I think Sean has his hands full on this one !!! But he is doing an excelent job at it ........
This is mostly a "me too" post, so briefly:
Secondary point for Sean or whoever else: Since I know you have tons of spare time and your first priority is making me happy, is it possible to make the backgrounds around the interface buttons transparent? Currently I have the drab-green background and each button has a block of sky blue around it. This is functionally insignificant but objectively, speaking as an amateur web designer, I must say it looks cruddy.

The above notwithstanding, thank you Sean for a herculean effort to get this all working. I can just barely imagine how much work it must be. :thumbup:

[burner]

Personal Avatars -

For now we should close this thread as it involves coding or searching for a mod out in PostNuke land.....time consuming. Best to stick with the signatures with pics to a standard size. Maybe when Sean has time he could give us the go ahead to set up a poll for file standards for the sig's.

Sig File width & height -

Sorry fellow Canuck but IMO banner size is too big

Theme -

The best theme to use is Post Nuke. You can change this in your My Account & your Forums Profile


New Site

PHP or in our case PostNuke is a huge step forward for the SB community. Sadly with the crash of the ISP's backup the learning curve is going to be very steep. Overall, there will be tons of neat stuff that will appear being that the code is database driven rather than tabled static code & the global nature of mod designer will give the site tons of funcitonal features that we would not of had before.

One note with PostNuke is that the themes are really tough to design but as with any CMS (Content Management System) the content is KING.


Sean

He's doing an excellent job & anyone who has lost their hard drive before knows how hard it is to rebuild or restore your data. Many a geek has lost their girl friend or wife when it happens ;-)

IMO all of us need to focus on carrying on as usual with talking about SB, adding new sce, mods, skins & etc. Given sometime Sean & co will have this site motoring once again with tons of new features. For now it's great to see everyone signing up again & jumping right into this new enviroment!!!!

Great work Sean & co....also for the members for their contributions!!!!!

[Sean]

Please send me a screenshot of what you are talking about. New (as in the whole site) themes are in the works. The 800 pixel width limit of this theme sucks.

Re: the sigs, I agree with your sentiments. I will look for hacks that allow signatures to the side, but they always need to be tested in a non production environment first. Don't expect anything too fast.

Sean

This is mostly a "me too" post, so briefly:

Don't bother requiring that the avatars be tank-related; as already mentioned, most will be related to tanks or online personae anyway.

10-20kB would be a reasonable limit, and maybe restrict the height to 150px or less...with GIF compression you can get a pretty good quality image into that amount of space. Restricting the width to 150px would disqualify my sig graphic and make me sad. :D

I'd much prefer to have the sigs on the left; this would make a significant difference to the amount of scrolling required in a thread. There's already a lot of scrolling because of the ******* left-hand menu taking up a quarter of the screen.

Secondary point for Sean or whoever else: Since I know you have tons of spare time and your first priority is making me happy, is it possible to make the backgrounds around the interface buttons transparent? Currently I have the drab-green background and each button has a block of sky blue around it. This is functionally insignificant but objectively, speaking as an amateur web designer, I must say it looks cruddy.

The above notwithstanding, thank you Sean for a herculean effort to get this all working. I can just barely imagine how much work it must be. :thumbup:

[Lone*star49]

[JTO]

Testing for LS.

[9erRed]

As a note here for this page design. Can the left margen be expanded back to the left edge below the menu area. To full page size, as it seems a waste with that area not being used. Can the menu be placed into a floating box, or have the top post box's wrap around the menu area? yea ,yea I know more coding,... but is it possable?
9erRed

[chrisotto]

Testing for LS.

Hehe

Looks like Lonestar wants to reach his old status quicker than the rest...

[Hell_Hound]

Screenshots are at the link below. One one level I'm embarassed to be bringing up such a piddly little detail in the face of all you've done, but it's the sort of thing net junkies notice and I think it is fixable.

http://www.jfahy.net/SteelBeasts/uglybuttons.bmp

Someday the above will actually contain something, but for now it's just a storage locker for pictures...

[burner]

What theme are you using? Suggest that you change to the PostNuke theme in your My Account & to the Steelbeasts theme in the Forums to get rid of the concern you have.

Please remember that this site is using PostNuke a open source CMS (Content Management System) and the various mods like the forums one can use with it. Note the PostNuke coding for the themes is not that easy to change at the moment as there is a very steep learning curve when compared to the basic HTML coding of most sites we have in the community.

[Hell_Hound]

Rgr, I've switched to PostNuke which looks substantially better. But I'm still going to be trying the SteelBeasts theme every couple days to see if it's progressing at all... :cool:

[CBrown]

Man, a guys leaves for a few weeks and the living room has changed and his favorite forum has moved. Any chance of posting a link at the old forum for this one.

Cbrown

[CBrown]

TEST

[Ssnake]

Any chance of posting a link at the old forum for this one. Yes - as soon as the data restoration efforts have been successful.

[Diceman]

Testing.......Testing.........This thing on? :cool:

[Lone*star49]

Testing.......Testing.........This thing on? :cool:


.. 5x5.. rgr tht.. good to hear from ya.. :)