Change to Forum Format

Where are you seeing the medals on a white background?

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.

Hi!

My IE-6 works that way. Firefox is OK.

BR, Iztok

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 also find it annoying that the member information is on the side and reduces the width of the post even further than it's already narrow extent.

The OP of the thread gets the full width but replies get cut down unnecesarily. When the information is on the top of the post then everyone gets the same width whether it's the OP or a reply.

I'm not quite sure why the thread is restricted to be so narrow to start with, on my screen at 1280x1024 the reply width is less that half of the total width of my screen.

This has always been an issue even before the forum change but the member information being moved to the side is taking what was a bad situation and making it even worse. People have wide screens nowadays. Why not let them use them.

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As far as I can tell the width restriction is simply to keep consistency down the entire thread and at the top of the thread the left side is taken up with the Home, Databanks, Downloads, ... Forum links and Reviews. In all honesty I find this information to be useless to be on every page. Leave it on the front page and even the forums list page but once someone enters a thread there is no need for this information and it only restricts the thread width unnecessarily.
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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?

The font is tiny. I don't want to have to set the zoom to 200% every time I come here.

Although I'm a rabid supporter of almost everything Stardock, I really hate this forum (software) as I do every other custom built forum I've encountered, because they all suck. There's a reason most sites use vbulletin.

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.

Tried to do an edit and got a new post, but I was going to add that the member number seems like useless information to me. Removing it would allow the field to be reduced in width providing more for the text. Also, a screen width of 1280 is considered rather small these days. The forum could probably be wider overall.

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.

While I'll complain about the things I don't happen to like and think that everyone else should as well, going this far is undeservedly harsh.

The web team usually does amazing work and the most usual response when something works well is nothing. The only time anyone says anything is to complain. I actually find this forum in general far superior to every other cookie cutter forum out there.

There are inevitable issues that will crop up due to such obvious massive changes but I have no doubt they will be resolved soon. The other kinds of things are not in any way bugs but simply design choices of format. The narrowness of the forum I brought up is nothing new and is in no way a bug but a choice. Clearly moving member info to the side accentuted this issue but there's really been no dramatic change.

If a bunch of folks agree with my subjective opinion that it would be nice to widen the threads up then they probably will respond to that. When they do so is an entirely different matter and I see no real need to rush them since they do still have actual bugs like the white background on medals in IE6.

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.

Re browsers for tired eyes, IE bites still, but Firefox is getting better. Opera has the best zoom function (it is pure zoom, text and graphics all treated algorithmically). In addition to the toolbar option Bingjack mentions, you can use the INS key and the MINUS key on your keypad to increase or reduce zoom.

Re the original width of the post fields, IIRC there is some human engineering research that shows readability problems with lines over X characters long. Letting a forum thread scale horizontally to any desktop size could lead to a whole different set of frustrations.

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.

Yeah, there were issues with png alpha transparency the last time the forums were updated as well.


If we simply got all of the 1024 pixels then I wouldn't complain but take a look at the following screenshot where I created a bitmap scale on my monitor with marks every 100 pixels.

You can see that the actual width of the text in the replies is less than 600 pixels. You could clearly get closer to the 1024 by moving the member information back to the top of each reply and by eliminating the space reserved on the left edge for the buttons, forum links and reviews. This space alone is 200 pixels at the minimum and the member info appears to be at least another 150 pixels. That 350 pixels represents more than 50% of the total width dedicated to text. Regaining that width still meets the 1024 criteria and would be a significant improvement.

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.

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And this is only size=1
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Actually once you explicitly select a font size in your post then that text does scale with your text size selection in your browser. When I first entered the above text it looked huge but it was only because I had set my text size to largest. Once I changed to the normal medium text setting then the above text now looks only a little bit bigger than the default size. But the default size doesn't change at all.

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).

All I have to do in FF is to hold down CTRL and scroll with the wheel on the mouse to increase/decrease the text...I think the same works in IE. However this would require a wheel mouse. The other alternative in FF is to hold CTRL and hit the + or - keys.

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?

ahh cool! It works that way with Maxthon too in 10% increments. Thanks I didn't know that. Just that first 10% makes a huge difference to the readability.

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.

Thanks for trying to improve the forums, but here are some issues I have with the changes.

One annoyance I'm seeing is that when I go into a thread, it no longer goes to the last page I looked at for that thread, but always to the first page.

Sometimes when I try to go the next page in a long thread, it wont load that page at all.

The "last reply" issue has certainly been aggravating. I really like that I could see when the most recent reply was, and when my most recent reply was.

Is there no longer an advanced search function, so you can find replies by users, and not just original posts?

Sentient species taste better...

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.

The fantasy TBS game is up next. Announcements about that coming within the next couple months AFAIK. From the posts Brad has made here so far, it looks like it'll be a GC prequel set on ancient Altaria (but that's just what I've gathered based on public comments--I'm actually in the dark as much as you guys on it). Following that in a couple more years, GC3.

Like I said, the forums aren't going anywhere. How lively they stay would depend entirely on how many people remain here playing the game, really. Hopefully TA will extend that activity for some time.