System Update

[Daryn]

I'll be updating the forums in the next coupld of days. If you see anything weird show up, please let me know. I don't expect any problems, but you never know what sort of issues can come up.

Thanks for your patience all.

[Daryn]

It seems like the update has gone more or less smoothly. I'll need to reskin the new editor, but other than that everything seems to be alright.

[Daryn]

Hm, all of the editor images went away for some reason. I am investigating this now.

[Dusty]

Working fine for me. Gotta say I like the what you see is what you get approach Once it gets skinned back down to black/grey it'll be great

[SliceOfDog]

I feel the same way as Dusty, this is a nice update. I especially love being able to toggle italics and underlined (Edit - I forgot Bold...) by pressing ctrl and the appropriate key. Also, I noticed a small 'Auto-saved' message pop up as I was typing this. That seems like it will come in great use with my tendency to type out long messages and have the internet cut out just before I click Send.

[Daryn]

Yeah, that's another cool feature of that editor. I believe it will be a benefit to a lot of people. It also has the ability to retain formatting of pasted text, so that should make posting stories or other long articles easier.

[SliceOfDog]

Oh, that's brilliant! I'm always very impressed when things do that. Technology today, eh? You watch, we'll be putting man on the moon next!

[Dusty]

Oh, that's brilliant! I'm always very impressed when things do that. Technology today, eh? You watch, we'll be putting man on the moon next!

For real this time

​I kid.

[Daryn]

It seems like there's one bug left to work out. The editor is skinned now, except for the WYSIWYG portion of it. Source mode will show up white on black but WYSIWYG mode is still Black on White as you can see. I'll get that sorted as soon as I figure out what's going on.

[Nelle Kozera]

I found this bug not sure if it was noticed yet or not or if this was what you where talking about in:

It seems like there's one bug left to work out. The editor is skinned now, except for the WYSIWYG portion of it. Source mode will show up white on black but WYSIWYG mode is still Black on White as you can see. I'll get that sorted as soon as I figure out what's going on.

EDIT: Nevermind it fixed itself. @_@

[Daryn]

Now the editor is colored properly. If you are still seeing a white background on the new editor, clear your browser cache. It's hanging onto old css values for some reason. Now that I know this I'll be tinkering with it a bit more, maybe sprucing up the toolbar a bit.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

(Meant to ask this before...) Any hope of an option to hide the sigs / stuff to the left of ppl's posts?

Ideally i'd like a button at the top of each page that i can press so it shows just the posts, the name of who posted them, when, their timezone, and nothing else (like on reddit or mefi). Would make it way easier to browse the site from my phone, which is currently next to impossible because of all the vertical scrolling required.

[Daryn]

I will see if there is a better way of doing that. RIght now the one thing you could do is go into your Settings > General Settings > Thread DIsplay Options. There you can turn off Signatures and Avatars. I'll see what I can come up with.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Ah that's a bit better, but if possible i'd want to have a button by each post to turn that stuff back on temporarily for that one post.

Heh sorry for yet more griping but now that i've turned off sigs i'm even more aware of all the



Ideally the text of each post should begin like right after the prev one ends, imho.

You're doing a great job tho, if nothing else yours is one of the very few sites where i don't have to manually alter the page background and text colours to be comfortably readable. White backgrounds are like reading off a lightbulb for me.

[Daryn]

It would, but the side column is pushing it downwards. Maybe there is a way to make a lighter postbit, It's better than it was before though, right?

[Rick Canaan]

I've never been much of a fan of all the empty space that occurs under/in between posts, either. But in an effort to make information about people available at a glance (game cards, IMs, etc), it is just one of things we had to decide to deal with.

We could, like Daryn suggested, make a lighter post bit (the term used for the code behind how posts display), but I think, in honesty, that it would just take away more, and leave even more empty space.

Either way, it is just a question of geometry. The part with the avatar in it is a tall rectangle, the bit with the post in it, a wide one. The post part grows in height with the more information that is put into it (like when people write longer posts), but with shorter posts, it just won't grow enough to match the height of the side rectangle. Therefore you get empty space. This, moreover, is a limitation of computer display schemes. It is also a scheme to accommodate layout of writing. We write on geometrically square pages, and read from them. In order to maintain that, computers have to display everything like this in squares and rectangles.

And oh yes, borg, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I absolutely detest going to sites that have backgrounds that are too light. It is serious eye strain to read anything from them! It is, like you said, trying to read from the surface of a light bulb!

[Wolfgang of Borg]

My idea was that you could optionally turn off most of the info displayed in the left column, leaving just the poster's name, possibly their avatar (but not the thing which i guess is called a "rank image"?), their timezone, and when (in my local time) the post was written.

If i want to see when someone joined, or their postcount, or the flag of their home country, or the name of their city, or how many blog posts they've written, or what their gamer handles are, or what instant messaging accounts they have, then i can bloody well just visit their user info page!

Also an option like "show sigs but only if they're less than 50 pixels tall" might be good? It'd let people link to stuff they like but without allowing obnoxiously large images... again this is more of an issue when browsing on a phone (which is a market i definitely think you should pay attention to, it seems bound to become more popular in the future).

Anyway sorry don't mean to be hypercritical, it's just that since you're altering the site anyway atm i thought now'd be the time to speak up.

[SliceOfDog]

Anyway sorry don't mean to be hypercritical, it's just that since you're altering the site anyway atm i thought now'd be the time to speak up.

Never worry about making suggestions, Borg. Even if they're impossible or we disagree with them, it's more useful for us to know how members feel than to have them suffer in silence. In this case, I'm not sure we'll be able to get a whole lot done about it, although some minimisation could be done. We could do with making the rank images smaller, or adding an option to turn them off completely, and maybe creating a limit on sig sizes (Nelle always seems to delight in shoving as much into his signature as humanly possible XD ) but I don't think going back to basics is a good idea, at least not as default. If it's available as an option for people such as yourself, then absolutely. But I think it looks more appealing for new members to be nearer what we have now that what you seem to want, and speaking as admin, I do find join date, post count and location quite useful, and I would say that I read those at some point every other visit thanks to their being right there for me. I can't say I ever use the Gamer IDs and IMs and so on though.
But yes, my vote would be to minimise the space as much as possible without dropping anything for now, and trying, if possible, to create an option to remove everything except the essentials: Name, post, and time of post.

I do have to agree with the white backgrounded boards though, I find them a terrible strain. It's the one reason I'm not worried about books dying out as a medium any time soon. I'd much rather have a nice paperback in hand than be reading from a PC screen or iPad or anything similar. However, it's odd that we prefer white text on dark background, isn't it, considering that we (well, I can only speak for myself, but I imagine you guys feel the same way) are happy to read black text on white when it's on paper.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

> I don't think going back to basics is a good idea, at least not as default.

Oh no not as default, by default you should show everything, i just think that there should be the option of hiding that stuff for those who want it.

> an option to remove everything except the essentials: Name, post, and time of post.

And timezone. That's vital context for understanding what someone's saying, imho. Also avatar images are still useful because you can recognise them at a glance, instead of usernames which have to be read.

> I do have to agree with the white backgrounded boards though, I find them a terrible strain. It's the one reason I'm not worried about books dying out as a medium any time soon. I'd much rather have a nice paperback in hand than be reading from a PC screen or iPad or anything similar.

You know you can just like tell your browser to display any page with any colour scheme you want, right? I wrote a simple bookmarklet to do that, and there's all kinds of browser add-ons and online services (it doesn't do it by default but last i checked it was there as an option) that do the exact same thing...

Also you're ignoring epaper (like the Amazon Kindle or Nook or Sony or Philips ebook readers), originally invented for military purposes (such displays are much higher resolution than comp screens and only draw pow3r when they're being updated (i.e. when turning a page), ideal for like maps or, indeed, books) but which now seem set to take off in an office / student / smartphone context -- imagine being able to carry around a device that you can read easily in sunlight and which can carry gigabytes of legal documents, memos, engineering blueprints, textbooks, novels, comics, etc...

> However, it's odd that we prefer white text on dark background, isn't it, considering that we (well, I can only speak for myself, but I imagine you guys feel the same way) are happy to read black text on white when it's on paper.

It's because paper works by reflecting light (so your eye pupils can adjust to the ambient surroundings) vs computer screens which work by emitting light, hence the lightbulb thing. "Passive" vs "active" displays, i believe the nerd terminology is.

For years i tried to find out where the "paper is white so computer displays should glow white" meme started, turns out it was Douglas Engelbart, who also invented mouses and hypertext (i guess two out of three isn't so bad, particularly given how great the other two were).

Hopefully eventually user agent ident strings will contain a field like "userPrefers:light-on-dark-text" or whatever, so sites can offer alternative stylesheets depending on what one's preference is...

[Rick Canaan]

Another argument against minimalism is the ability for members to express themselves.

When Daryn and I first began designing these sites, I told him I wanted dark backgrounds and the ability for members to put as much information in their profiles as they could. Well, not only in their profiles, but to have the ability to display it along with their avatars, so that it showed up along with every post.

This gives people the ability to express themselves. But more importantly, it also allows people to show how long they have been on the site, what their standing on the site is, what trophies they've earned, what their interests are, etc. It allows people to be individuals on the site. If we took away ranks, game cards, country flags, and everything else, everyone would be just one more name adding their thoughts to forum posts. I think... no, I know that taking that away would be a mistake. And a big one.

As for the dark backgrounds, one of my reasons were as were mentioned earlier in this thread. It is much easier on the eyes to read light colored texts from a dark medium, than it is the other way around. But even more than that, I wanted our sites to have dark themes. Why? So member content - signatures, avatars (and you'll notice that we provide for very generously sized avatars), and other member-added imagery or color selections used for their self expression - would provide the site its color. Doing it that way, gives the feeling, and rightly so, that the site belongs more to the members, than it does to the "high and lofty" admins who run it. Moreover, with every addition of color and decoration members give themselves, they are adding to the beauty of the site. Also, in that way, members can feel like they have contributed the site's beauty, and made a small part of the site their very own, by adding their personal touches to it.

Long gone is the day of the text bulletin board systems. With today's Internet speeds and bandwidths, I see no reason to not see how far the envelope can be stretched. For those who do not like the color, images and other stuff that comes with this, there is the "Turn off Images" option available in their browsers.

We can't please everybody, and we're not going to try to. But what we are going to do, is do our best to make our sites as beautiful as they can be made to look, and make them as appealing to use to members as we can. Besides, this is a site which celebrates science-fiction. If we did this site in just plain text, or took a "Spartan" approach to its layout and function, what we would be doing is making people scratch their heads and wonder if the people who ran this place had the first clue about what we were doing.

And I challenge anyone. Find a discussion site anywhere in the furry fandom that is as beautiful as Scififur.net. If you can find one, start a poll on it. If more members agree that the site is more beautiful than ours than not, then I will pay for a commission for you from Legacy350.

I know that to some people, we seem a little mad about forum development. Or at the very least, a little over-the-top with it. But I promise you, there is method to our madness. Just look at our site for proof. We do have the most beautiful discussion site anywhere in the furry fandom. I stake money on it (and I have).

[Wolfgang of Borg]

> If we took away ranks, game cards, country flags, and everything else, everyone would be just one more name adding their thoughts to forum posts. I think... no, I know that taking that away would be a mistake. And a big one.

No, not taking them away, just offering readers the option to ignore them.. i don't care what someone's prestige lvl is, or where exactly they live, or how good they are at Tetris, or whatever... what they have to say is the main thing i care about, everything else just distracts from that.

(But then i am a borg collective after all, individuality is overrated imo.)

No one is "just one more name" imho so long as people are interested in them and what they have to say,.. that it'd be nice to be able to read it without all the unnecessary vertical-space wasting cruft is all i'm trying to suggest here.

> Doing it that way, gives the feeling, and rightly so, that the site belongs more to the members, than it does to the "high and lofty" admins who run it.

But the admins are still kings, everyone knows this, trying to hide the fact does nothing but seem disingenuous. The main thing is that we trust them with their power, which obv we do or we wouldn't keep posting here. And graphical flashiness isn't even an issue, there're tons of sites that don't even allow avatar images yet still have *huge* userbases.

> Moreover, with every addition of color and decoration members give themselves, they are adding to the beauty of the site. Also, in that way, members can feel like they have contributed the site's beauty, and made a small part of the site their very own, by adding their personal touches to it.

Totally with you there, but there's a point where one person's ideas of beautification and personal expression infringes on another person's very real usability concerns. Have you never seen MySpace, or Tripod (back in the old days), where users were given near total freedom over the site's appearance? Yellow text on white backgrounds and the like were fucking rife!

I'm not saying that everything should be text, just that ppl should have the ability to limit how many random .gifs and irrelevant pieces of info get shoved in their faces is all.

We don't all go around everywhere IRL with a "Hi! My Name Is ..." miniautobiography stuck to our T-shirts, do we? No, that would be silly and really distracting.

> For those who do not like the color, images and other stuff that comes with this, there is the "Turn off Images" option available in their browsers.

(EDIT: also that wouldn't do anything to help with the superfluous avatar column trivia, either)

That'd be like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, totally overextreme, like gouging your eyes out because you don't like seeing ugly people or something. Better to just give ppl options about what they want to see by default, i think, yes? Teh existence of rose-tinted glasses would make everyone's lives easier...

Everything would (in my ideal world) still come with a "see everything" button, just it would be a choice, not a dictate.

> We can't please everybody, and we're not going to try to.

Of course not, it just seems like having the option of a more minimal layout would be nice for those as need it. As i said this is kindof an issue with the upcoming smartphone thing, happily i'm on an unmetered plan but some ppl have to pay for every kilobyte they ever so slowly download, you know?
And plus all the scrolling to get between the tiny fragments of actual interesting content makes my thumb tired :[

And again, i really don't want to be overcritical or adversarial here, this is by far one of the most useable sites i know of. Just wanted to add my tuppenceworth since ya'll were asking what ppl thought about the site...

[Daryn]

All of that said, I was curious to see if I could put something together. I have managed to make this rough draft so far. It needs some refinement, but it is a start.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Hee oh wow that's pretty much exactly what i was hoping for! Stick some timezone info and maybe an avatar pic (and a button that'll show *all* info, like the current style does, but just for one post at a time) in there and it'd be just perfect in my book. Thanks for considering my idea man!

Sorry again for getting argumentative above, i still think this is one of the best designed sites around (aside from all the scrolling) so your current strategy is probably working fine tbh. Maybe you could have a poll as to whether there should be the option of a condensed layout?

Maybe like if you access the site with a http://www.scififur.net/... URL you get the current layout, but with a http://m.scififur.net/... one you get the minimal mobile version? That'd be most useful, imho, and let ppl easily choose which one they want without having to mess with Settings or anything.

Anyway i'll be off soon to try and write my game, can't wait to see what the place looks like when i get back!

[Rick Canaan]

But the admins are still kings, everyone knows this, trying to hide the fact does nothing but seem disingenuous. The main thing is that we trust them with their power, which obv we do or we wouldn't keep posting here.

Sorry again for getting argumentative above, i still think this is one of the best designed sites around

Actually, your doggedness in expressing your opinion is something we appreciate, borg-dog. Moreover, your forthrightness about it, and keeping things politely to your points, while you go about it.

On that point, Daryn is in fact, writing a whole new template based on your suggestions. From my discussion with him about it tonight, when he gets it ready, it will be available in the dropdown theme selector at the bottom of the forums. Members will be able then, to choose between the theme we have now, and the minimalist one he is creating, based on your suggestions.

In response to the first passage I have quoted from your replies, I have to say that not all administrators are created equal. Case in point, if I were the kind of administrator that followed your suggested analogy, it would be me running the site, and not Daryn and SliceofDog. I own the server upon which Scififur.net is based, and therefore have the right, should I choose to exercise it, to take over the site from Daryn and SliceofDog and run it, myself.

I however, obviously, have not.

The why of it is simple.

Far too many sites (and a great many of these I will not visit) are run like little personal fiefdoms. A guy downloads some bulletin board software, has a little knowledge about putting a server together, and then starts believing himself the ruler of the universe because people have started populating his site and looking to him as its administrator. I have seen abuses of power like this time and time again.

My view of running a site is to create something that people can enjoy. It isn't about prestige, about bossing people around, or becoming some kind of revered administrator.

Of course, running a successful site comes with prestige. It is unavoidable. People come to like the site and to look up to the people who run it. But my view of running a successful site is that one present something to their community, give it recognizable structure, a rule of law (site policies if you like), and then stepping back to let people enjoy what you have created. People enjoying what you have created is its own reward.

Also, I have come to recognize that for a site to be truly successful, it needs real talent behind it. This was why someone other than myself was selected to run Scififur.net. SliceofDog, in his tenure as Scififur.net's Head Administrator, has taken it much further than I or Daryn ever could. He has been a driving force for both, creativity and of bringing an atmosphere of convivial buoyancy to the site. Had it been me in fact running Scififur.net, I know that I could not have taken the site to anywhere near where he has brought it.

And that, in my view, is what it means to be an administrator. It is about giving something to people. It isn't about being looked up to, being the one in control; it is about being a leader whose main interests lie in those whom he serves. I could turn this site into my own, personal little fiefdom if I wanted to. But what I want is to see people enjoy what has been created for them. If I get looked up to for that, then I am happy for it to be so. But I do not want to be looked up to only because I am an administrator.

It is to that end that your suggestions have been taken with merit, bog-dog. We do want to see people enjoy the site. If that means buckling down to create a whole new theme for people to choose from, then so be it. We in fact, invite suggestions from everyone. If there is a way for the suggestion to be implemented, then members are very likely to see it show up. Also, though, we would like for everyone to please be aware that we are hobbyists at this. We have no professional programmers on staff. We're just a bunch of guys doing this in our spare time. So, given that, it may take some suggestions longer to implement than others, and some others we may not even be able to implement at all. But also, given that, it can sometimes find us with our backs up when people don't show appreciation for what has been put into the site. Four hours spent rummaging through code to make a change somebody wants, can often be four hours away from something else we would rather do. It is all volunteer work, and every bit of it is done during hours that we would otherwise have free. A little thanks and praise to the people who work on the site, can often go a long way, too.

We have worked very hard to make Scififur.net the best site in the furry fandom - and it is something I think we have achieved. We are committed to continuing that trend, too. So keep your suggestions coming, borg-dog, and everyone else. Suggestions, yes, may often create more work, but they are also some of the highest compliments a site can get. Suggestions, after all, are people showing interest in what they like. And making something people could like, is what we have done all of this work for.

[SliceOfDog]

Bravo! Very well said, Rick (and many thanks for the compliments, it always brightens my day!)

I don't think I have anything else to add to this, because it's pretty much all been said. However, I have just noticed something that might be of use: Borg and Daryn, could you both check out the Topic Review in the Advanced Post screen? It's the part that lists all previous posts in that topic. It's extremely compact, but keeps username, post time, and the format of the post (so quote boxes are still there, as well as italics and so forth)
Could that be useful to base a new design off of?

[Daryn]

I believe I've got the editor's popup dialog boxes now fixed. You should now be seeing a gray background to them instead of white.

I think the buttons are the only things that are still a little off. Will sort those out ASAP.