Forum Upgrade!

[Jacob Orlove]

Okay guys, you may not have noticed, but TMD had a software upgrade recently. That made our current theme slightly out of date, so we'll be upgrading that sometime this weekend. There may be some downtime as this happens, and things will probably look all funky as we get the new visuals ironed out.

If you experience any technical difficulties with the site in the next few days, or notice something that needs fixing, go ahead and post here, and we'll try to take care of it.

[Machinus]

Is this site going to be permanently on central time?

[Jacob Orlove]

You can adjust the time you see on your profile. I don't think it matters much what the default time is, but I can see if I can change it if people want. That'll have to wait until we get the new theme, though.

[Yare]

If you could fix the "mark forums read" button, I would greatly appreciate it.  It has been broken for a while.

It's good to see this place get a facelift though.  Thanks for putting forth the effort to do it.

[Jacob Orlove]

Yeah, that's one of the big issues this will fix.

[sean1i0]

Also, I don't know if this is just me or not, but the "new" button for a thread that's supposed to take me to the first unseen post in a thread continues to bring me to the first post.  I would like to say too that I've been liking the changes made.  Thanks for the updates and upgrades!

[Jacob Orlove]

Right, that's one of the other things that'll be fixed.

[MasterShake]

Is there a way for me to alternate themes in forum preferences, or am I stuck with the default?

[Jacob Orlove]

We only change the theme when it becomes incompatible with new software, so we don't allow people to use old themes. At best, you'd lose functionality, and at worst, it'd do a lot of damage to the site.

However, the new theme is mostly still in the default mode, and we have some tweaks in mind to improve it. Feel free to post suggestions here or PM them to me.

ALso, is anyone using OS X and Safari? If so, are you experiencing any problems with the site?

[Machinus]

Getting rid of the search bar at the top would be basically awesome.

[desolutionist]

We only change the theme when it becomes incompatible with new software, so we don't allow people to use old themes. At best, you'd lose functionality, and at worst, it'd do a lot of damage to the site.

However, the new theme is mostly still in the default mode, and we have some tweaks in mind to improve it. Feel free to post suggestions here or PM them to me.

ALso, is anyone using OS X and Safari? If so, are you experiencing any problems with the site?

Jacob, I'm using OSX/Safari but I don't know if the features I'm seeing are supposed to be the way they are.  In every post, it only displays 2 lines of text at a time and I have use the scroller on my mouse to scroll down to read the rest of it (2 lines at a time).  I doubt this is intentional; it is awful.



Notice your post -- how it cuts off at 2 lines.

[Jacob Orlove]

Getting rid of the search bar at the top would be basically awesome.

Yeah, I already asked Ferrett about that--he's looking into getting rid of it.

desolutionist: Bardo reported the same problem, which is why I asked about that OS/Browser combination. We'll try to figure out how to make it not happen. Please email webmaster@starcitygames.com (that's the Ferrett's email), and give him the details of what is going wrong.

[TopSecret]

I'm using Safari,
and every post has one line of text with a scroll.
I don't know if you already noticed this.
Sorry if you did,
but it's frickin' near impossible for me to read anything on TMD.

[erictehfatz0r]

So let's just say... I love the changes. Looks great guys!

EDIT: Is there going to be topic notifiers to tell what is stickied and not? I can't tell the difference between them.

[Yare]

Hrm, stickies aren't as obviously offset as they used to be.  Now they just seem to have a little shadow under there message icon.  Any way to change that?

It also seems "mark as read" is broken again, although I assume you guys are just tinkering around.

[Jacob Orlove]

Yeah, we'd like better icons. Mark as Read should be working, though. What browser/OS are you using?

[Jacob Orlove]

One consequence of the software upgrade is that there is now a one to one correspondence between accounts and email addresses. This only matters in the following case:
1) user registers an account with email A
2) user creates a second account with email B
3) email B becomes primary email, user switches both accounts to email B

It seems the system resets the two accounts to separate emails, based on which one had the current email first. If you fit the above case, and have the wrong email addy on your real account, PM me, I'll delete the second account (or just change it to a diff email), and you can set your email on your primary account to your current email.



If all that made no sense, don't worry. As long as you have the email you want to have for your account, you're fine. If you don't, and it won't let you change it, PM me.

[LotusHead]

One consequence of the software upgrade is that there is now a one to one correspondence between accounts and email addresses. This only matters in the following case:
1) user registers an account with email A
2) user creates a second account with email B
3) email B becomes primary email, user switches both accounts to email B

At LEAST two people at the last Eudemonia tourney commented that they can't make TMD accounts because they have only Hotmail email addresses.

TMD has a high readership of users who read but never post.  This I've known.  These individuals simply can't make accounts.  I know that they can get another email account and use that, but they might noot be fluent in l33tscript.  What are TMD's restrictions as far as email accounts? And why?

[ReAnimator]

I'm using Safari,
and every post has one line of text with a scroll.
I don't know if you already noticed this.
Sorry if you did,
but it's frickin' near impossible for me to read anything on TMD.

Same here with the safari problems,
I also tried OSX with fire fox and TMD wouldn't even load.
As it is right now this site is compleatly unuseable on a mac for me.
Hopefuly this all gets sorted out.
That all being said, i do like the new layout, it looks a lot better, except for the stickies, they look just like normal posts at first glance which is sort of confusing.

[Bardo]

@ Reanimator - Yeah, same thing with me. Safari, which is a sweet little browser, can't handle this site. I've temporarily switched to Netscape on my wife's Mac laptop and it worked fine for me after that.

On IE, I think the new theme looks great and would just point out, as has been said above, that stickied and locked topics need new icons. I'm also unsure about the blue mana symbol being all over the place. Does it add any functional value or is just supposed to be cool. If the case is the latter, I'd just assume dump the sucker or at least make it small. It's distracting.

At LEAST two people at the last Eudemonia tourney commented that they can't make TMD accounts because they have only Hotmail email addresses.

TMD has a high readership of users who read but never post.  This I've known.  These individuals simply can't make accounts.  I know that they can get another email account and use that, but they might noot be fluent in l33tscript.  What are TMD's restrictions as far as email accounts? And why?

Jacob or someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe yahoo and hotmail email accounts are banned for registering at TMD. Recommend they register with Gmail accounts. That works. I have free invites if anyone needs them (like 50,000,000 other people).

[Zherbus]

Bardo, this is a left-over policy from when I owned the site. It's because we'd ban someone who was on a dial-up service like AOL (non-static IP) and they'd just sign online the next day and make another junk account with those free services. We need someway to control that flood, or it's a ton of work banning and deleting.

[nataz]

I'm with Bardo, the blue mana symbols are really annoying.
Also, if people need g-mail, its not in beta anymore so you can just sign up (least thats what I thought).

[Twaun007]

I'm with Bardo, the blue mana symbols are really annoying.

Ditto. If there is away that they can be toned down to a softer blue it might not be so bad.

[Harlequin]

It really needs to be removed as the "Standard" symbol.  On the main page, forums that have -new- posts are indicated with that gigantic  ... then when you click on the forum basically every thread has the same  next to it.  On top of that the -new- icon is also blue, and roughly the same size.  It might be just me, but my brains have trouble comprehending which threads have new posts and which don't. 

Granted, I do alot of brousing before the morning coffee 

[Yare]

Yeah, we'd like better icons. Mark as Read should be working, though. What browser/OS are you using?

Button appears to be broken for me still.  I'm using Firefox and Windows XP Professional.

Edit: Nevermind.  I logged out and logged back in and it appears to be functional now.

One thing I don't like, though, is the distance between the "poster info box" on the left and the actual message.  Is there any way to tighten that up a little bit?  Hmm, it seems that the size of the poster info box is proportional to the width of my screen rather than having an absolute width.  Just something to consider, I guess.

I also share the sentiments concerning the giant blue mana symbol.

In spite of my criticisms, I want to emphasize I am glad about the changes and updates.  Thank you.

[grahf]

Posts are broken in Mac OS X Safari and Omniweb.  Every post longer than a line is truncated, with a tiny scroll box that's too small to actually use.  Strangely, the full posts display fine in the Topic Summary, such as the one I see below this reply box.

Now I can't even lurk...

[Pandora]

I'm currently working with OSX and I've had the same scrolling problem while using Safari, but it works perfectly fine in Firefox.

[Jacob Orlove]

Water Drops are gone. The Ferrett changed the CSS, which will hopefully solve people's Safari problems. Please post here if you are continuing to experience problems in Safari, OR if you have stopped having problems.

[desolutionist]

Water Drops are gone. The Ferrett changed the CSS, which will hopefully solve people's Safari problems. Please post here if you are continuing to experience problems in Safari, OR if you have stopped having problems.

Everything with Safari is fixed now. 

I also think the 'Reply', 'Reply with quote', and 'modify' links should be reconfigured so that they're more obvious/salient.

Also, the stickied Forum Rules and Useful Articles threads aren't distinguishable from regular threads.  Shouldn't they have some kind of special symbol?

[Yare]

I just noticed there is no "The Mana Drain" banner to be found anywhere on the site.

Looks good otherwise.