Post here with comments & suggestions.

What do you think of the smilies on the left when you make a new post? Would you prefer they be more organized? How about the font colour menu on the right?

What do you think of the Title placement? Is it too big? Is it too easy to confuse it with the player name now?

Personally, I love it. This is the first reply I've made since the forum went down, and here are the features I've noticed:

-All the pretty colours thataway ======>
-Having a small faction logo beneath your avatar picture, a really nice touch
-Titles stand out more, since they are in bold/black against the name in faction colour
-A more easily acessible post counter for the uber competetive
-Ditto join date
Good Job!

I like the smilies and colour swabs as they are, though I'd certainly prefer to see the gilset, remyset, and miscset together, and matching flags for the Indie and FS factions.

Title placement is definitely too big and easy to confuse with the playername.

You have some unicode encoding issues going on, as you can see in viewtopic.php?p=82684#p82684. Some people also have borked sigs.

Links need to be more obviously links. It's impossible to tell what's a link and what isn't, at the moment.

The online/offline buttons are a bit clunky.

I like the new "Faction:" infoline, but Blue's colour seems a tad dark and unmakeoutable, and the icon is weird on a line by itself. Maybe the icon can go next to your name?

From a developer's standpoint, the lack of semantic data and bucketloads of nested <table>s make me very sad

And thank you for keeping old permalinks working

[EDIT; PS] Also, I'm not sure what everything topic title being bold except ones I've clicked on accomplishes that the standard read/unread icons doesn't. The icon legend down the bottom mentions nothing about the little dot that represents whether you posted in the thread or not. And I'd want everything above the Blue background bar ("Topics" or "Edit Post" or ...) to be more compressed - on my screen it takes up a good one-third of the screen space. And I'm not sure if I like the extra space between my post and the bar indicating the start of my sig.

I don't see any on the right. I see a huge ol' splash of them on the left, taller than the default posting box. I think a little more organizing would help them, 'specially since you have three rows exactly of Gil plus two exactly of Remy.

If the smilies section's going to be so tall, maybe there's a way to expand the post box to match?

Color on the right is way cool.


...yes. Though I'll probably get over it. Would it be possible to swap the title with the Online/Offline button so that it's with the name?


Everything Sluor said, and this especially.



Edit:
Oh, in your old announcement thread, the link to the new one is broken.

I've noticed that clicking on the name no longer brings up that person's skyrates profile. Will that feature be returning?

Easy enough to do!



Yeah, I'm not sure where to place it for maximum bestness. I suppose...perhaps underneath the player's name but smaller?


I'm not sure what borkedness I should be seeing in that thread? How are the sigs borked? Images/bbcode not working?



I agree entirely.



Hmm...I think we can make those smaller.



I tried that, and I think what occurred is that some factions had it showing up on the next line because of the length of their name, so I just had it always on the next line. We could center it though.



Such is the phpbb package =/

And thank you for keeping old permalinks working



That's a preference thing. I personally prefer scanning the titles rather than the icons.



Agreed.

I believe eventually.

Possibly. I'll peek into it.

Detaching game account and forum account is a great idea. No more accidental posts as an alt!

This looks real pretty on a short name like Pen, but has exactly the problem Taft describes on a long name like the Marquis.
I'll keep trying and show you guys what I come up with.

Ditto about the title text and the offline/online button. They're both a little too big and too awkward. By having the title text the same font size and format (bolded) as the player name, it puts them on the save level of importance. Titles are cool and all, but they should be secondary.

I also like the faction icons being added, but they seem a little out of place. I kicked around some ideas. One of the more radical ones is having a "faction avatar" underlying the "character avatar". If a persons faction changes, the modular image denoting that faction then changes. The "faction avatar" could be something visually complex or large (maybe 120x120?) or just a simple colored border.

I'll go try and make some mockups to illustrate my point across more.

(PS: simplification like what eskay did there is super awesome, cutting down the lines of text is much better in my view)

Two more short comments. Apparently my signature is an example of one that is "borked" it seems my tags are not working. Perhaps I need to reformat them with quotation marks? No big deal if so.


Also, the option to review messages posted as you typed is pretty cool and nifty. May prevent the post ninjas that seem to pop up now and then.

Sorry for the repeated posts. I went with the idea and ran with it, highlighting some possible ways the idea could come about. These are all 150x150. Obviously more minimal approaches can be smaller. Ideally, any faction avatars would recall features from the established faction logos. I made these very quick, very dirty, so please don't see them as anything but illustrations for the idea.



Again, the proposal is to merge the current faction icon with the player avatar. This could be done without making a majillion new avatars (18 charactersx7 factions) by overlapping a character avatar and a faction avatar.

I'd also like to see the gil smilies all grouped together, it's also kinda wierd that the faction symbols and flags are interrupted by...pirates, grog, gonk and woodman.
Also, would it be possible to make the Forum tab clickable when you're in the forum? It would be a nice, simple way to click back to the main page of the forum.

By the way, some users are already wrapping to a second line.