Forum Design

arctine said:
I'm very curious to know where 'work' is ;)
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The top secret Cornwall RADAR base :p

arctine said:
Of course, it is none of my business. For what it's worth, I've never ran into any trouble browsing in blue.
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I love blue, but white would be handy now and again around work.

arctine said:
I'm sure your modship is a misunderstanding. At least I hope so anyway I always though that you were one of the better mods, fwiw.
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Hmm I'm not sure sure :p **** happens eh. Thanks though :)
 
a lot of the competing forums are set up terribly in my opinion. I do however find the colours also hard to read on, but I have disabilities so reading black on white can also really strain my eyes for a long time. However the alternative black theme has worked well for me reading white on black.
 
Oscar99 said:
Although i'm pretty new here, i do have an eye for design.

I must say that when i jumped ship from the other forum & came here, first thing that put me off logging in was the design of this forum....

Am i the only one who thinks it's a bit heavy on the eyes & can be quite unpleasant to look at for long periods of time? :(
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It's a fairly neutral design. I don't especially like it (I prefer dark text on light background), but then I've never particularly had a problem with it either.
 
It's fantastic, I don't know of a better design. I detest black forums they are sickening. White/beige/grey are ok but often look like a word or excel document.
These forums look nice but simple and colour is very easy to read. Combine that with sig/avatar rules and strict moderating and you have a winner.
 
We always complain about how oldschool the forum software is but at least it works perfectly, some forums I post on are bugged and it's so annoying.

ie: Pasted text changes to the background color, so it's impossible to see. One forum I post on has that.
 
Glaucus said:
These forums look nice but simple and colour is very easy to read. Combine that with sig/avatar rules and strict moderating and you have a winner.
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I still think the sig rules are a bit ridiculous, the size is really small compared to general sizes of most signatures, and the file size makes it even harder to stick to, what is it, 25kb or something? I honestly don't think 50kb or 100kb signatures would hurt the forums.
 
Aedus said:
I still think the sig rules are a bit ridiculous, the size is really small compared to general sizes of most signatures, and the file size makes it even harder to stick to, what is it, 25kb or something? I honestly don't think 50kb or 100kb signatures would hurt the forums.
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It would hurt the increasingly large number of people who are viewing on their mobile devices and using their capped data allowance.

They're small because then they don't upset the formatting of the page, and at that size you have to be some sort of special case to not be able to get the file size down to under the limit - which is 20KB by the way :p
 
Zefan said:
It would hurt the increasingly large number of people who are viewing on their mobile devices and using their capped data allowance.

They're small because then they don't upset the formatting of the page, and at that size you have to be some sort of special case to not be able to get the file size down to under the limit - which is 20KB by the way :p
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Tbh with you if people are concerned about their data usage then they can go to their user CP and disable avatars and signatures entirely, which would also help with loading times of the forum in general.

Unless your signatures are very plain colours or you drop the quality of the image then it's hard to stay in the 20kb limit, 50kb would be much better. It's hard to make a 400x75 signature which is colourful and stay in that limit.
For an example I just took a random colourful picture from the internet, and made it 400x75px:

amta20.jpg


Even with quality near the lowest amount, it's still over 25kb and it looks awful in comparison. I think a 20kb rule is a bit silly and overly restrictive, it should be somewhere closer to 50kb for the signature size of 400x75px to be viable. Can't have any creativity with signatures with such a low file size limit.
 
Why not just get better at resizing stuff instead of being a massive noob about it all?

Here's an example.

I cut and pasted your left "high quality" image and saved it at 100% in IrfanView.

Here it is @ 26.75KB
dsnmh.jpg


I then saved it at 90%.

Here it is at 10.54KB
2hmosy8.jpg


Can't tell the difference? Neither can I...
 
Aedus said:
I still think the sig rules are a bit ridiculous
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I love the sig rules. Keeps everything nice and neat, and page load times fast.

However I DON'T like the lack of custom avatars - I believe this (to a degree) detracts from a posters identity.


But speaking of forum design...

Time to upgrade to vB4! This version (presumably 3.8) looks like something from the 90's ;)
 
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The limitations are great, altough sigs could be put up a tad it makes little to no difference.

Only thing I want is a 'work' mode as dark blue sticks out a mile :p
 
How easy is it to make a stylish skin?

It's for another forum that I use..

Sig limits are great, can't stand browsing forums that have no restrictions
 
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bledd. said:
How easy is it to make a stylish skin?

It's for another forum that I use..
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Well different forum software use different skinning methods, so it varies.

But if you're competent at graphics related stuff generally, and have a decent knowledge of CSS (and possibly template editing), then it's a piece of cake. ;)
 
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