A few small changes.

[Hawk]

I changed the color of my sig but it's hard to get a color that looks good on a dark and light background.

I do think the color needs to be changed for Registered Users. That maroon-like color doesn't work real well on the dark background. Same with the Global Moderators, although I don't think there's any Global Moderators set up.

Again, finding a color that looks good on dark and light backgrounds is the trick.

[Gumboots]

I do think the color needs to be changed for Registered Users. That maroon-like color doesn't work real well on the dark background.

That's funny, because to me it looks much better. The bright red was taking over the whole page. I find the maroon distinct but better for balance. But the downside is that it's fairly close to the admin brown on the light backgrounds.

Same with the Global Moderators, although I don't think there's any Global Moderators set up.

Was thinking about that. With the low activity these days there's no real need for moderators, and Milo and Ned haven't been around for yonks anyway. It occurred to me that just having admin and normal members is probably good enough.

[Gumboots]

Have gone ahead and removed the board moderators. The groups are still there, in case they are ever needed. I've also hidden the groups legend down the bottom of the main page as there's not much point having it. Everyone is in the normal members group, apart from admins, and they're pretty obvious.

I'm also rearranging some of the boards a bit. I figure it makes sense to have things like guidelines as announcements in the newbies board. That way nobody can miss them. Fewer boards up top also means less stuff to scroll past if you just want to talk about the game, so most of the time it should be more convenient.

[Gumboots]

Hey what do you think of this look?

[RulerofRails]

Is there any option for strike-through? I want to correct some out-dated info in one of my old posts without removing completely what was there originally. Maybe there is a reason it's not here and I forgot it with time?

PS
I tried the dark theme some more, but can't get used to it yet. I would say your shot is an improvement, but I haven't got any attachment to the darkside at the moment. I did notice that some smilies don't have crisp edges and you can see bits of white around them when in dark mode. But I suppose this is immediately visible to anyone.

[Gumboots]

Yeah they're gif's, and gif's don't do partial transparency, so people fill in the jaggy bits with a colour that more or less matches the background. Which works fine as long as you don't change the background.

I'm not planning on forcing anyone to use the dark theme. I just like having it as an option.

I added a custom BBCode for strike through. It's at the bottom of the custom dropdown thingy. Or you can type it manually if you're using the quick reply.

Works like this.

Code: Select all

[strike]Works like this.[/strike]

---

I've played around with the look and layout a bit more, I like having the site menu separate from the forum stuff (seems to make sense) so that's gone to the top of the page. Have also messed with the header, so there aren't so many separate pieces. I like the banner and navbar in one unit.

Have also played with typography and layout a bit on the boards section. This is all just CSS so far. I haven't done any template hacking. Once I get it rationalised I'm thinking I'll use the same basic setup for light and dark styles, and just change colours to suit.

[RulerofRails]

Thanks for the strike code.

Off-topic: What are the restrictions on the advanced search and ignored words? Some words like "industry" are ignored. Which maybe is fine because who would search just that. But sometimes when I do a search I want to put something like "industry profit" and it's not possible from what I can tell. Is that something that saves server bandwidth (a good thing). I have no idea, just wondering if the update did anything for search capabilities?

[Gumboots]

Dunno. Haven't looked at the search settings yet. Hang on and I'll go check.

[Gumboots]

Gave it a tweak. See if that helps.

[RulerofRails]

Thanks for looking. I tried a bit, not sure I saw a difference. It is a minor thing for sure. Don't make a change just cause of my whim. I wont be online for some hours now, so don't be surprised about that.

[Hawk]

Things are looking pretty good. Looking forward to your changes going live.

[Gumboots]

Allllllllllllllll righty then.

Tweaks are now running live on Prosilver Dark. Note that it is still a bit WIP, but it's enough to give the general idea. I'll probably code it up with different banners for different boards, just for fun, but that's not live yet. Am also planning a few more layout tweaks, maybe a bit of tweaking of colours, blah blah blah.

The default Prosilver, and Aero, now have the website menu up top too. Aero's menu is styled for the black variant.

[RulerofRails]

Nice. I like the pic of the steamer in the Dark header. It's making it harder for me to decide if I should stay on the dark or not.

[Gumboots]

Oh don't worry about that. I'm likely to go nuts on banners, so they'll all end up with something groovy.

What I'll do is change the header coding so that the H&B logo and the text are part of the banner image. That will allow better matching of looks for each banner, and there won't be any worries about text scaling and positioning in narrow windows (for people who use them). It'll all just work as one unit, and the default text can be ditched.

[Gumboots]

Ok, the login form is now at the top of the page, just beneath the banner. Much more convenient location, IMO. Beats me why they wanted to hide it at the bottom of the page.

This worked out quite well. The site menu extension had a file to call content after the banner anyway, and I had emptied that file when I moved the menu to the top of the page. So, all I had to do was transfer the login form to that file and delete it from Prosilver's index_body.html file. Hey presto, login form appears below the banner in all styles. Throw a bit of eye candy at it and Bob's your uncle.

[Hawk]

Coming along nicely.

I just noticed something. I don't recall seeing these commas before (after the subforum titles) but they sure stand out in the ProSilver Dark Edition.

Here's a shot from Aero:

And ProSilver:

Now look at ProSilver Dark Edition:

Here's what shows when viewing the source code:

Code: Select all

<i class="icon fa-file-o fa-fw  icon-blue icon-md" aria-hidden="true"></i>Default RT3 Campaigns</a>, 															<a href="./viewforum.php?f=84" class="subforum read" title="No unread posts">
			<i class="icon fa-file-o fa-fw  icon-blue icon-md" aria-hidden="true"></i>Default RT3 Scenarios</a>, 															<a href="./viewforum.php?f=85" class="subforum read" title="No unread posts">
		<i class="icon fa-file-o fa-fw  icon-blue icon-md" aria-hidden="true"></i>User Created RT3 Scenarios</a>, 															<a href="./viewforum.php?f=86" class="subforum read" title="No unread posts">
			<i class="icon fa-file-o fa-fw  icon-blue icon-md" aria-hidden="true"></i>Version 1.05 Scenarios</a>, 															<a href="./viewforum.php?f=87" class="subforum read" title="No unread posts">
			<i class="icon fa-file-o fa-fw  icon-blue icon-md" aria-hidden="true"></i>Version 1.06 Scenarios</a>, 															<a href="./viewforum.php?f=89" class="subforum read" title="No unread posts">
<i class="icon fa-file-o fa-fw  icon-blue icon-md" aria-hidden="true"></i>Unfinished Maps</a>

I'm not sure if this was something added in the new version of the forum software or that I just didn't notice it before, but with the addition of ProSilver Dark Edition it really stands out.
Not sure if there's anything that can be done about it though. I had a quick look in the ACP and nothing jumped out at me, but you know how to dig deeper so maybe you can figure something out - if you even want to.

[Gumboots]

Don't worry. I already know about it. They're part of all the styles, but on the dark one I'm experimenting with putting that collection of subforums into columns for better readability. That requires setting a width on the columns, and the commas are hard-coded into the markup after each subforum name. I can get rid of them easily with a small markup hack. I just haven't got around to it yet.

ETA: @Hawk - I've sorted the commas now.

And I have to say, having just logged in this morning, that the login form up top is much better than hunting around for the thing.

PS: I'm thinking I'll ditch the "Pretty Topics" extension. Frankly, it ain't that pretty. Also it creates an entire new CSS file for one rule, which is the sort of thing that gets up my nose. I could tweak it, but I don't think it adds enough to be worth the bother. What I might do instead is split stickies out to a separate display, the way announcements are currently done. There are a couple of ways to tackle that:

1/ Simply turn stickies into announcements, in which case they will automatically get separated.

2/ That will look a little bit silly sometimes, since most of them aren't announcements as such, but I can get around that by changing the heading of the separate chunk from "Announcements" to "Stickies", or even just to whatever suits ("Pinned Topics" is a fairly common description of such critters). The "Announcements" heading is just a common language string, which can be changed. For this site I could even cheat and use hard-coded text.

Code: Select all

					<dt<!-- IF S_DISPLAY_ACTIVE --> id="active_topics"<!-- ENDIF -->><div class="list-inner"><!-- IF S_DISPLAY_ACTIVE -->{L_ACTIVE_TOPICS}<!-- ELSEIF topicrow.S_TOPIC_TYPE_SWITCH and (topicrow.S_POST_ANNOUNCE or topicrow.S_POST_GLOBAL) -->{L_ANNOUNCEMENTS}<!-- ELSE -->{L_TOPICS}<!-- ENDIF --></div></dt>

[Gumboots]

Ok, I'm ditching the custom site logo extension too. It's bonkers complex for what it actually does. It'd be easy to just upload the actual H&B logo to overwrite the default phpBB logo. That way we'll still have the custom one, but without requiring a humungous pile of code in an extension. This is bound to be less trouble for me sooner or later.

ETA: Done.

ETA again: Come to think of it, I'm not sure there's any need to have a news scroller and a global announcements box. Seems to me that they're more or less doing the same job most of the time. The only time both would be handy is if you have some important urgent news but simultaneously want to advertise something (like a new map or whatever) in the scroller, but I can't see that happening very often. The global announcements box has the advantage that its maintained by the phpBB team, so there will never be a problem keeping it updated.

[Hawk]

The subforum columns do look better.

Where'd you get that picture in the header of ProSilver? It looks a lot like a town just south of me.

[Gumboots]

I thought you might like it. Since I did myself a steamer for the dark style I figured "Hawk would probably like a US diesel, because he's a bit funny like that".

I found it on https://pxhere.com/ when I went looking for public domain images. It's just called csx-railroad-train.jpg and it doesn't give an actual location in the tags.

By the way, I've been looking into the coding some more. The markup and CSS on Prosilver is just nuts. I'm going to need some serious pacifiers by the time I get done with this thing.