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I'm sorry, but I just laughed out loud when I read what it said on the footer of the forums, and realized that you guys still use Invision Power Board 1.2. That is ancient stuff.

Any reasons why you won't upgrade to a more modern version?

By upgrading your IPB forums, many more convenient features can and will be available, thus the content of posts can look a little more polished, such as finally having the ability to reduce/increase text sizes, embed some sort of YouTube video (instead of just putting up a link), a scroll-down spoiler tag to reduce lag/crashes, or to align a block of text/image at a certain section of a post.

There are plenty of reasons why we're not interested in upgrading, actually; some could be considered your business, and others are most definitely not.

You can laugh all you like, it's really endearing. I'm certain that with your many years of web development expertise, the forums probably seem clunky to you, which is perfectly okay.

Now, with regards to your notions of what this would make available to us, let me hit those real quick:

1. Text size changes (and by extension, color and font face): this was in the original Invision Power Board. We took it out. Upgrading would not make us put it back in, because 98% of the time it's used by people who are trying to be irritating by using dozens of colors, font faces, and sizes in every post. There's a difference between not having something and not wanting something.

2. YouTube video embedding: we've never had a single person ask for this feature. It seems like this could be abused pretty easily too by someone who wanted to cause trouble, but if someone actually wanted that functionality, it wouldn't take but a few hours to write - I'm sure you know how trivial this would be, as you've done it, right?

3. Scrolling Spoilers: I'm assuming this to mean that you click a button to display and hide spoilers rather than highlight. OK, that's not an altogether unappealing idea, and at my job, I find that I'm doing sliding content pretty frequently. People like the effect, particularly those who aren't developers. However, since that relies upon javascript and not CSS, which is used for the current method, it's actually just as likely, if not more to cause browser issues for certain users. In fact, and I'm trying to remember for certain here because it was years ago, I think that it was only multitudes of nested spoilers in our style that ever caused problems for anyone, and I believe that was patched in IPB years ago. Again, never heard a single complaint.

4. Aligning text goes back to #1. What makes this such a compelling, necessary feature? I think we actually turned this one off as well, rather than let it stand.

If you feel you have more to contribute besides vaguely derisive laughter, feel free to post again. We're always here.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Quote (Allen Hunter @ 10th December 2009 06:28)

I'm sorry, but I just laughed out loud when I read what it said on the footer of the forums, and realized that you guys still use Invision Power Board 1.2. That is ancient stuff.

Any reasons why you won't upgrade to a more modern version?

By upgrading your IPB forums, many more convenient features can and will be available, thus the content of posts can look a little more polished, such as finally having the ability to reduce/increase text sizes, embed some sort of YouTube video (instead of just putting up a link), a scroll-down spoiler tag to reduce lag/crashes, or to align a block of text/image at a certain section of a post.

You say you want a more "polished" look, but, having a rainbow of colours and sizes everywhere makes things look untidy, and i'll just skip all posts in question. The same goes for youtube embedding. I made a post a month or two a go listing my favourite Squaresoft/-Enix tracks, with hyperlinks to each. That's a much more "polished" format to post them than to have 20 embedded videos in one post. It falls into the same are as pictures in your signature, and it just keeps everything much, MUCH tidier.

The only other forum I will tend to browse is the Escapist forum, while I wait for the latest Yahtzee review to load. There are no smiley lists, no font changes, no colours. And that's the way it should be. There's actually one thing in there that I think should be implemented here, which is where quoting of three or more people (or so, can't remember specifics), the oldest quotes will fade and not actually show any of the post, so you only have the most recent quotes showing up. And it gets rid of any potential forum games of "quote pyramids". That concept makes me die a little inside, though, thankfully, we'd never get those here.

As for the spoiler tags, I'd personally be interested in a hybrid of the two. I don't like it when spoilers merge into the rest of the post once I click to view, and that you can't hide them once you've clicked. I like the way it's in a separate box here, but, yeah, highlighting is maybe a bit irritating now. But I wouldn't want a scrolltag - it doesn't seem to have any point rather than just...being there. It actually ruins the flow of the post.

However, unless there's something groundbreaking, earth-shattering MINDBLOWINGLY AWESOME in the newer versions, I don't think there's much point in upgrading.

Quote

1. Text size changes (and by extension, color and font face): this was in the original Invision Power Board. We took it out. Upgrading would not make us put it back in, because 98% of the time it's used by people who are trying to be irritating by using dozens of colors, font faces, and sizes in every post. There's a difference between not having something and not wanting something.

2. YouTube video embedding: we've never had a single person ask for this feature. It seems like this could be abused pretty easily too by someone who wanted to cause trouble, but if someone actually wanted that functionality, it wouldn't take but a few hours to write - I'm sure you know how trivial this would be, as you've done it, right?

I understand, but don't you already have moderators to fix those problems if they were to come around? What would be much of the point of having them around if there are so many forced restrictions? In my opinion, those features should be here to help better improve the quality of someone's post.

As for the YouTube videos being embedded, I never said it should have like 20 or 30 or 100 videos embedded per post, just 1-2 per post, and that's good enough. For example, if there's a thread about posting information about the music you're listening to, what's so wrong with embedding a YouTube video that is appropriate and relevant to the nature of the topic?

Quote

3. Scrolling Spoilers: I'm assuming this to mean that you click a button to display and hide spoilers rather than highlight. OK, that's not an altogether unappealing idea, and at my job, I find that I'm doing sliding content pretty frequently. People like the effect, particularly those who aren't developers. However, since that relies upon javascript and not CSS, which is used for the current method, it's actually just as likely, if not more to cause browser issues for certain users. In fact, and I'm trying to remember for certain here because it was years ago, I think that it was only multitudes of nested spoilers in our style that ever caused problems for anyone, and I believe that was patched in IPB years ago. Again, never heard a single complaint.

I see. The reason why I prefer the scroll-down spoiler tag is because it helps reduce lag when you're viewing a thread with plenty of content in a post or two. I like the highlighted spoiler tag for text-related stuff, but if you want to argue on "tidiness," then the scroll-down spoiler tag should be the way to go, because it helps pack up large content into a miniature object until you click on it. But if that's not something you could pull off for this site, then I guess that's that.

Quote (Allen Hunter)

I understand, but don't you already have moderators to fix those problems if they were to come around? What would be much of the point of having them around if there are so many forced restrictions? In my opinion, those features should be here to help better improve the quality of someone's post.

Colours, fonts, alignment and such do not improve the quality of a post. Ever. Unless it's a really terrible post and someone's posted it in a colour that's invisible on one of the themes. That does help a little bit.

But that's one of the key reasons the feature was removed. Navy blue looks great on Persona, but try reading that post on Scanner. It creates all sorts of difficulties of that nature in exchange for... well, nothing - topics also just end up looking like a scribbleboard instead of following a consistent, readable theme.

Quote (Allen Hunter)

Stuff about embedding, spoilers, new features in general

I don't disagree that a cleaner spoiler option and some embedding capacity could be beneficial if done right. And believe me, we have the talent to do them right. What we don't have, being old men with jobs and bills and lives outside the site, is all the time in the world any more.

Sure, we could upgrade to a new version or a different BB and get them for free. And then have to do all the theming again, saving us exactly no time at all. Meanwhile, the already glacial pace at which we're able to add new main site content would freeze over further.

Quote

But that's one of the key reasons the feature was removed. Navy blue looks great on Persona, but try reading that post on Scanner. It creates all sorts of difficulties of that nature in exchange for... well, nothing - topics also just end up looking like a scribbleboard instead of following a consistent, readable theme.

That is pretty much the only reason I could agree with you for not including the font colors feature. I still stand by my point that if used right, sizes/colors/alignments help make a post look more pleasurable to look at.

Quote

What we don't have, being old men with jobs and bills and lives outside the site, is all the time in the world any more.

Sure, we could upgrade to a new version or a different BB and get them for free. And then have to do all the theming again, saving us exactly no time at all.

That is why you hire experienced people you can trust, who would be willing to bother with that.

Now hiring!

You must be:

• Experienced
• Someone we can trust
• Willing to bother with that...
• ..for the money we actually bring in

Anyone? Yes? Maybe? No? Yes? No? No.

A few months ago, I posted various ads for staff recruitment for my site, MegaGaming, at craigslist, and we received plenty of responses from experienced programmers/designers. However, I actually was not looking for people who would expect a paying job, just something for fun. It was such an awesome idea I came up with, and I don't think that many sites like ours even attempted pulling that stunt off, which is just amazing, even if the results weren't specific to my tastes.

I understand that Caves of Narshe is a part of Rangers51's career, not just a fun hobby, unlike in MG's case. I still would love to see a more modern IPB, and you could still do away with options and features you don't like. I think that would seriously help make the your forums even funner to navigate around (such as having the ability to do a quick edit or leaving comments on someone's profile).

Still, post your hiring ads at that site (craigslist), if you haven't already. I think you'll get plenty of interested people wanting to help you out.

This post has been edited by Allen Hunter on 11th December 2009 08:57

Quote (Allen Hunter)

A few months ago, I posted various ads for staff recruitment for my site, MegaGaming, at craigslist, and we received plenty of responses from experienced programmers/designers. However, I actually was not looking for people who would expect a paying job, just something for fun.

I don't mean to be rude here (well, perhaps just a tiny bit, but no more than that), but what gives you the indication that you were dealing with experienced programmers and designers? I don't doubt that there probably some out there right now, collecting unemployment in this recession, who might have responded looking for something to fill their time; since none of them seemed to meet your needs of being able to gently modify a Wordpress or basic forum template (as evidenced by the quote below, where you didn't seem to like the results), though, I wonder how experienced they really were. Feel free to send me a link to your Craigslist posting or some of the portfolios you received in response, though.

Quote (Allen Hunter)

It was such an awesome idea I came up with, and I don't think that many sites like ours even attempted pulling that stunt off, which is just amazing, even if the results weren't specific to my tastes.

I'll expound a bit on what I just said above - Craigslist is an interesting site, and I'm sure you got responses to whatever ad you posted (again, feel free to send it my way!). However, there is a marked difference in scope between your site and CoN, regardless of how you might perceive the two next to each other. Speaking as someone who has developed sites in Wordpress in the past, there's a big step between developing a site in Wordpress, where the bulk of the work is done for you from the start, and writing a fully customized site like CoN. Just because you found a few folks who could claim to do what you would want doesn't mean our mileage wouldn't vary. Given my experience with failed transactions on Craigslist, I think the thought of trusting anyone out there would be more than I could handle. I'd rather spend a little money and go to a place like 99Designs if I had any desire to take that route.

Quote (Allen Hunter)

I understand that Caves of Narshe is a part of Rangers51's career, not just a fun hobby, unlike in MG's case.

I'm not sure you completely understand my relationship with CoN. While CoN does go a long way to help me get jobs, CoN isn't my actual career at all. I don't make money off CoN - the money I do make isn't enough to pay server costs. Therefore, I certainly don't pay the folks who help out here, even though when they do help, they tend to be pretty darned good at it. CoN is a hobby for all of us; it just happens to be a hobby that has been around for more than a decade and has the quality to not die out once a couple people tire of it.

Quote (Allen Hunter)

I still would love to see a more modern IPB, and you could still do away with options and features you don't like. I think that would seriously help make the your forums even funner to navigate around (such as having the ability to do a quick edit or leaving comments on someone's profile).

I think something that I'm trying to articulate here that isn't getting through, just as with with other people such as Blades of Steel/Mr. Saturday Knight in the recent past, is that you're having trouble determining the difference between what you personally think is the proper way to run a website and what is actually in line with the goals and principles of CoN. I'm not sure that anything you've proposed makes any part of the forums "funner [sic];" while I do concede that you've mentioned one or two things that could be potentially useful, I maintain that we try to use our development time to provide new features that the visitors to the site, as a whole, have asked for - and, since you yourself don't even use IPB, I'm not really sure how much context you actually have for your suggestions. I don't see people lining up to beg for most of what you're suggesting, therefore, it's a very low priority. If someone out there agrees with any of the stuff that Allen Hunter is suggesting, please speak up - if one "new" user comes in and immediately starts posting about how we're doing things wrong, we don't really have much choice but to assume it's some sort of sour grapes and not part of a desire to actually improve the site.

In other words, while you might assume that after a couple months of running a low-traffic website built from off-the-shelf components you know more than enough to explain what we're doing wrong, you'll have to forgive us if we don't take your word as gold right out of the gate. You're going to have to do more to convince us that you actually know what you're talking about.

This post has been edited by Rangers51 on 11th December 2009 15:11

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

No.
...
All right, I'll elaborate.

1. Font modification, colors, aligning.
This does not make a post look beter. It makes a post look like it's been written by a child with a box of crayons. The worth of a post is in the words, not the letters. If a forum has this option, there will be a hellish lot of idiots who will abuse it and post retarded looking posts just because they can.

2. Video embedding
While at some boards I am guilty of committing this sin, the sight of a post with more than one video embedded makes me cringe, and there's never only one video.
If there is only one video, due to some werid coincidence most probably, it only irritates me.

3. Scroll-down spoilers
Not a bad idea, but I like what we have.

4. This:

Quote (Alle Hunter)

That is why you hire experienced people you can trust, who would be willing to bother with that.

How do you know they're experienced?
How do you know you can trust them?

I'll sum up with the Vetinari family motto:
Si non confectus, non reficiat.

Possible spoilers: highlight to view

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

This post has been edited by SilverMaduin on 11th December 2009 18:56

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"I fell off the mountain of words at around the 10,000ft mark. Tell my family...they owe me money." -Narratorway

"If you retort against this, so help me God I'll shove any part of your anatomy I can find into some other part. Figuratively, of course." - Josh

"We have more, can deliver tuesday." - Del S

Good old CoN

I'd appreciate the ability to center/right align text elements. It's a bit of an issue for those of us submitting chaptered works with dividers.

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Visions of Peace - Four Generals, One Empire, and the Returners caught in the middle.

Quote (Elessar @ 12th December 2009 16:15)

I'd appreciate the ability to center/right align text elements. It's a bit of an issue for those of us submitting chaptered works with dividers.

Recently, that seems to just be you.

I can kind of understand where you're coming from on that, really. I have to counter that the forums aren't really meant to be the end-all of fiction submission, when we intend to publish at least some of them to the site proper, where we obviously have more control. Can you be more clear about situations in which user experience is significantly harmed by not having this feature?

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Quote (Rangers51 @ 12th December 2009 19:46)

Can you be more clear about situations in which user experience is significantly harmed by not having this feature?

Nope. Obviously it's not a big deal, or I might've brought it up five years sooner. ;)

I think online formatting for large chunks of text is one of those difficult problems; it's somewhat akin to typesetting that publishers have entire departments devoted to. Word wrap isn't helpful, studies show that reading text in short newspaper columns is easier than the large width of the typical browser. So being able to center a divider is just a little bit of help.

Also, I've never seen paragraph-alignment abuse. Text color, video embedding, I do see the point.

So yeah, if it's just a switch or a patch upgrade, it'd be nice. If it's a huge effort, then whatever.

Since I read this the first time I've thought more about the video-embedding and I really would like to see it here. Is it really so bad? I don't think it would be used to the point of abuse and it's good to get a piece of music out there or a clip of something being described, like in the recent FFXIII and Dissidia threads. Linking a clip is one thing but it looks better to just lay it down, and it's more accessible. People here tend to be more rational than on other boards where things like custom avatars, pictures in signatures, and, yes, embedded videos become ridiculous, I would argue. R51, if you're saying it's easy to implement then I'd definitely support your doing so.

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

1. The only aspect about which I'd agree with the OP saying is that formatting makes posting funner is the idea of overly nested quotes. I'd love a forum games section.

Except that such a section is quite against the philosophy of the leadership team here, even if it were restricted to a single section of the fora. I've learned to live with that anyway, and I've learned to enjoy this site for what it is--a great, friendly, and not-insane place to hang out and chat.

Besides, I already have a place for letting out my shitposting desires (well, shitposting with limits, as I don't want a forum to completely deteriorate, so I usually prefer that such activities be confined to a single thread or a single subforum), and that place is the TV Tropes forum, which goes MUCH much faster than this fora (we're talking many new posts every 10 minutes or so--and this is NOT a good thing, actually--it means that it really spoils instant-gratification drives, and actually wastes TONS more of my time than this site ever did), and where the threads are much more like informal conversation, complete with one-word or even memetic pictoral/video responses.

2. And even there, the TV Tropes fora, which are built on a custom platform that might be even more custom thatn this one here (they basically modified the wiki software to make a forum), have minimal markup capabilities. You can't embed more than one video per post, it's hard to control the positioning of pictures, and while you can change color and size, you can't change the font.

Have I ever seen font, color, and size used for meaningful forum discussion? No. They have, pretty much, been cosmetic features used to dramatize posts or for comedic effect. You also noticeably don't see these in serious threads.

Also, be happy you have a quote button. The mods there are strongly against it; you have to type out [[quoteblock]]your quote[[/quoteblock]] manually.

But yeah, the fora looking clean and easy to read are a definite plus for me. TV Tropes, like here, does not alow images in signatures, and while they allow people to upload their own avatars (people have gone overboard with this, yes), they can't be animated. I think that last one was because of technical constraints, but I don't mind it either. It makes it clear where the post is, and removes the possibility of sig images taking up all the attention of the reader.

(FWIW, their quotes cannot be nested. At all.)

3. Embedded YouTube videos look like crap, in my opinion. I'd much rather have the link.

Edit

Incidentally, pardon me for speaking bluntly about this, but I think I could start more topics over here, rather than leaving them to the fast-paced folly of TV Tropes, so that this place gets more action and I don't get threads that fall off the face of the Earth in a day (with the exception of threads about sexuality, politics, or animé controversies).

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 10th April 2010 15:09

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current games (2024-02-19):
Fairy Fencer F ADF
Pokémon Perfect Crystal

finished so far this year:
Gato Roboto
drowning, drowning
New Super Mario Bros.
TMNT 3: Radical Rescue

tabled: Lost Ruins

Skipping over a lot of things, here...

I happen to support the IPB 1.2 choice. As someone who's administered IPB and IF forums in the past, IPB 1.2 is a fairly good balance between security, user accessibility, and ACP simplicity. Not to mention, it works really well with most of the mods and addons on whatever IF Skin Zone's calling itself this week.

Oh, and to whoever you are who's saying that they need centered text, I don't know if the staffers have allowed the use of the "dohtml" tag here... actually, let me try with the following...

This should be centered

If it's centered, then they allowed it. If it's not, they didn't and that is something to be discussed in PMs.

This post has been edited by Endymion on 27th November 2010 08:01