Bay 12 Games Forum

My apologies for getting into the argument, I let myself get a bit too annoyed. People who refuse to make even the slightest compromise for the sake of others tend to do that to me.
I known, I know, here I am still getting that last barb in... I will however not be continuing with the argument/discussion past this point, so feel free to lambast me.

Question for Janus: Would it be possible to have settings on a per-forum basis?

Basically thinking of the stories one specifically. That forum would be especially hurt by large or distracting signatures, in my opinion. Much more then, say, General discussion.

That would be a hell of a lot of work for miniscule gain. I currently have no intention to work further on the mod than I already have, anyway.
Here's what the mod will do. You will have an option in your profile to have images within signatures under posts completely stripped out before the data is even sent to your browser.
Note that the mod does not strip out signature images anywhere else, so you would still see them when viewing that person's profile or when viewing a PM sent to you by them. The signature images would only be stripped out beneath posts in the forum.

That's what the mod does and all I plan to have it do. Nothing more, nothing less.

So let me get this straight... People who want to have mild signature images should be prevented from being able to have them, so that you then don't have to miss out on seeing the signature images which you didn't want to see in the first place?

(Yes, I realize this is nit-picky, which is why I said it is. Though this still is an existing issue )

People will always find something to whine about.

The forums I've seen with images in their sigs have tended to be rather nasty.

Like the current argument, you mean? 

I've seen some areas where pictures in sigs are annoying even when capped at 20 pixels, because some people made stacks of them.

The number of allowed images in a signature can be capped to any number desired in the admin settings, such as 1 (seems like a good number to me). Signatures with multiple images could indeed easily be an annoyance.

With the spacing -- an issue I've had brought up in email, and maybe some of the spacing discussion here was about this is the following -- new vs. old.  The old forums give you twice as many topics in the same space, so it's easier for some styles of forum-reading (mine included, since I'll open up a tab for every topic on a page in bugs/suggestions).  I'm not sure what other views are on this.

One thing, if you use Firefox, you might want to check it out in Firefox 3. The handling of floats and spacing is improved, with the result in this case being that the "last post" link on the far left of the topic listing isn't shown on it's own line. This tightens it up considerably.
You can get a stable release candidate version of Firefox 3 now (which is what I'm using), or wait until tomorrow when they're supposed to release the official first full release of Firefox 3.

EDIT: an example of what it looks like in FF3:

I do think some issues could be solved with a new theme, but I don't know enough about board themes to make one.   The page headers everywhere take up a lot of space.  It's odd, because they did on the old forum too, but it didn't bother me for some reason. I'd like a theme that is more compact, so you can see more topics on a page.  The pointless "Logged" icon is wasting space in each message.   A lot of places have unnecessary margins.

The top section can be shrunk somewhat by clicking the "-" at the top right, if that helps.
The "Logged" doesn't waste any space. To the left of that is where the note shows up indicating a post has been edited.
There are a few places that could be compacted a bit, but it's a pretty minor issue I think.

Oh, my biggest issue now is the Search.  I'd like to search for all posts by a user in the last 15 days, but Search requires a keyword.  And you can't use "the" or "a", or search for all posts without asparagus.  I tried searching for Dwarf, but it seemed like there should be more.  It was slower than the old search, and the results were bloated.  I just need a list of topics and post #, like before.

To view the last posts of a person, go to their profile and you'll see a link to do that.
The search can potentially be a bit slow, most often if you search for something nobody else has searched for yet, or if you search for something which shows up in most posts. This should smooth out a bit over time.
An oddity with the SMF search is that the top search box will only search within the particular board you're in. If you want to search the entire forum, you need to go back to the index and do it or instead click the little magnifying glass icon to go to the advanced search form.

Also, the search supports more advanced methods like searching for phrases by surrounding them with ", or excluding results with certain words by sticking a - in front of them. Pretty much the same as you can do with Google or other advanced search engines.

Also, I really dislike the smilies, they have a white "aura" that was obviously meant so they would blend well with a white background. It's really annoying.
If you'd like, I can donate a pack of smilies I made myself, though most of them have the downside of being animated. (they blend perfectly with any background though.)
Example of one:

Yeah, I've said it before, the default smileys for SMF are pretty crappy (even ignoring the "halo" effect on dark backgrounds). I'm actually a bit fond of the old default phpBB2 smileys, which also show up well on any background. I'd definitely like to see the default SMF smileys swapped out for better ones.

Quote from: Fossaman on June 16, 2008, 04:37:44 pm

I don't suppose anybody knows why this forum takes two or three minutes to load for me, do they? The old ones loaded right off. I seem to have similar troubles with other SMF forums.

Does that for me, too. Don't know about other SMF forums.
My ISP is pretty crappy, so that might be it.

Two to three minutes? Ouch. So it's when you go to the index? Only the first time, or every time?
I've been running on my old 650mhz laptop for the past few days with both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 and haven't noticed any slowdowns like that. Firefox 3 is definitely better, though.