Question New look of the forums

Karma is like thank yous, except that it persists across threads in a way that is visible (Although thank you totals are now visible too... so... not sure about the duplicate efforts). Similar to Kudo's on BCTS. Except it also has a 'negative'. So someone who is regularly a jerk is actually visibly so, as opposed to someone who's just neutral or not very active.

The square is a topic icon. The default one. If you look between the Subject and the formating tool bar while writing a message, you can see the topic icon options. Along with the default white paper page, there's an "Important" red exclamation mark, a blue "Question", a light bulb "Idea", a swap/trade "Exchange", a denial "NO" x, and an agreement "Yes" green checkmark.

And threads with new messages do still have the number of new posts (in green) off to the right of he subject name. If you want, I can try to highlight that a bit more... maybe a color shift on the background or something.

Oh. Those! Those are connected to the 'new posts' counter. Any post that you've seen before is white. If it is marked unread for you, you see that as green. You should be able to click mark all read, and all the green boxes go away. reset everything to unread, and its green boxes all the way down.

My main frustration with the other style (which I like and prefer also) is that every update alters the template in a way that reverts all my modifications to the CSS. As a result, the total forums is 'huge' in a vertical scroll sense. Most people don't see that because there are like four different sections of staff and canon access that are invisible to readers.... but it lacks cohesion. The headings are too far from their threads, and so on. I tighten that up by changing the padding and margin settings... but they keep adding features that change the template. Sooo... I'm playing around a little with this template. There are also some professionally designed ones that I like and may purchase as an option.

Ultimately, I'm playing while they get ready to release the next big jump in the forums code (this is 4.0.11, they're beta testing ver 5.0 now). Once that's out, I'll settle on a template and write some custom CSS files to keep it from changing on us.

Nope, its not a setting, I'd have to find it in the CSS and alter it that way. Doable though.

Astrodragon wrote: My only real issue is that the new posts text in green is small and easy to miss.
Maybe a bright red would be more obvious, if the colour can be changes simply?

they are now red and a slight bit larger.

Ya... well, having to redo CSS every time they do a code update is a pain in the rear, soooo...

Hmm.. well, I don't think we'll spend any more time with this. From what one of the developers is telling me, this template will be considered obsolete and unsupported as of the next update when the code comes out of beta. Sooo... back to the other template we go.

That's a little something I've been holding in reserve for a while now, but since the first person who is not an author is about to cross over from the highest of the default 'blue dots' ranks into the 'special' ranks and get the fancy glyph ranks, I decided it was time to reveal the author/staff/admin ones too. When Dom gets another... 50ish posts, you'll see the color palette for the reader version (and have an idea of the rank naming system).

As to the source... they come from a Lovecraftian inspired (R'lyeh) language/font I ran across a while back. propnomicon.blogspot.com/2014/03/rlyeh-runes-version-1.html ... for those not Lovecraftian savvy, R'lyeh is the city from Call of Cthuhlu, where that being and its minions lie sleeping. The fairly well know 'chant' of his followers mentions it "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" - which means, In his house at R'lyeh, Cthulhu lies sleeping. R'lyeh is believed to be located on the floor of the south Pacific, a nightmare corpse-city built of Cyclopean architecture - bizarre to the human eye due to non-Euclidean geometry

There are a number of good ones to choose from out there... I just went into Google, searched for "Lovecraft font" and then looked at the images for something that looked close enough to the rank dots that I could shrink down and use without them becoming overly distorted.