new CofC forum suggestions

[Corvus]

Please use this topic for suggestions on how to improve the experience on the forums.

My suggestions:
- make the forum body wider. I can't help it but this place looks cramped now when compared to the old forum
- boss skin: something low profile, white background, blue and black foreground, for discrete forum browsing while at the office
- fix anti-aliasing of smilies, these look ugly
- do something with thank points, implement a reward system
- the ability to return to the forum when in a post. For example you will see the title 'Suggestions' above this post now, but you're unable to click it.

[mahon]

1. That's the difficult part, because otherwise we'd either have to put the Menus below the forum or above it. This would make the forum wider, but can't tell if more usable...
Now it's adjusted to the website's overall layout.

This one is: MAYBE LATER, as it will be time consuming.

2. This isn't all that difficult and will probably be added as soon as I am done with basic functionalities here. One problem: if we go for light/pale/white - smilies will look bad... as there is only one set of smilies

3. Will do. But it's much work, as all have to be redone (pasted on dark background + tweaked + re-saved). If I have a volunteer for the job, I will gladly share the task.
I can send the smilies + information about color of the background.

So this one is: POSSIBLE, PLANNED, but also pretty time consuming

4. That's why medals are here. I considered implementing a rewards system, but writing a custom one is much too much work, and none of those available felt satisfactory.

In short: I think we'll award several types of medals to people who have some achievements - like contests won, events attented, posts posted, thanks received, etc.

5. Yeah, very important and useful thing. Thanks!

WILL DO!

[Corvus]

Thank you for the reply. I really want to help you with stuff like the smileys, but not now, since my time is limited and my own blog also needs a lot of work.

Another suggestion I have is to make the icon for the pinned topics to stand out more, it's hard to separate the pinned topics from the normal ones in my opinion.

[mahon]

Good point!

I already have a volunteer for the smileys. I just hope we can find smileys on dark background somewhere on the internet, so not much work will be necessary...

EDIT: Two volunteers

[Pandadosmares]

Tell me what you need and i give a go, if help is needed

[Le6n]

OMG, don't know... This new skin is too dark to me, too slow and small. Not really fan of it... The top header is too big (cca 184 px height) even if it contains almost no information, just (bit disturbing) repeated pic of colour bottles. Main menu the same (50 px) and again - it contains almost no info (Home, Index, UCP, Messages, FAQ & Login/out), but lots of free space. Search bar is the same.

The main body is just 960 px width, but about 235 px is dedicated to Main Menu and User menu (partly displayed in Main Horizontal menu). So we have just about 725 px of space (width) for the forum content. Really not good...

I apologize for criticism (job deformation), just think you can use the space better...

[mahon]

no worries, there will be other skins available as well. this one is simply aimed at being unified with the site.

thanks

BTW I changed the position of menu - much like it was before. better now?

[pakerjon]

All suggestion are good... if some are implemented it improves a positivly CofC forum...