Forum Updates

[WhiteNoise]

A few updates will be coming in the next week or so, mostly small things. Profile information next to posts is going to be improved, reply interface is going to be overhauled (smileys in menu, larger monospace font, better looking previous post summary, will add some minimal formatting options to quickpost if it's not impossible). Some stupid margin problems here and there, a few redundant features to nerf. I'm going to see if I can change "Like" to "Push The Button" as requested. www.thechemicalbrothers.com started using Intro Black, a free font, for headers last summer, so I will experiment with including it here and there. And Enjoyed has sent me some awesome designs for post icons that I'll try to work on and work into the site.

If you have any requests (literally anything, the tiniest or biggest problem you have with the site), now's ya chance.

You may see small changes come and go occasionally - I have to push the updates live every now and then to test for the perspective of a lurker. Should not have to take the forum down at all, and things should still be usable even with small changes.


Also - considering creating new themes for the forum, based on different Chemical eras as a future project. Making a new theme is no small task, but with help anything's possible! I also want to build themes replicating the older versions of the forum - especially the WATN layout:

[WhiteNoise]

Note: Message icons will be fully disabled. They were a little icon at the top right of your post and you could change it to a page or a smiley or an exclamation point. I think 95% of the time they weren't used. They might return in the future...

[ThePumisher]

I had to adjust my time offset a lot in the past few days, maybe about 3 or 4 times in the last two weeks - even though i was at the same place.

[Enjoyed]

I literally adjusted mine about 40 minutes ago.

Is there any way to get it to automatically sync to the timezone of your isp?

[WhiteNoise]

Okay, I will look into that seriously now - Skyscraper has been having the same issue. It is likely something back-end so Explud may be of help.

[whirlygirl]

I loved the We Are The Night era of the forums. There was so much added because the devs took the time to listen. But it was hard to maintain. Even from a moderating pov, managing those tags was a serious pain in the ass!

Fresh updates and changing themes are good. I'm excited to see what new looks etc are in store!

[WhiteNoise]

managing those tags

What on earth was "ebw irish fan karaoke remix" about anyway?

[androidgeoff]

An irish guy's karaoke rendition of a remix of a chemical brothers ebw, recorded through a rotary fan for "cool chorus fx bro"

[WhiteNoise]

Oh my gosh. I'm already in love.

[WhiteNoise]

I've added mouse-over job titles for the ChemBase credits in the footer.

[Wolkenkrabber]

If you have any requests (literally anything, the tiniest or biggest problem you have with the site), now's ya chance.

You're probably tired of me mentioning the tweets that don't embed because they have emojis in, so I'm only mentioning because of your above sentence. Honest.

Also, you know when you quote somebody and want to reply to them, you end up in a small box down the bottom of the screen, rather than the regular 'Reply' screen. Just an opinion: I'm not crazy about that. So I copy and paste from the quote box into a normal reply screen. But if you're quoting a really long bit of text, the copy function can be a little awkward. But hey, maybe I'm just a little awkward... 

[Csar]

You're probably tired of me mentioning the tweets that don't embed because they have emojis in, so I'm only mentioning because of your above sentence. Honest.

Also, you know when you quote somebody and want to reply to them, you end up in a small box down the bottom of the screen, rather than the regular 'Reply' screen. Just an opinion: I'm not crazy about that. So I copy and paste from the quote box into a normal reply screen. But if you're quoting a really long bit of text, the copy function can be a little awkward. But hey, maybe I'm just a little awkward... 

In the meantime, what you can do is press "preview" and you'll get to the regular editor screen.

• Is it possible to allow for an extra row in the topic title in each forum to add subtitles?
• When replying one can give one's post an individual title which is then shown on the chembase overview page as a link to that post. While this is great, you can't immediately associate such a post with its origin topic it has been posted in. Question, can we add a line that also shows the original thread?
• Could we add post count to each topic that's shown in each subforum?

[ThePumisher]

Looking at the watn-screenshot - what's up with iggy? Complete out of order?

[Enjoyed]

He's married. Working hard. Went to see Arnold Schwarzenneger in person a couple of months back. Was elated by that.

[Enjoyed]

The right hand column on the main page is titled "Unread Posts" - can we change that to "Latest Post" or "Recent Posts" or something? They certainly aren't unread with the amount of times I refresh this place.

[WhiteNoise]

All noted! Updates on whether each thing is fixable/doable coming... Soon..

[WhiteNoise]

You're probably tired of me mentioning the tweets that don't embed because they have emojis in, so I'm only mentioning because of your above sentence. Honest.

Also, you know when you quote somebody and want to reply to them, you end up in a small box down the bottom of the screen, rather than the regular 'Reply' screen. Just an opinion: I'm not crazy about that. So I copy and paste from the quote box into a normal reply screen. But if you're quoting a really long bit of text, the copy function can be a little awkward. But hey, maybe I'm just a little awkward... 

The emojis breaking the embed is beyond my current scope of knowledge. I haven't looked into it but there may be an update to the Twitter Embed Code that I can install which will fix it. Otherwise this involves manually updating/correct code I haven't written for an API I'm not familiar with. I do want to fix it but it's not an easy one.

The reply thing is a good bit simpler to fix though - for now, I am going to set it to send your text to the box at the bottom of the screen, without jumping you to the bottom of the screen. This should make it easier to multi-quote. I'm going to try to add an "Edit in Full Editor" button (or just change the Preview button to say "Edit in Full Editor") to send what you've quoted and typed in the box at the bottom to a normal reply screen, and I'm also going to try to add some formatting buttons to the quick reply, so you don't necessarily have to use the normal reply if you don't want to.

In the meantime, what you can do is press "preview" and you'll get to the regular editor screen.

• Is it possible to allow for an extra row in the topic title in each forum to add subtitles?
• When replying one can give one's post an individual title which is then shown on the chembase overview page as a link to that post. While this is great, you can't immediately associate such a post with its origin topic it has been posted in. Question, can we add a line that also shows the original thread?
• Could we add post count to each topic that's shown in each subforum?

Extra row: Possible, but difficult. I would have to make a change to the forum on a fundamental level because it would introduce a new piece of data to the information stored in the post database. I don't have experience modifying the code at that level and it would be a lot of work and a lot of screwing stuff up for a minor feature.

Individual title: How do you mean? If you reply with a new title, does it split into a new topic?

Post count: Yes I might be able to do that. The goal when originally designing the layout was to keep link density (links that are extremely close to one another) at a minimum to help mobile users navigate (especially those of us with large hands and fingers!). I'm going to revise my original design for this a little bit and see if I can improve the look, adding a post count might come with that. For now it's implied in the number of pages.

The right hand column on the main page is titled "Unread Posts" - can we change that to "Latest Post" or "Recent Posts" or something? They certainly aren't unread with the amount of times I refresh this place.

Easily changeable, but a little difficult to change "correctly". I don't think anyone is actually using this board in a language other than English, but this board supports great translation features which basically use variables in place of text, so it can display "Unread Posts" in whatever language you are viewing the board in. So I can't just type "Recent Posts" into the PHP template, I have to go into the engine and change the definition of the concept for English, otherwise it will say "Recent Posts" in English regardless of what language you're reading.

Which I actually don't think is a big issue considering we're all posting in English anyway. I'm all for using foreign languages here and considered setting up a "non-English" board, but considering we all post in English, it's probably not necessary to even have translations at this point...

EDIT: This reminds me to fix that Unread Posts link! It's supposed to be a feed of all unread posts but as it wasn't a mainstream feature I didn't get it finished at launch. Some bad CSS going on there...

[Wolkenkrabber]

In the meantime, what you can do is press "preview" and you'll get to the regular editor screen

This was actually a good point from Csar, and one I probably should have figured out myself...

[Csar]

Extra row: Possible, but difficult. I would have to make a change to the forum on a fundamental level because it would introduce a new piece of data to the information stored in the post database. I don't have experience modifying the code at that level and it would be a lot of work and a lot of screwing stuff up for a minor feature.

If that's such a pain in the rear, we can easily drop that since it's just a really minor thing and not essential at all.

Individual title: How do you mean? If you reply with a new title, does it split into a new topic?

What I mean is, when you post, let's say in the Star Wars thread, and give your post an individual title ('subject' row in the reply menu), say "coming soon", this very title is then shown in the recent post column on the front page. You could mistake this for a fresh topic when in fact it's just a post with an individual subject name.

Post count: Yes I might be able to do that. The goal when originally designing the layout was to keep link density (links that are extremely close to one another) at a minimum to help mobile users navigate (especially those of us with large hands and fingers!). I'm going to revise my original design for this a little bit and see if I can improve the look, adding a post count might come with that. For now it's implied in the number of pages.

This is also a thing you shouldn't waste too much time on. If it's too labor intensive to do as well, then drop this one too. I think there are more important things to take care of than these petty ones.

[WhiteNoise]

What I mean is, when you post, let's say in the Star Wars thread, and give your post an individual title ('subject' row in the reply menu), say "coming soon", this very title is then shown in the recent post column on the front page. You could mistake this for a fresh topic when in fact it's just a post with an individual subject name.

Titley test doo doo indeed... Hmm. I might do something with that.