BETA FORUMS THREAD
I've just finished reading this entire thread, and while there was a lot of chaff in the posts, there were a few very good posts also. I'll return to those in a moment.
THE NEXT - WHO?
I'd like to learn more information about "The Next". Who is this new web-admin, what's his background, etc.
As we already know, members of the TGC forums, as a community, have very strong feelings about the forum. And, I guess, about the TGC products as well.
Many here have first learnt to program using TGC products, and have been members of the community for years. So, when I ask for a bit more background information about The Next, I think it might be of interest to everyone, because you're working on something that has become precious to many.
I've been away from the forums for about a year, and I'm just catching up and reading all of my unread messages; starting with the AppGameKit forum.
I saw some contradictory information... In the very first post The Next writes:
Quote: "I do not work for TGC so still have a full time job, plus other projects for TGC to work on."
Later, The Next writes:
Quote: "I won't say what TGC is and isn't paying me for. However I will say I am working for TGC on a large project, and for everyone that is higher priority than the forums at the moment, taking up a good number of hours per day, what I fit in the forums is just an extra on the side for the moment, although I know that TGC is interested in big improvements in a lot of areas. Very exciting time to be on the team."
So, you're working for TGC, but as an independent contractor?
MSG 2505477 BY CLONKEX
Original message
In this post Clonkex already commented on everything that I would have commented about - there's very little I can add to that. His observations and comments were SPOT ON with mine.
I'll comment with additional details to only a few points in Clonkex's post.
Quote: "Automatic image re-sizing for images larger than the page would be great as well."
Quote: "Yes! That's a very important and necessary upgrade! I hate having to scroll back and forth to read text when someone posts a huge image."
I don't know if this has been fixed on the beta forums already, but it's very simple to do even on the live forums.
I'm assuming everyone knows how to use user style sheets on their browser, either using Stylish with Firefox, or something similar on other browsers.
All you need is:
.BoardMessage div img {
max-width: 800px !important;
}
You adjust the width to suit your needs, and all images within posts, that are larger than the specified width, will be resized to fit within this max-width.
Quote: "Also an option to have the carriage returns match the post writing box so that the way you see it in the edit window is the way it comes out on the post."
Quote: "Bad. Why have widescreen monitors when all the posts are fixed at a narrow width?"
Hmm.. Manual carriage returns are already respected, so I think the original quote refers to something else, such as ADDING CARRIAGE RETURNS AUTOMATICALLY at the line wrap positions? Which would indeed be a terrible idea.
Quote: "I made a stylesheet for the site with a hovering navbar."
Quote: "NO! Please, no! Floating stuff is AWFUL! I feel like I'm looking through a tiny window when there's stuff floating in my face! "
Exactly - floating stuff, such as fixed navbars, headers or footers are generally a very very bad idea.
They may be ok for someone who uses a 27 inch monitor in portrait orientation, but they're usually just eating up space that could be used for actual content. (And if you REALLY need them, you can always make them using a user stylesheet just for yourself.)
Anyone remember what a pain it was trying to read the AppGameKit online documentation on a phone or tablet, because both the header and footer were fixed (floating)?
Like this page for example:
http://www.appgamekit.com/documentation/Reference/Sprite/CreateSprite.htm
Imagine that with a fixed header and footer, which together take up about 25% of screen realestate even on the average PC monitor.
So, I feel very strongly about this - NO fixed elements, such as floating navbars, headers or footers!
Quote: "I think it is, as someone stated earlier, about high time this forum had larger avatars. These little images are silly."
Quote: "Silly? Why? Where do you stop with size, then? It's entirely arbitrary and there's no reason to increase the size."
Indeed. Why would the avatars need to be larger? Why do you care about them? The avatars are nothing but a distraction from the text content; same thing with the badges and signatures.
Personally I've gone as far as to hide ALL profile information from every post, except the posters name.
So, I don't see your badges, avatars, signatures or any other crap, just your name, date of the post, and actual post content. The following image illustrates what I mean:
Quote: "As promised the new spoiler tag has been added."
Quote: "Useful, but I'd prefer if you had to click on it to see it. It's all too easy to brush your mouse over it and I detest having to be careful where I place my mouse lest I do something without providing any intentional input. More importantly, the flicking whenever you move your mouse around is annoying, to say the least."
I agree. It can't be hover activated.
Also, I can see that I'm going to have to replace that Spoiler cover image with something that has a bit more ambient or calm feel to it. It's terribly "in your face" as it is.
Quote: "The new highlighter needs support for DBP ... and it is case sensitive."
Quote: "That seems like a really bad idea to me, when DBPro is case-insensitive and the highlighter is case-sensitive."
Yea, the very first time I read The Next's comment saying that the highlighter is case sensitive, I thought to myself that's going to fail.
(Even if you would supply lower-case, upper-case and camel-case definitions of all keywords, you wouldn't get it right, because people don't always follow those conventions in a case-insensitive language.)
Quote: "Improving search functionality is a MUST."
Quote: "Not that I have yet had great use for such features, but I second this."
We can already use google to search the forums.
For example, in this search we're looking for information about atlas images, and restricting the search to the forums:
"atlas image site:http://forum.thegamecreators.com"
However, this isn't perfect, so yes, I can't wait to see better search functionality. And if that fails, we can always fallback to using the google search, although the google search is always a few weeks behind the live database - meaning that it's results won't include the latest posts.
MSG 2506136 BY THE NEXT
Original message
Quote: "I am still working on the forum contrast I know it needs some tweaking to meet everyone's needs."
Please, don't even bother trying to please everyone, instead concentrate on building the color customization features that were requested earlier, such that everyone could tweak them for THEMSELVES.
As we already know, colors will never ever be 100% identical on different devices, different eyes and different lighting conditions.
MSG 2507221 BY Libervurto
Original message
Quote: "Remove page width restriction and make pages scale."
I'm going to have to agree with this 100%, even though I already saw The Next's reply, where he said he wouldn't do this...
But I need to emphasize that you can't make any presumptions about the resolution (or orientation) of someones display, and pages should always be designed to be as scalable as possible. I'm strongly against fixed width elements, they are just bad design.
Quote: "Give unique ID's to: forms, buttons."
Yes. Assign unique ID's or classes to EVERYTHING!
MSG 2508077 BY EASTER BUNNY
Original message
Quote: "Can you please consider adding a new board to the app game kit section for users to post Example Code, Tutorials and Code Snipplets? I think this would help new users a lot as well as get existing users to input more."
Let's review our current options.
The Codebase
My feelings about the Codebase are very divided.
On the positive side, at first the Codebase seems like it might be great. It has very extensive code categories and a somewhat more complete search capability than the forums...
But on the negative side, we can't comment on anything in the Codebase, we can't provide revised code versions except by a tedious process of contacting the original author, or by creating a new entry for the revised version without the original authors permission.
And the Codebase is just TOO STATIC. It's not easy to see when new entries are posted.
I can't think of a better way of describing the current Codebase, except as a sort of a hidden corner of the TGC website. It feels like it's not ALIVE, like the forums are.
The AppGameKit snippets thread
It's failure is that it tries to keep all of the examples in a single thread.
It would be much better if Examples and Snippets, as a whole, had their own board, where each example and snippet had their own thread.
Also, the AppGameKit Snippets thread depends on a single person (Baxslash) to update the list of snippets whenever something new is added.
(I think the "AGK Snippet" thread suffered a slow death, and the focus of the thread shifted from "Examples by Baxslash" to "Examples by the Community". Then, at some point, the thread just died. The last post is nearly a year old already, and the last update to the list of examples is even older.)
The AppGameKit Commands Online Docs (with examples)
It was a nice addition when User Contributed Examples were added... but these online docs would be even greater if "User Contributed Notes" were allowed also! There are many ambiguities in the command documentation, and there would be no better way to point them out, than by allowing user contributed notes to commands.
Wasn't a help rewrite project started at some point? And how is it going? Forgotten and buried?
Compare the AppGameKit online docs to PHP online docs. The PHP online docs are seriously professional, and there's very good community participation.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
Or, check out the MSDN library for another professional example with the "Community Additions" feature.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms633559%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Summary
Therefore I second, that new boards for Tutorials and Example Code (whether they be snippets or complete programs) would indeed be very useful.
Authors of example code and tutorials enjoy receiving comments and feedback - which the Codebase doesn't facilitate at all, and which is the reason for it's greatest failure - there is no feeling of community participation.
I could have written about this with fewer words, but I wanted to cover it exhaustively from a few angles, and I'm not even sure if I succeeded.
MSG 2508085 BY NONZERO
Original message
Quote: "There's a code snippets section on this site that deals in all code. A stickied thread on the help section with linkies would prolly suffice."
What Help Section? You mean, this?
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=206078&b=41
I strongly disagree. A dedicated examples and snippets board is the way to go.
MSG 2509997 BY SEDITIOUS
Original message
Quote: "Just tried out the beta forums for the first time in a quite a while and I have to say I'm quite impressed! I did notice though, that there's a fair amount of blank space in posts that makes them larger than they need to be: http://s30.postimg.org/jy76oaedd/gap.jpg"
Exactly. This excessive use of empty space always annoyed me.
And it would still annoy me - had I not created custom stylesheets to get rid of it.
In the following screenshots, I have the same post visible in each tab, at the default Firefox zoom level.
Image 1 - Beta forum
* Amount of empty space: IMMENSE
* User style: Disabled
Image 2 - Live forum
* Amount of empty space: A LOT
* User style: Disabled
Image 3 - Live forum / User style
* Amount of empty space: MINIMAL
* User style: Enabled
About the user style:
- The empty space is reduced to maximize visible message content.
- Message height determines the maximum profile height, instead of the other way around.
- Has the ability to hide the profile column completely, even further maximizing visible message content.
- "caffè latte" color theme, which is easy on my eyes.
MSG 2519539 BY NONZERO
Original message
Quote: "I think, for programmers, functionality and optimization would be priority, not pretty. Admittedly, I'm a minimalist but I find too much decor on a forum to be annoying. It should be, within reason, free of clutter. The very-decorated sites are targeted at general users."
I guess I'm in the minimalist camp also, because I couldn't care less about page decorations - my concern is more about the ease of content consumption. (My time is limited, so I don't want to see any distractions.)
Having said that, I'm not opposed to anything you do to make the Forum look - amm, prettier.
Because, quite frankly, I won't be looking at it. I will override everything, exactly the way I like it to be, no matter what styles the forum uses internally.
USER DEFINED FORUM STYLES
It's great that the forum software and layout is finally receiving some attention.
The old forum was a bit of a pain to customize, because many elements didn't have their own CSS classes or IDs; whereby creating CSS selectors for anything more than very simple customizations ment having to use complex child combinator paths to be able to select exactly the elements that one wanted. (Instead of doing that, I usually resorted to using local HTTP filter proxies that inject new classes where I needed them. But those filters aren't a pleasure to maintain either. Their power is unparalleled however.)
In order to make customization easier, I do care a lot about the CSS classes and IDs in the internal structure.
This is the HTML produced for the
thread list of the AppGameKit Product Chat beta forum, particularly the "Stats" column entries:
<div class="stats">
<div class="title bold">
Views:<br/>Posts:
</div>
<div class="value">
12,875<br/>525 </div>
</div>
Let's assume that I wanted to create a user-style sheet for myself, which does NOT show the "Views: 12,875" entry at all; but only shows the number of posts - reducing the column height by a factor of 2. (Or maybe I wanted to see these entries horizontally, instead of vertically.)
It would be relatively difficult to do that, because both "Views" and "Posts" are included under the same div-element using the same class. Same goes for the div-element that has the "value" class.
However, if you used this:
<div class="stats">
<div class="title bold">
<div class="TitleViews">Views:</div>
<div class="TitlePosts">Posts:</div>
</div>
<div class="value">
<div class="ValueViews">12,875</div>
<div class="ValuePosts">525</div>
</div>
</div>
Do you see how much easier it would be for user styles to hide and rearrange these elements now?
(If sections like that aren't fixed on the server side, I will have to resort to using local HTTP filters with relatively complex regexp patterns to fix them before they're being fed to the browser.)
THE TEAM
Could a page like this be created for the actual TGC website, with a slightly more complete list of people responsible for TGC operations... perhaps including the independant contractors, such as Baxslash, Jeku, Daniel, The Next, etc... Unless these people are opposed to it.
Well, it's just a suggestion - but I would like to know more about the people behind the scenes who have worked with TGC over the years.
Cheers,
AgentSam