"Official" Forum Suggestion Thread

[Mateo]

A generic place to discuss your suggestions for the forums. Whether is about the theme, the layout, the amount of sub-forums you would like added/consolidated/removed/etc. this is a good place to discuss those things.

[Mr. Magius]

I've never noticed the ads... this site is hosted for free so I can see why there would be ads, but there's no need for donations!

I want to rename the URL, but then no one would know what the new URL is! I have to find a way to re-direct "twilight-hacking" to "celadonmansion." It's probably not difficult.

[Mateo]

I'm sure there's a way to, but I'm not super familiar with doing that. But since not many people are active right now anyway, if we advertise with the new URL like we did the old one and update links that would help people find it. But it could be problematic, you're right. If it changed and I went to my bookmark I would just assume it was down. I wonder if the host has a tool to redirect it? I'll try to look into it, but that might be something you have to be the root admin (Mr.Magius) to do.

[Mateo]

I don't understand how that would solve any of the problems of just changing the URL on this one. Unless we left this as an empty placeholder saying to go to the other one.

[Mr. Magius]

That would be way too much trouble. I'm sure a re-direct is the easiest solution.

[Danny-E 33]

As far as forum suggestions, it would be nice to have a theme with stronger borders between posts and sub forums and such, and darker colours.

[Mateo]

A little more distinction would be nice. Also, I'm in favor of different icons for theads with and without new posts. To me, the shade of red is dim enough that I often can't tell right away if there are any new posts or not. So I'll start looking into some ways to do this, and I'll run them by Mr. Magius and of course the other users.

For the thread icons, I'm thinking Grayscale Pokeball icons for threads with no new posts, and coloured ones for new posts. But not standard red Pokeballs, ones that would fit the Celadon City theme we have going on. Or maybe GS Balls. What are you guys' thoughts?

[Mateo]

I was thinking I had made an optional Skeetendo-based theme for this forum, but I think that was on the other bare-bones place where Cartmic and I were going to start Celadon Mansion before we merged with Twilight Hacking. I like the lighter coloured scheme here, plus I think the green fits the name well. But I know different users have different preferences, so adding multiple theme options to choose from the way Skeetendo and PokeCommunity do might be worthwhile to consider.

EDIT: I'll have to look and see how flexible the forum software is with header images. Also, when you linked to the thread for Pokemon Christmas were you talking about PC's banner or my hack's banner?

I'm kinda fond of this one, tbh.

[Mr. Magius]

Some good ideas here. I'm not even sure if it's POSSIBLE to have multiple themes available... if so, anyone is welcome to contribute.

[Mateo]

Yeah, I haven't found an option for that yet in the admin control panel, I know some hosts have the option though. It might be hidden in plain site somewhere that we wouldn't look for.

[Mr. Magius]

Ah, I looked it up and there are tutorials on how to do it. It's inserting an HTML code.

[Mateo]

Oh okay, cool! Maybe we can make this happen after all. Also, I looked for it to see, is there a way we can make our user titles show up under our name? So it says Administrator instead of just having a green user name and having to look up what that means?

[Mr. Magius]

Yeah! I actually never noticed that. It's in the User Titles section, haha.

[Mateo]

Some of those suggestions sound OK to me, but I'm curious: Why two separate subforums with the same name, that seem like they would contain the same thing? I mean of course the duplicate Tutorials, Tools, and Resources sections.

Also, gotcha that makes sense about the title image. If Celadon Mansion wasn't so tall, it might be nice to include it on the title image.

[Mr. Magius]

Initially when I rebooted the forum there were separate forums for different generation hacking, but I figured we'd make the current boards universal unless we actually get a flood of GBA games, which I highly doubt. Unless you guys are against that.

[Mateo]

I'm a fan of them being universal for now as well. I don't really see there being a flood of Gen III hacks, but if we have a few I think it would be nice for them to be grouped with the other hacks instead of tossed into General Discussion like AtecainCorp's Ruby hack on "the other forum" haha. Plus, like I announced on Facebook the other day, I've been thinking about trying out making a Gen III hack at some point too so that's reason enough for me to want them to be in the same forum

[Mr. Magius]

Just putting some brackets after your hack's title is good enough for me. Like "Pokémon ___ -- [hack of Silver]" or something along those lines.

[Mateo]

Maybe putting the brackets first, so they don't get lost if the title is very long. For example:

[Red Hack] Pokémon Orange Islands
Explore the Orange Islands in this old Red Hack that I didn't make.
[Silver Hack] Pokémon Secrets and Rumours
The way WE PRETENDED it was supposed to be.

That's also the system I used in the Tutorials, Tools, and Resources section when I posted a lot of things here the other night. Same basic idea, just changed where we were posting it. But yep, sounds good.

[Mr. Magius]

Sounds good. I think there's a way to have set prefixes that mention the ROM base before the hack's title. PC has that feature, if I'm not mistaken.

[Mateo]

That's what I was basing the formatting on I'm not sure if we can add those here or not, but it would be cool to look into -- especially if they work the way they do on PC, where you can click one and it will sort together all threads with that tag to easily find other hacks of the same ROMbase.

[Mateo]

I looked around but wasn't seeing it in the admin section. I also couldn't find the section that determines if user titles are shown under our names or not. Perhaps only the root admin can see them. Or I need internet-glasses. Maybe in addition to being near-sighted, I'm also internet-blind to some things

[Mateo]

No problem (it was me, I did it one day after reading this thread and while I had nothing better to do just to see if it looked okay, and I thought it did. I do feel like it has too much empty space between our usernames and the body of the post though, but I couldn't find a way to alter that.)

[Mr. Magius]

Just added ranks for us, Matteo. It was in the Users & Groups (Rank Administration) section, haha. Right now it just says our ranks in text below our usernames, but I'll probably make some small banners/bars for them...more PC mimicry.

[Mateo]

Looks good! And that makes sense, I don't think I looked there for some reason.

[Mr. Magius]

Either I forget I added the forum or someone else added it, but... what exactly was the "Non-Public Hack Space" for?

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