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Full Version: Forum style improvement suggestions.
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1. Darker horizontal rules. Preferably the same colour or something close to the default text colour. Not exactly rocket science, just requires a tweak in the global.css and anyone that has access to the forum's ACP can do it (just go to styles & templates -> pick the blue revolution -> global.css -> search for hr selector -> change the background-color and color properties). The current HRs stand out a lot and don't look too marvelous.

The alternative would be to simply make the HRs colourable. It would involve a simple custom BBCode that you can find here.

2. Remove table borders. Srsly, who thought this was a good idea? It's ugly and tables in general would see more use then, making many of the pages more compact (in the way of making parts of them having columns for example.

3. Perhaps adding Agency FB to the Font dropdown menu in the post view, as well as replacing Courier with Consolas or Lucida Console (argh!). Not sure how difficult that would be to implement.

4. *coughs* Percentage indents, please? *coughs*
You want a darker HR? It used to be almost invisible, so I merely picked a color which happened to be this one. If you have a better suggestion (hex code) which looks better, give me a number. I'll take a look into it and change it.

2) I agree.

3) I'll look around on that one. I do personally like Agency FB

4) Qué?
How about implementing all Office Word fonts (((:
I'm not even going to bother explaining why that wouldn't be ideal.
Well, other than cluttering up the drop down menus, it wouldn't actually make any difference. Fonts aren't stored on the forum, the request for their use is sent to the local PC. If you don't have that font, you get something similar from the same font-family. So as an example, the next serif font the computer can find instead of "Times New Roman".

Any font that you want to use - any font at all - can be used by manually typing it in. Whether other people see what you're seeing of course depends on whether they also have it installed. That's why Agency FB is so popular here - it's the font used in-game and comes bundled with Freelancer. By default, everyone has it.

While we're suggesting improvements to tables, could I also suggest adding the table header [th] function, as well as col and rowspans, for more easily customised displays? Should be some plugins that can deal with all of it as a single installation.
Quote:You want a darker HR? It used to be almost invisible, so I merely picked a color which happened to be this one. If you have a better suggestion (hex code) which looks better, give me a number. I'll take a look into it and change it.

I believe #AAAAAA would look pretty well, considering it's pretty close to the forum text default colour. Of course there are many more alternatives throughout the entire greyscale like, say, #888888. Even more, the opacity of the hr could just be tweaked slightly to make it look better. I guess the idea of a hr is not to make it visible but to have a way of clearly distinguishing parts of text. I was thinking of writing a tutorial on how to style posts nicely and I might come around to it in the near future.

Here are some examples:
[Image: 66Zsc1I.png]
background-color: #d3d3d3 - current

[Image: j8TQu9Y.png]
background-color: #aaaaaa

[Image: 78jlw2o.png]
opacity: 0.7

Live examples:
Blue Blaze transmission - current, opacity: 0.3
Zenith transmission - current, opacity: 0.3

You can play around with it yourself, just open the style editor (F12), go to global.css, Ctrl+F for "hr" and change background-color and opacity.

Though of course, for ultimate justice I guess the best course of action would be giving the people decide on the colour, see this.

Quote:4) Qué?
I guess I haven't elaborated on that anywhere since I thought it was pretty obvious, but I guess not. It's been something that should've been implemented ever since Blue Revolution was introduced, in my honest opinion.

The previous theme had an absolute width, I believe around 700-800px (?), while now the theme adapts to your screen resolution. And everything would be completely fine if it weren't for the indents. Nobody actually cared to switch the "px" to "%" on the indent bbcode and what that causes is when you indent a text very many times (I used to do that on Zettsu's tranmissions), on a widescreen monitor everything would look perfectly fine, but there still are some people who use 4:3 and for them it would look like a barely readable toilet paper strip.

Changing this is not rocket science per se, but I have no idea how exactly indents are implemented so I guess it'd have to be looked at by someone who knows.

Quote:How about implementing all Office Word fonts (((:
Get out.

Quote:Well, other than cluttering up the drop down menus, it wouldn't actually make any difference. Fonts aren't stored on the forum, the request for their use is sent to the local PC. If you don't have that font, you get something similar from the same font-family. So as an example, the next serif font the computer can find instead of "Times New Roman".
Yes and no. I agree that it would maybe not be an ideal way of solving the issue of people using trash like Impact or Courier, but it would be positive for the overall workflow, as for the headers you could just highlight them, pick Agency as one of the fonts from the dropdown and have the entire thing already done. And would hopefully deter people from using Impact.

Quote:While we're suggesting improvements to tables, could I also suggest adding the table header [th] function, as well as col and rowspans, for more easily customised displays? Should be some plugins that can deal with all of it as a single installation.
Colspan and rowspan would make header redundant, so there's little reason for that. But yes, colspan, rowspan as well as column width (percentage) would be pretty useful. It's not really necessary to use a plugin, though it would probably be easier.
Any updates on this?
So this has been sitting here for over two weeks, what about it?