Spring RTS Engine

I'm doing some much needed maintenance of Forum Ranks and User Groups, as you might have noticed by the appearance of bright yellow-orange people within the general population. Do not be afraid, this affliction is not easily transmitted.

So, what would you like improved? I'm open to suggestions.

I want to be pink.

The yellow is ugly/unreadable. Dark green? Or just no color at all, not like being an ex mod is useful for other users to know.

The yellow is very hard to read against the background.

I changed it to a darker orange.

Yeh on bright forum backgrounds, text is best towards the darker scale. At least we've got groups now though.

My suggestions for members who should have their own groups:

• Admins (This should include the overall governors of Spring)
• Global Moderators
• Sub-Section Moderators
• Major contributors (Includes Mappers, Modders, Lua devs and any other members who have contributed greatly)

Speaking of groups, it would be nice to get some proper official groups together so that people know who to come to if they need help.

This should include:

• Support and Bug Team
• Engine Dev Team
• Lobby and Server Team

And obviously Cabbage would need to be pink.

What if you're both a major contributer and a subsection mod?

What's the purpose of tons of user groups besides making people not included in one feel small? It's not a very inviting atmosphere when everyone but the 5 lowest-ranked newbies are part of some group. The colors we do have lose all meaning.

Two groups: Administrators - show abject reverence, Moderators - mistreat until they develop an eating disorder and finally leave you alone.

Why should anyone even care if someone is a "major contributor"? Oh, he made a map, I guess I should treat him differently from some random guy that has only contributed $50 to the server fund to keep the site alive. He allegedly is in the process of developing innumerable mods, I guess we should shower him in sincere praises and thanks.

Extra groups just serve to make people above the rules and I've never been to a forum where they were used effectively for anything but cosmetic purposes.

Moderators and Administrators are all we need, and even then only to differentiate between them for the sake of knowing who I need to talk to in order to finally be able to edit my posts again, and who's just out to get me.

The purpose of user groups is to inform you who is particularly capable or memorable for what, specifically. AI Coders, as a rare breed, were a user group for years. Serious Mappers were as well, though that has been functionally deprecated.

<<<<< That's what avatars are for.

I think colors are unnecessary.
The most important thing would be to encourage different contributors to be present in specific channels when they are logged in.
Mappers to auto join the mappers channel,engine devs in SY# mod devs in moddev etc etc..
ATM it's already like that except the mappers channels.
The second thing is for lobbies to allow joining channels using the UI instead of giving commands,same with browsing the list of all available channels.
As soon as users can easy join and browse the list of available channels and their description it would be much easier for newbies to find help.

Creating a few groups never hurt anyone. As long as the right people get the right kind of power then it makes everyone happy.

whats the point of major contributors ? and what rights would they get ? this group is quite obvious in open source game >> there should be admins and users, what else u want

Wombat wrote:whats the point of major contributors ? and what rights would they get ? this group is quite obvious in open source game >> there should be admins and users, what else u want

Major Contributors would get no rights at all. Just a nice colour so people can identify that they contribute a lot of possibly query them if they need help with a specific problem.

If you wanted to get messy, sure you could give different contributors different groups. But bare in mind, you're gonna have to keep a colour key somewhere at the bottom of the forums in the statistics to let people know what each colour means.

Edit: Yeh just checked it, you need to update the legend Neddie.

cool, can i get green color and horns near nick as i biggest spring troll ? thx

Gota wrote:The second thing is for lobbies to allow joining channels using the UI instead of giving commands,same with browsing the list of all available channels.
As soon as users can easy join and browse the list of available channels and their description it would be much easier for newbies to find help.

you mean like it already is possible since a year or so?
personally i find that the user interface reasons ( along with other blatant lies like the one in this case ) is often used as excuse for laziness/etc
ie. people searching technical solutions for social problems

Seriously for the love of god change/get rid of the colors, forum is ridiculously fugly now.

Three of those colours were there before. I just added one.