Opera has a % "Magnifying Glass" control you can drag and drop on your toolbar that lets you change the magnification of any page on the fly. I have to set mine to
about 120% to make the forums readable now.

Im sure Firefox has some equivilent control, or you could download something. Firefox also has a dynamic style plugin ( I forget what its called), where you can set it to change the default colors of a site. Im thinking of giving that a try to increase readability of the forums as well.

In every post and reply but not in the metaverse section.

I use IE6 with all active content either disabled or set to prompt.

Also Craig's point about text size is good. The font is "crisper" and therefore more readable but it's unchanged by the text size selection in my browser. This used to work on the old forums.

Also the new profile format is kind of cool, but what the heck is an access class Journeyman (4) anyway?

Also the online/offline status in the thread is a nice touch but shows offline in the profile even if online. Seems to work fine in the thread though.

I agree with Mumblefratz.

I run on a 1680 x 1050 screen. The width of the forum takes up about 1/2 of my screen, with about 3.5" of black on either side.


Surely, with this 'modern-day'technology'', it can be done better?

I'm using IE6 with a screen size of 1280x1024 if that helps. It would be nice to be able to tell the forum what default font size to use. The reduction in width of the text field is probably not the best way to go, especially with a bigger font.

Sure you didnt just hit the wrong button...they are right next to each other

Anyways, give them a chance to fix the issues as they pop up. It's a work in progress, and they asked us to report things as we experienced them. SD has always worked to improve things, given time.

I agree they need to get rid of the restrictive frame setup. Eliminate the right hand border altogether, though the left may have to stay due to the links. I also wonder why the member number display. Kind of feels impersonal to be a 6 or 7 digit number now   . I'm not getting the white background thing like some, but upping the font a hair would be a great improvement.

I wouldn't expect the overall site width to change, guys. *All* of our sites are fixed width 1024 pixels. Personally I use a browser window just a bit wider than our sites and the height of the screen, but then I massively multitask too.



Access levels haven't been tweaked yet. So right now that's just showing the default (Wincustomize) names for ranks.



Looks like that's due to IE6's lack of PNG alpha support (you'll notice it happens on all images with transparency). Hopefully there's a workaround coming forthwith.

Also is there any intent in allowing the text size selections that are part of the browser to work. They used to work but at least in IE6 they don't now.

SD should realize that there is a fairly good percentage of geezers that frequent these forums and it get's pretty tough to squint sufficiently to make out this extremely tiny text.

The alternative is for people to start posting in a larger font size which gets a bit onerous as well.

[edit]
And this is only size=1
[/edit]

Poster details on the side is standard across the great majority of forums, and width arguments aside, most people find it improves redability (less junk interrupting the text flow). And since it's already been done, it's a pretty major thing to change.

Re getting rid of the GC2 sidebar stuff, that can't happen for a variety of reasons. A couple being that the forum itself is also fixed width (allowing for sidebars on ALL sites)--anything that splits the forum codebase between sites would be a big pain to keep up, and that it'd require a complete redesign of this site as well (which won't happen... as noted elsewhere, TA is pretty much the end of the road for GC2 aside from patches).

There appears to be no sidebars on forums.stardock.com and these same posts wrap differently because of it although the extra width there only amounts to an extra word per line or so.


What does that mean? Does this mean an anticipated end to forums.galciv2.com?

What happened to version 2 with the standalone installer?

Does that mean we should stop playing the game?

TA will be the last expansion to GC2. There will be patches to follow. The sites won't be shut down. My point is that since the game is nearing EoL, there's just no sense in redoing the GC2 website specifically at this point. Especially with the huge queue of sites the web team has on their plate already.

So what's next on SD's plate in the TBS space?

I just have these visions of this site becoming the same as www.galciv1.com that still has a few lone individuals posting as recently as today even though the average age of most threads is close to a year.

I find that look at the future as to the state of these forums to be very sad. To me and certainly others one of the major appeals of GC2 has been these forums and the metaverse. Without these two items GC2 loses a great amount of the appeal that it's held for me for close to two years now.

I keep looking and checking for anything that's even remotely similar to the life in these forums and the activity in the metaverse and it simply doesn't seem to exist. Certainly Space Empires has a few fansites that are better organized than any GC2 fansite but nothing comes close to these forums.

Also last I heard Brad mention, which was close to a year ago, that this would be the last metaverse that any of his games would have. Again this thought is rather bleak as well. I mean GC2 is a great game and all but without the forums and the metaverse it's far less than with them.

Certainly all good things come to an end and at some point you need to move on. I'm just hoping that there will be something to move on to when the time comes.