Ok, first off, I've moved all the stuff about what I'm doing to the site itself into the blog and out of the forum, since discussion about the forum itself seems to be dominating, and while we all may be navel-watchers at heart, with Halo and Myth 3 coming out there are going to be more interesting things to post about.
Recent Changes
The return of our proper DNS name means we're back at http://rampancy.net. The links on the site that were pointing to http://synfibers.com/rampancy have been replaced.
All the Rampancy themes have been tweaked slightly to prevent some issues that were reported: namely, the appearance of thread listings and/or multiple reply post forms when viewing the forum index in the threaded-max or list-max modes (where all message bodies are displayed).
The new comment button is suppressed when viewing a message body with its subthread in the list-min or threaded-min modes; it isn't necessary since there is a post reply form right there, and because clicking it had the confusing effect of producing a *second* post reply form.
The threaded-min index should now have a prettier look, with threads more clearly organized; the first post in a thread is offset by a little space and has a bold subject. When viewing a message in a thread, that thread's subject is displayed in bold and is no longer a link.
With the login cookie now set for 7 days, posts are now displayed as new when they've been created in the last six hours.
Known Issues
If you use The Dreaded WWW to login at http://www.rampancy.net, right now you'll get logged out when you hit a link to http://rampancy.net. The quick fix? Use the short address and bookmark that one, everything will be OK. The longer fix is I'll be changing the hard links to ones relative to the current URL so that won't happen anymore.
When viewing the first thread in a post in the threaded-min mode, the subject line for that post does not appear in the thread display itself. We are aware of it and will fix it; It's just a low-priority fix given the fact that 1) you're already looking at that message and It's above the current thread, and 2) once you get past viewing the first post in the thread, the problem just goes away.
The forum doesn't know when you logged in last now since logins are persistent. we're working on a better way of labelling new posts other than just in the last six hours. We may make it a user preference.
There's just a global limit on things like the number of posts displayed in the forum index, the number of items in a box, etc etc. We are also working towards making this a user preference.
There's some ambivalence about the quoting code. Right now it continues to add quote indicators and wordwrap, as well as indicating the speaker near the top of the post to preserve the context of replies, rather than removing all but the previous message. Some people like this because it makes following threads easier; some don't because after awhile the replies get messy and to write a clear post you need to delete a lot of ugly crap. madmax has graciously donated some Perl code for the quoting system he wrote for Subnova's forum, which much more elegantly formats and colors varying levels of quotation; it should clear up both the message display and the contents of the reply box. we're going to test this soon.
User ratings right now only display submitted story items and not voting on forum comments-- although right now there's little need for moderation.
If there are any other issues you've noticed, or requests for changes or new features, just comment on this entry and I'll add them to the list.
Comments
Johnny Law
Since you asked :-)
In UnConeD the normal thread view needs a background IMO. I think the background used for the thread-fragment displayed when replying to a post is quite nice; why not do the same thing for the main thread view?
narcogen
Custom theme support
In reply to: Since you asked :-)Johnny Law wrote on Friday, 10/19/2001 - 00:18:
: In UnConeD the normal thread view needs a background IMO.
: I think the background used for the thread-fragment
: displayed when replying to a post is quite nice; why not do
: the same thing for the main thread view?
Yeah, that should be no problem.
In general, however, I think what I might just do is make links to an archive of themes files to be downloaded, so that anybody can look at them, tweak the HTML if they like, and send a new theme to me for inclusion; might be easier to do that than for me to build a custom theme for everybody.
narcogen
Some more fixes
In reply to: Since you asked :-)Johnny Law wrote on Friday, 10/19/2001 - 00:18:
: In UnConeD the normal thread view needs a background IMO.
: I think the background used for the thread-fragment
: displayed when replying to a post is quite nice; why not do
: the same thing for the main thread view?
Take a look now, I think this should look as you requested.
Also the thread structure has been modified a bit more. This should benefit IE users on PCs and Opera users; the spacing that was a little funky should now be exactly what WebBBS users expect.
Furthermore, the "missing first post" bug should now be gone forever.
Johnny Law
Re: Some more fixes
In reply to: Some more fixes: Take a look now, I think this should look as you
: requested.
Hmm, don't see a change. Here's what it looks like on my end: http://www.clanplaid.net/~johnny/temp_images/rampancy_forum.jpg
No box around the thread display, and a dark background.
Same for these user blog threads too, BTW.
narcogen
About Unconed
In reply to: Re: Some more fixesJohnny Law wrote on Friday, 10/19/2001 - 04:31:
: : Take a look now, I think this should look as you
: : requested.
:
: Hmm, don't see a change. Here's what it looks like on my
: end:
: http://www.clanplaid.net/~johnny/temp_images/rampancy_forum.jpg
:
: No box around the thread display, and a dark background.
:
: Same for these user blog threads too, BTW.
Ah, Ok.. The HTML code that is wrapped around the node displays is embedded in the program logic itself.
The Unconed theme, basically, displays all node content in the grey-background table that "floats" in between the two black table cells.
Routines that call the "box" function are creating the HTML defined by that theme to go around the reply thread listings, the post reply box, etc.
But none of those functions are called to display the current node-- the output from the scripts just "falls" into the theme where it's laid.
If I change the characteristics of that table, the whole background will go to grey.
I could rebuild Unconed to have an entirely different table structure... but it's getting a bit extreme considering that at current count, about 3 people on the site are using it.
If you're game, when I'm done tweaking the existing themes, which should be soon-- I'll build a zip files with all of them inside, let people download them, tweak 'em, and then I can add new personal variations if you like.
The only caveat there is that each of the themes also includes a bit of theme-specific program logic, not just HTML-- so if you mess with it in the wrong way, you could end up with something that just won't work at all.
Johnny Law
Re: About Unconed
In reply to: About UnconedHmm. OK... I thought it would be a simple tweak since the thread-fragment displays do have a background in UnConeD. If it's not, don't sweat it, and I'll wait for the themes to be downloadable.
nfin8zero
Design Question
In reply to: Since you asked :-)Hey Narc..
I know this happens in R.net Classic Theme .. it may happen in others, I haven't checked.. the forum links are targeting _new. Is this supposed to happen?
and yeah.. those hard coded links are annoying...
-nfin
narcogen
target new
In reply to: Design Questionnfin8zero wrote on Friday, 10/26/2001 - 05:51:
: Hey Narc..
:
: I know this happens in R.net Classic Theme .. it may
: happen in others, I haven't checked.. the forum links are
: targeting _new. Is this supposed to happen?
No. Actually, I had changed it so that any of the news feed boxes-- the forum threads included-- were supposed to open in new windows ONLY if they were from another site, but in a later change to the XML news feed module I lost that change. It's back now.
:
: and yeah.. those hard coded links are annoying...
:
: -nfin
Narcogen
Johnny Law
XML feed
The rampancy.net XML feed is having problems:
Mebbe there's a debug switch turned on that is messing it up.
Johnny Law
Fixing the Goofy theme
I was playing with themes and noticed that the Goofy theme, while looking fine in IE, was moderately crap in NS and Mozilla even though it is supposed to work in those browsers.
Here's how to fix it.
In the DOCTYPE declaration, remove the explicit URL to the DTD. In other words, it looks like this originally:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
and if you change it to look like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
then suddenly the Goofy theme is happy in all 3 modern browsers. A little unnerving; one wonders why the Mozilla engine has a different default idea of what "transitional" means than the official DTD does. However it's also pretty clear that the official DTD was doing the wrong thing with table cells containing images, so I guess it's all good.
narcogen
Re: Fixing the Goofy theme
In reply to: Fixing the Goofy themeJohnny Law wrote on Tuesday, 10/23/2001 - 10:14 pm:
: I was playing with themes and noticed that the Goofy
: theme, while looking fine in IE, was moderately crap in NS
: and Mozilla even though it is supposed to work in those
: browsers.
:
: Here's how to fix it.
:
: In the DOCTYPE declaration, remove the explicit URL to the
: DTD. In other words, it looks like this originally:
:
: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
: Transitional//EN"
: "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
:
: and if you change it to look like this:
:
: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01
: Transitional//EN">
:
: then suddenly the Goofy theme is happy in all 3 modern
: browsers. A little unnerving; one wonders why the Mozilla
: engine has a different default idea of what "transitional"
: means than the official DTD does. However it's also pretty
: clear that the official DTD was doing the wrong thing with
: table cells containing images, so I guess it's all good.
Done-- better late than never. I didn't notice the comments here until I posted my blog entry for today-- another one of the problems related to having comments in more than one place.
Narcogen
nfin8zero
Addition of Myth III forum on main page
Uhm... is it me, or are the (main page) columns funked up again?
Maybe they should be changed to dynamicly size themselves.. I don't know about the xml side.. but in html its easy.. as you probably know. I don't know about recent varieties of browser compatibility issues with this idea though... I haven't designed/developed sites since.. IE5.5 on the Mac and PC came out. :P
-nfin
nfin8zero
your code's showing dude
It looks like I have some code not hiding or something on the lower left of my Classic Theme. Just wanted to let you know narc.
cheers
-nfin