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Looksee! an ugly new Forum and a whole new page look

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2011 5:39 pm
by Forceflow
Well, I guess by now you have seen the new forum, yay, isn't it ugly? You may or may not have noticed the old board being flooded with SPAMbots. Supposedly phpBB 3.0.8 Captcha Feature is much better than the old one. Thus I had to upgrade it, which proved to be a bit more difficult than planned. I'll try to get the look back to normal asap, but I still remember the last time I had to do this. (Meaning it might be a while 'till things look okay again...)

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2011 6:11 pm
by Forceflow
Okay, not great, but much better. At least this way I don't have to redo everything at once due to the black/white thing... Best style I could find on such short notice...

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2011 7:22 pm
by Forceflow
Mhm... I guess the Forum is now in a state were I feel somewhat comfortable to leave it in for now.
Finally giving me the chance to crawl back onto the couch drinking hot tee and dumping various sorts of drugs into me to fight that damn cold of mine. I officially hate phpBB btw! The coding and overall structure simply sucks, still have no clue why some of the smilies don't work properly...

Oh, one more thing. The registration page now uses the reCAPTCHA feature, so hopefully we'll be safe from bots for now...

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2011 7:32 pm
by Vince T
Hmmm, that greyish color scheme is pretty stylish. Me like :)

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2011 12:19 am
by WildstarBlue9
Well done, Forceflow...say, you think you can give the Morning Star assistance with upgrading our CommNet to the new version? We're still stuck w/ phpBB 2.x
:kopfwand:

PS: The Morning Star is in the process of "rebooting," as we wanted to make the group more inclusive and less reliant on being based on 12+ year old games. I am now known as "Hook" there, but will likely keep the old name(s) on my other SW forums for "old times' sake."

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2011 4:04 am
by WildstarBlue9
As an update, I found in my research of the spam problem for the Morning Star and another forum I'm a user on that reCAPTCHA has been cracked, too. This version of phpBB has a Q&A captcha, though, which may be more effective, at least for now (a virtual bowling league I'm the secretary for has our sign-up and score submission forms protected by a Q&A captcha, and I've yet to receive spam from those forms).

I also found this in my research; the replies describe the mod as "simple, but very effective." :D

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Sun Feb 06, 2011 7:45 am
by Forceflow
Great, here I thought that Google would be a safe bet, but looks like it has indeed been cracked. I looked into other captcha type plugins for phpBB and found some that appears to be rather good. Hopefully it wont be so popular that the SPAMbots have locked onto it already. We'll see...

As for helping with the update... well, this is a bit tricky to do mostly because you can mess up the everything. It should be straight forward, but I still remember when I updated before, and it was not pretty. Make sure you are able to at least back up the original database. Best way would be to actually set up a second DB to work off from. (This way you will always have a fallback position in case something goes wrong)

Biggest problem is when you have some MODs installed since those will make the process much harder. It's of course possible, but I would first start off without using any MODs until you know the new forum is fully up and running. If you have full server access it shouldn't be a big deal to update. If you don... well then you have to hope that the automated update process wont mess you up :(

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 9:21 am
by Forceflow
So.... what do you guys think about the new color theme I set up? (Did I mention I hate phpBB btw.?) I finally got a subtle transparency set up for most of the forum. I know it doesn't work in all areas, but I think for now it's okay...

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 1:13 pm
by Mako
I like the new forum. For some one who hates the format you did a damn good job.

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 4:50 pm
by Vince T
I greatly appreciate the new color scheme. The red text was often pretty hard to read.

W00t for barrier-free internet :D

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 5:39 pm
by Forceflow
General_Trageton wrote:I greatly appreciate the new color scheme. The red text was often pretty hard to read.

W00t for barrier-free internet :D
Yeah... I really do have to admit that I messed up the last forum pretty much. Luckily I did learn a lot more about the way phpBB does stuff and the complete reboot finally let me fix all the stupid mistakes I had done before. (Half the PM area was pretty much unusable...) I just hope the forum still works for everybody though, it does seem to be awfully quiet ever since I installed the new one...

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 6:12 pm
by Vince T
It was awfully quiet before. :?

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 11:55 pm
by Seagulls
Those Moved Thread icons are ugly.
:rock2:

Thanks for your efforts to keep the spambots out. Good job.

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 8:29 am
by Forceflow
Well, to be honest I think all thread icons are ugly. I just have never seen any ones I actually liked...

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 4:52 pm
by Forceflow
Made some more minor tweaks to the style of the very first post. I think this looks pretty cool actually and works itself nicely into the overall look. Now I just wish people would actually see it ;)

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 7:37 pm
by Vince T
Hmmm, help me out here? I see no difference between the first and the other posts...?

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 7:44 pm
by Forceflow
The first post should have a red headline and fading border. (Plus the title should be above the area it usually is...)

Look here:

Image

Might need a forced refresh though because of a new css file

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:43 pm
by Vince T
Hmmm, no, not for me. In fact, the headline is smaller than in the other posts ... strange :/

Edit: HMmmm, works now on my other pc ... :)

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 2:35 am
by n8weigel
The headline font is smaller on my pc too, but is white text on a red background. Overall, I'd say things look great. Thanks for trying to keep the bots out. :thumbs:

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 3:27 am
by FunkyFreshMan
It's smaller and white-on-red on my computers, too, but the fade and transparency are indeed there. It took me a while to get used to seeing a different forum, but I think it looks great! Sometimes it's nice to have a change. :)

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 6:08 am
by Forceflow
General_Trageton wrote:Hmmm, no, not for me. In fact, the headline is smaller than in the other posts ... strange :/

Edit: HMmmm, works now on my other pc ... :)
It does appear to need a forced refresh. Had some trouble on the PC at work as well to get it to show up. In Firefox you can do this by pressing the SHIFT key and then clicking the reload button. IE is SHIFT F5 I believe...
FunkyFreshMan wrote:It's smaller and white-on-red on my computers, too, but the fade and transparency are indeed there. It took me a while to get used to seeing a different forum, but I think it looks great! Sometimes it's nice to have a change. :)
n8weigel wrote:The headline font is smaller on my pc too, but is white text on a red background. Overall, I'd say things look great. Thanks for trying to keep the bots out. :thumbs:

Thanks :) Yeah, I don't like the bigger text too much. I want to make it smaller, but I still haven't found a good way to change the font size in phpBB. There are just too many different tags in the css code. (The 'new' header was simpler, because I could create the css tag for that myself) As for the bots, well let's hope they will indeed be kept at bay for now. There are new members again that haven't posted anything, so that always makes me a bit suspicious ;)

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 11:33 am
by Dragon
I like the new Forum, good work Forceflow. :thumbs:

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 12:31 pm
by Forceflow
Seagulls wrote:Those Moved Thread icons are ugly.
:rock2:

Thanks for your efforts to keep the spambots out. Good job.
Well, what do you think about my latest attempt at the new topic icons? (Again, a forced refresh of the page is most likely needed to see them!)

Also hid a little Easter egg... wonder if anybody will ever actually find it...

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 5:48 pm
by FunkyFreshMan
Okay, let me see if I have this right:

The Vader helmet is for announcements.
The clonetrooper helmet is for sticky threads.
The Death Star is a normal thread.
Yoda is a moved thread.
Crossed sabers indicate a locked thread.
R2 indicates that the logged-in user has a post in that thread.
What's the firing Death Star?

If anything, I would say maybe make the locked thread sabers a little bit bigger, if possible. Just so they're easier to spot at first glance. :)
Forceflow wrote:Also hid a little Easter egg... wonder if anybody will ever actually find it...
Hmmmm...Does it have anything to do with the Yoda icon? :?

Re: Looksee... an ugly new Forum...

Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:50 pm
by n8weigel
I like the new icons, they'll just take some getting used to. On left bar now, the red box the normally appears over the Star Destroyer under all the links like "FAQ, Chat, Links, Rules", so on and so forth, is gone. It's been replaced by the XWA Upgrade symbol and it makes the links harder to read. Just in case you hadn't noticed that because of a forced refresh issue or something, I wanted to point it out.