Silentwings wrote:Please keep the discussion civil.
@Forb: I appreciate your work on this, but imo you cannot seriously expect anyone to trust your credentials as a phpbb developer if you respond to someones genuine concerns with insults and a pre-supposed view of their intentions.
I insulted no one. Read again.
I am not a phpbb developer. If I were I would rewrite the entire thing because it's garbage (so it would likely never get done, circling back to why I am not a phpbb developer).
Let me point out that 99.9% of the changes I have done can be undone with the commenting out of a single line. That is exactly why I have done things the way I have. The way I am doing them is technically harder, but once I've done the work it is easier to work with after the fact. It also makes reverting things extremely easy.
*********************
People bitch about things which are more or less irrelevant. And this thread is exactly why I haven't really done much with the forum in several weeks. I did have a bit of a plan, but people complaining about irrelevant things pretty much make me not even want to mess with it because they are incapable of seeing the bigger picture and responding to their "valid concerns" (IE pointless arguments about things that really don't matter in the end) takes so much time and energy that by the time I'm done responding, my ability to give a crap anymore is diminished.
If anyone was look at the source styles of this forum (Phpbb source), it's fucking depressing. It is so shitty that at times I don't even know where to start when tackling a new issue.
If people would be so kind as to keep their opinions and critiques to things that actually matter, that would be extremely helpful. At the moment they are not being helpful, they are simply being annoying.
The way buttons and crap like that look doesn't fucking matter. Why? Because any idiot with access to css docs and 30 seconds of spare time on their hands can change them to look like whatever they want! Without what I have done, that would be much more difficult.
I want this forum to have a unified and custom style that fits our scheme. I've been working towards that. I have also been very careful to make things easy to revert, easy to change, and I have been very careful to document my changes both via text and images (ffs look at the merge request history...).
If anyone wants to help me accomplish my goal, then hell yes! Please by all means! I would really like to have good feedback, but if all anyone wants to talk about is fucking shadows and buttons, I have no time for them or their opinions because they are far too short sighted to be taken seriously.
Fun fact, I did a trial material design for the forum a few days ago, just in a very basic sense, and It was ugly. True material design looks fantastic, so it comes down to the way I am doing it is what sucks. The problem, I realized is that material design is essentially virtual paper and layers. As it happens the forum has many layers. You have the base paper, then the virtual papers which house the categories, then the papers that house the individual forums. Without separating these, it looks jumbled.
As a result, I have tabled the material design idea until I have a better idea with what to do with all of the elements. I imagine AF could probably come up with a fairly fantastic mockup of how to do it (he's quite good at that and very creative as well).
*********************
You mention bounties for this sort of thing. Ugh. I don't want your money (someone else might... *shrug*). I do this because I find it entertaining to stretch the boundaries and it's fun (usually, until I have to deal with people who can't see 5 feet in front of them). What I want is positive ideas. Can we manage that?
I asked many posts ago for a definitive color scheme for the forum in keeping with the site. It's what I have been working toward for some time. Has anyone even bothered to try?
For example, here is a nice little tool to help you:
http://paletton.com/#uid=1000u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF
Am I wasting my time in trying to explain anything here? Does anyone bother to read and understand what I'm working towards?
@AF
You're probably right, but I don't want to do anything with the rest of the site, only the forum. My changes wouldn't be hard to maintain, unless prosilver suddenly mass changes class/id names or something like that, and even then, the changes would fail gracefully anyway.