streamlined forum skin

I started rambling in another thread, but decided it might be better here.

  1. Something looks weird with the buttons at the top of the page. I think the background is light and the white text makes them look very washed out. But then I have the artistic eye of a rock. Anyone have ideas for those buttons?

  2. While we are nitpicking, and before Riven gets tired of the requests ;), listing all the moderators between the board and the thread title looks pretty noisy.

  3. There seems to be a huge space between the end of the text in a post and the


    tag / signature. Oh wait, I guess that comes from the avatar pic and other info under the poster’s name. :-\ Or does it? This post is getting pretty long and there is still a huge space…
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
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    Ok this should be long enough. How much space is there from here to my signature? Edit: Aha! Quick modify could go up next to modify. The signature could go in a table with 2 columns, left would be the signature and right would be “report to moderator” and the IP address. Maybe shortened to just “Report”? Or don’t show it at all, since this forum is heavily trafficked by moderators anyway, it doesn’t really need the reporting. The IP and the little icon doesn’t really need to appear at all for non-moderators.
  4. Also, I would vote to just not display post titles. People very rarely change them, and no one really reads them anyway.

  5. “Quote from: Nate on 3 days ago” should be “Quote from: Nate, 3 days ago”.

The coloring theme definitely needs rework.

The difference between these icons, that indicate whether there’s a new post or not in the forum, is not clear enough.

The latter (on) definitely needs to be a lot darker.

Same with the “new” icon in front of threads. This needs to be dark blue with white text.

Threads with new posts need to be bold (not just sticky posts).

Sticky threads need to have light blue background row color. Announcements probably a darker blue color.

It needs to be natural for the eyes to see differences. It’s not now. But with just minor changes like these, it can be.

I begin to suspect my monitor brightness is just way off the everybody elses…?

Just added that. I removed the bold style from the sticky posts, though.

[quote=“appel,post:2,topic:36068”]
I think that sticky topics are the root of all evil. They should be kept to a minimum, because they clog up the boards and take valuable space.

[quote=“appel,post:2,topic:36068”]
Slowly getting there!

It’s a lot darker now.

I’m going to watch JGO on a few other monitors now…

This is not me being a grammar moron, but I haven’t found the code that inserts that ‘on’ string in there :slight_smile:

You can use colors to your advantage. This suggestion tunes down the overall brightness and makes it simpler and faster for the eyes to understand what is going on.

http://gamadu.com/temp/jgo/jgo.png

I disabled it in the code, but it’s still there. Working on it…

Looks like the only remaining items are #2 and #4. :slight_smile:

#6 http://www.java-gaming.org/Themes/-dilbermc/images/valid-css.gif image is broken causing the small css image at the bottom of the page to not display :slight_smile:

wont all these custom changes be a problem when upgrading?

Almost all changes are made in the Theme, which isn’t modified in an upgrade.

So far there have been two modifications in the core of SMF itself and those are easy enough to restore later.

Also, the question is how much longer we will run SMF.

The more I see of the sourcecode, the worse it gets.

The number of possible SQL injections is just shocking…


		$request = mysql_query("
			SELECT someColumn
			FROM someTable
			WHERE someColumn = '$_POST[someParameter]'
			LIMIT 1");

:’(

What are the alternatives? is there any java equivalent to SMF?

isnt there some (deprecated) autoescaping feature you can activate in the php.ini? Then again, it might break code posting…

I find that with pretty much any of the popular web apps (wordpress, drupal, SMF) - internally they’re a complete mess, and look like they’ve been put together by someone who’s never even heard of concepts like abstraction or dont-repeat-yourself.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that most ‘web programmers’ genuinely don’t know what they’re doing, and just hack at things trial-and-error until they kinda get the right result. The most recent example coming from a friend, where their web programmers haven’t even heard of version control. There’s just the production environment and everyone just hacks on it while it’s live (for bugs and new features).

This is so true :slight_smile:

I was even doing this stuff many years ago. java4k.com is php code, the design is pretty solid, using mvc and templates, and it’s secure from sql injection as all parameters going to the database layer go through either int casting or mysql_real_escape(). I do not version control it, not worth the hassle. I’ve sometimes had the idea of creating my own forum system in php, but there are so many (seemingly) good ones out there that it’s not worth the effort. But I’m sometimes amazed how bad these systems are, how easily they are hacked, easy for bots to get through, hard to update, etc.

WTF PEOPLE. :o

Version control is effortless, and has made my coding life exponentially easier (I use mercurial)

Sorry, what I meant to say is:

I version control ALL my java code, but php code is not worth it.

:slight_smile:

There’s really no excuse not to, considering version control doubles as a backup and distribution model (among all of the other benefits)

To each his own, I guess.

I didn’t version control my code for literally like 10 years. :-/ I finally did it just a couple months ago. Really stupid of me because I would love to have 10 years of version history, not to mention all the projects I’ve lost over time. I’ve done it all in git now, so I’m really looking forward to being able to branch like crazy as I do different experiments with my games.