THE PACK Message Boards

As you may have noticed, the location has finally changed. Feel free to complain about anything with the new theme.

nice job

Cool.

As for the new theme, I do have a few issues with it. In particular, a post's user info is now on the right instead of the left, which makes it difficult to quickly associate a given post with its user (you start reading on the left, so you have to force yourself to look to the right to see who posted, before you can start reading; and the name next to the avatar seems less prominent, but this may be due to it's right-aligned position). There is the name just under the post's subject, but it's easy to miss. There also seems to be a lot less in the way portions of a post are separated, which makes various bits of information mush together unnaturally. The "quote" and "report" buttons seem to be dangerously close to each other, too, which could cause accidental reporting when you mean to quote.

Other than those issues, though, it seems nice, so far.

Chris wrote:a post's user info is now on the right instead of the left

That's due to the theme being derived from "prosilver" (one of the default themes) of which has the user information on the right. It can be modified, but I'll wait for further input by others.

Chris wrote:There also seems to be a lot less in the way portions of a post are separated

I'd be curious of a screenshot, in case if what you're viewing differs. I may be able to just add more separation simply.

Chris wrote:The "quote" and "report" buttons seem to be dangerously close to each other, too, which could cause accidental reporting when you mean to quote.

I believe it was actually that way prior. Otherwise if a person does accidentally hit "report" they still have yet to fill out the report; so if someone accidentally clicks it, it's of no harm. Again, I may be able to just add more spacing.

Lastly, the theme itself is incomplete. Some elements were just taken from the old theme just for the sake of getting it temporarily done. A few parts here and there still have to be tweaked (i.e. the friend's list on the left when you're in the User Control Panel), since some of it wasn't noticed/tested when the theme was being modified/created.

The experiment seems to be a success, herr doktor. Slight mutation, but that's to be expected with this type of thing.

Ahh, addendum: All the links to specific threads and whatnot no longer work, which makes sense since this board cloned everything but changed the .com to .net
By that I mean things like this, that link to thepack.network. Following the link brings you to the redirection page telling you the forum migration is complete.
http://www.thepack.network/thepackboard ... file&u=428

It's not a big problem, as the address is still 95% correct, but I can see how it could cause some problems. Would a Find & Replace possibly work, or would that replace all .com links with .net links, even ones having nothing to do with thepack.network?

takyoji wrote:

Chris wrote:a post's user info is now on the right instead of the left

That's due to the theme being derived from "prosilver" (one of the default themes) of which has the user information on the right. It can be modified, but I'll wait for further input by others.

I don't know how much of it is modifiable, but would it be possible to make it an option in the control center? Just in case some poeple like it on the right.

Chris wrote:There also seems to be a lot less in the way portions of a post are separated

I'd be curious of a screenshot, in case if what you're viewing differs. I may be able to just add more separation simply.

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/1066/piccie5.png

That's basically how I see it. You can see how the post title, author, and date just flow right into the post itself (it doesn't look as bad in that shot since the post starts out with a quote, but ones that don't suffer more). Unfortunately since the old board is inaccessible, I can't get a comparitive shot of it.

Chris wrote:The "quote" and "report" buttons seem to be dangerously close to each other, too, which could cause accidental reporting when you mean to quote.

I believe it was actually that way prior. Otherwise if a person does accidentally hit "report" they still have yet to fill out the report; so if someone accidentally clicks it, it's of no harm.

Ah, I see. I guess it's not really a big deal, then.

Lastly, the theme itself is incomplete. Some elements were just taken from the old theme just for the sake of getting it temporarily done. A few parts here and there still have to be tweaked (i.e. the friend's list on the left when you're in the User Control Panel), since some of it wasn't noticed/tested when the theme was being modified/created.

The theme itself is quite nice, if texturally (new word?) bare. It's mainly just the post's user info being over on the right that really throws me off.

Wingman wrote:It's not a big problem, as the address is still 95% correct, but I can see how it could cause some problems. Would a Find & Replace possibly work, or would that replace all .com links with .net links, even ones having nothing to do with thepack.network?

Yes, I've done that before. There were broken links that referred to the calypso-blue.com domain in the past. So yes, I intend on having all those posts fixed. I also believe there are some character encoding issues as well, as "smart quotes" and other non UTF-8 characters are abolished. For example "can’t" will appear as "can’t", which again, can be fixed by a find/replace method.

I like the new theme, bold yet elegant and purposeful (I'm unleashing my inner Edna).
I would agree that the name and all that other profile info feels more intuitive when put on the left, it's rather unusual to see sites put it on the right for the reason that chris mentioned, at least as long as the general language of the forum reads left to right.

I love the new look. It's so sleek and futuristic. Or something, heh.

I would request a less saturated blue. I have eye issues and it almost glows against the dark background.

Looks good. Yeah, it will take some getting used to, but at lest everything works.

A few more tweaks to the forum theme have been made. Feel free to critique; and list anything not yet addressed.

Also I was thinking: should I keep the layout as stretching to the size of the web browser window (fluid width) or having it a fixed width where it doesn't expand horizontally?

This is kinda offtopic but I have a quick question; is there a way to search for a member's topics? Just curious.

You can search by names and terms. I don't think you can search by topic