The New 2012 GC Forums Info, Explanations, Pointers...

[Flitterkill]

Welcome...

 

This has been building for a hell of a long time. Years probably. We've had a consistent drop in the use of the forums since forever and that's kinda depressing. The Board made a brief but concerted effort to post more themselves and we did have traffic uptick during that time (go figure, creating content leads to even more content being created and so on...); however that itself petered out as we, well, kinda stopped making that effort. All guilty as charged. And underlying that was a larger problem and a well known forums rule.

 

As traffic drops, ya gotta eliminate forums and sub-forums and pull back to a smaller, more manageable footprint.

 

And I've known this (years actually). I've also known that to start pulling the band back together would mean a lot of forum editing grind. Had to be done but procrastination is such a lovely thing... Anyways, this was as good a time as ever. The previous skin we had was pushed as far as it would go and honestly I was sick of it back during the last update. Nicely enough, IPB released another point revision which as is often the case for them means changing and enhancing the hell out of everything and tinkleing off skin designers everywhere as all the skins have to be re-written from scratch. For us that equals cool new forum stuff and in this case since the Underground skin we used is still not updated yet, we get a brand new skin (it's a sordid tale of a designer quitting and another designer riding in on a Skyrim dragon to save the firm and update all the skins, just not Underground yet.)

 

So, this will be a fairly *long* post(s) to explain all the under the hood changes to the forum software, the skin and appearance, and the forums themselves. As before, I'll probably keep this thread locked and open up a general commenting thread in chit chat.

 

Sorry this took so long, both the upgrade and the forum revamp.

 

Did you know there is a pretty decent chance we can start taking credit/debit cards for payments soon? Yep. Changes. More ahead but we are good to go live with this now.

 

Thanks for sticking around, thanks to all who keep Retro alive and kicking, the hordes of L4D2 freaks out there making it #1 on gametracker.com, and all those still lingering in the background waiting for a game to bring them back here. We know you are out there (I've seen the site logs )

 

Scroll down for all the updatering,

 

-Fk

[Flitterkill]

New Skin, Graphical Things, Shiny Things

 

NOTE: If what you are looking at right now is a sea of blue and white across your screen then you are still somehow on the default IPB skin. Go to the very lower left corner of the forums and select "change theme" and switch to GC-Blood323. That is real GC skin default and you may just be caught up in an old cache keeping you or setting you on the wrong skin.

 

That wasn't a joke earlier about the designer riding in on a Skyrim dragon. One the best skin joints (ha!) for IPB; the designer just had enough and bailed. Probably sick of having to rewrite/design the skins yet again after numerous IPB changes. This skin, Blood, was pretty ok before, but the new designer really knocked it out of the park with his revamp for IPB 3.2.3. This was an easy switch to make, regardless of how our old skin ends up looking when it gets updated. Also we really couldn't wait anymore so... You can see the stock version here: http://www.skinbox.net/skins/blood/

 

1) Changeable backgrounds!

 

Yep, knock yourself out. Just under the searchbar, down and to the right you will see a paint bucket icon.

 

 

Click that for seven choices of graphical luxury. You've got HL3 design artwork, Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, Diablo 3, L4D2 and CS : Global Ops. Two more slots available, I figure we'll update these from time to time, perhaps a vote off the island thing, or a submit-your-screenshot thing. No matter, you've got options now; light and dark. Default is a Diablo 3 background. If that is peanut butter in your chocolate, well then you just go ahead and change that to chocolate in your peanut butter. Or celery.

 

 

2) Background scrolls away leaving you with stygian darkness.

 

It could be set to stick and stay and not scroll away but see, this skin is all ups with the transparencies. Everywhere. And those are costly for browsers cpu wise. If you've got a cpu monitor up scroll away and you'll see a hit, sometimes small, other times big. And if the background was fixed? Brutal. No joke. It's just an html/css/browser thing. Hilariously enough, if it weren't for the fact that Chrome/WebKit is actually additionally bugged we may have done this. Yep, FireFox and Internet Explorer may take the CPU hit but they manage to scroll and flow just fine with the background parked. Chrome? Chrome weeps (and stutters and laaaaags...) This way is probably less distracting anyways.

 

 

3) New "I'm online" graphic.

 

IPB actually depreciated the "are you online" graphic/flag. They claimed no one cared. And the IPB community forums begged to differ in the polite way one would expect. It's still there under the hood so cool skin designers just hack it back in. Just FYI, its on a fifteen minute timer. Meaning if you see someone flagged as online, it means that 14 minutes ago they could have posted something and then left the forums. The whole thing is a vague "they might be here or they were just here" thing. Instead of the text green button/badge I've hacked it so it is, in the words of Lousiest, "sleek". Just to the left of your user name in a topic thread there is now a small vertical bar. Darkish gray if offline, a noble green if they are online.

 

 

4) New User Badges.

 

 

Some nipping and tucking over the previous versions. And text. Contributing member may flip to Coalition Member, I just like people seeing that coalition members are contributors and not just a member of something. Server admins now have bloody red skulls. And why not? They deserve it! Swanky digs for the handful of GC founders who pop in from time to time (perhaps more now that Diablo 3 is rearing it's tantalizing head). There is a new badge of Alumni that is reserved for members that have contributed a ton over and above the call of duty who have (theoretically) stepped down or away from serving the organization. I was going to make it GC Forever but then I thought about Batman Forever, and then I was sad. Perhaps GC Lifetime? Dunno. Good enough for now and good enough for Ice_Berge and Stutters the only two with the badge. I also roughed and dulled up the GC circle so as not to sear your retinas anymore than they've already been seared. Also grunge, and Metallica, and so on.

 

Hey! This is post 2999 for me! Sweet; gonna roll those digits soon... Anyways...

 

 

5) Profile stuff has been dis-apparated.

 

Where's it gone? Is it coming back? Well, yeah, eventually. No one cares about Wii, and there are no plugins for PS3 for IPB. We do have the new and improved (seriously) Xbox Live mod in the main menu. Use it fools! Do it. Do it now!

 

Computer stats have also be ret-conned. Those will be back in a neat way later after I finish my necessary bender getting this upgrade finished. Awhile later. All that stuff is gone data-wise. Nuked to oblivion from your profiles. Not sure what to do with Steam yet. The IPB mod was abandoned years ago; we'll figure something out. Perhaps just another menu tab with a big list of our Steam contact stuff. You do still have a location field on your profile; feel free to use it for a text based description of "Where you at dog?" But the *real* location thing is separate...

 

 

6) Member Map

 

Yonder google maps plugin. Click it and drop your location. Or delete it and add it again. With the influx of internationals vis-a-vis L4D2 I think we'll all love what that map will look like in a bit. It is Google Maps so enter whatever for a location/address and it'll figure it out. I just used a zip code for mine. Special locations can be added but only by special types like me. Also we are stuck with the default pins for now. Mod author is on it. Formatting for the member pop-ups when you click a pin is twonky. Partly the mod author, partly our dark skin. It's on the punch list for improvement, but not that high up the list...

 

ATTN INTERNET STALKERS: Just because someone put a pin on a map does not mean that's where they actually are. They could be lying. Or maybe they just used their zip code (like I did) in which case the pin is put down right in the center of the entire zipcode. So stop stalking and stuff.

 

 

7) One photo to rule them all...

 

Like that hasn't been written in any other forum's IPB 3.2.3 upgrade posts... There no longer are both avatars and photos. Just one. They call it a photo. It lives on your profile page. You update it there. It gets re-sized and reused everywhere else. Set at 120x120 so choose wisely or break out the stolen Photoshops (or poorly named free software equivalents). I suggest not adding your own border around the image as everywhere it is used on this board there is already a border frame in place. New, working (!) default forum avatar for everyone as well.

 

 

8) Post view = larger font size.

 

With the really dark look I've gone ahead and increased the default font size in posts to 14px (from 12px). I think it looks fantastic. Your opinion is not valid in this matter unless it agrees with mine. Also all links have a dashed underline beneath them.

 

 

9) Hover away. PM's and Status Updates.

 

The new version uses a lot of hover code. Hover over a user's name and up will pop a mini profile. If you want to send a PM, that's where you do it. Hover over their name, click the send pm link. Or you can still just click a user's name to go directly to their full profile and send the pm from the link there.

 

To update your status for our Lag Chatter sidebar thingy *CLICK* your user name up in the top right corner by the server monitors. There is your update window for that. Not sure why it was moved out of the sidebar proper but it is what it is. Remember all your blitherings there are archived on your profile page (unless you delete them of course)

 

 

10) Profile Forum Stats Tab.

 

On your profile page is a new tab called "stats". It shows the time line of your forum activity and where you post the most, etc. The first graph is cool; the second graph chokes a bit on us with the 1000s of posts. Its just a graph formatting error. It'll get fixed eventually.

 

 

11) Friends is gone, but like stuff instead.

 

Friends mod is disabled. We're all friends here (theoretically...). The reputation system is set for liking only. Posts have a like button. Use it or don't. Total likes you get are shown on your profile page and I imagine topics/posts liked can be filtered or something something something...

[Flitterkill]

Post Editor

 

It is new, and has ripped asunder the IPB community. It is wysiwyg, but slightly buggy. For example if you drop a link while typing in your post, at the moment it shows up as bright purple but that ain't what it will look like in the post. That's the one I've come across but otherwise all seems fine. That particular bug is probably easily enough dealt with but it's just one of the things that have tinkled people off. Keep in mind if you copy/paste text from other websites into this editor it may bring along links and formatting you were not expecting. This editor will keep some or all of that stuff and parse it as it can. Might get ugly.

 

Anyways, bb code is hidden in this editor. You *CAN* however go back to the old ways. In the top left of the post entry/editor box is a toggle/ Looks like a square icon that looks like a light switch. Tap it and you can remove the visual and get back to the code view old display with bb codes and plain text.

 

The MyMedia button is for uploaded content of yours, kind of an attachment manager. If you've got a substantial post to make I still reccomend clicking the "use full editor" button. That has a clear and large attach files segment beneath the text entry window.

 

For inserting videos and the like, the last version of IPB had the media bbcode which was of course the word "media" wrapped in brackets, etc. You'd drop that around your YouTube links or other video, music source links and if it was set up for parsing it would just drop the video in instead of leaving a link. Now is the future and *ALL* links are automatically parsed against the media bbcode plugin meaning just entering a link in this editor automatically calls the media tag to check. Magic. Oh yes, the media bbcode is still there and used (in fact, when you edit your posts you will often see the tag pop up around your links) but when you just are doing it on the fly, it's all good. The power of the wysiwyg editor.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ALySsPXt0&noredirect=1

 

Also, just because it is hiding the bbcode doesn't mean you still can't use it in the wysiwyg editor. The editor will just silently judge and mock you for not using the above buttons, but it will parse correctly once you make the post.

 

All that said, don't be surprised when bugs or annoyances appear. For example, sometimes after editing a post the editor doesn't go away and you think "did my changes get posted?". They did, just refresh the page. This happened to me once. No clue what caused it.

 

But by and large; big improvement.

 

My 3000th post was about a text editor. Lovely.

[Flitterkill]

Forum Structure Changes

 

Attentive folks may have noticed the changes that were started last week further down the forum index. The archives was compiled together more to not be a giant block of dead text. A few forums disappeared and were merged with others (jokes and web videos were dumped into chit chat for instance). A few other things got placed under more useful headings. Etc.

 

The Coalition forums have also been moved to be underneath our general chat area and the games area. Let's get the focus directly on us talking, not all the other stuff. I've also inverted the structure of the Coalition forums. That's more of a philosophical thing reflecting importance and service I'll make a note about in the GC only forums.

 

For our general chat area (now called Spawn Point) we've got this:

 

Chit-Chat and Blah Blah - The usual remains but all the media stuff has been brought back under this. Movies, music, tv, etc. The old forum known as Real Life buried deep down in the board index has been merged in.

 

Tech Support, Hardware Discussion, Builds - Same as before. Unix has been merged back in.

 

Sports Bar and Grill - We had some action on a recent beer post, that got me thinking of expanding this a bit. So here we are. I think it will work out well.

 

Buy, Sell, Trade, Deals - Same as before with the addition of deals on gear moved out of Tech Support.

 

The biggest change is saved for our chaotic games forums. We've never really adjusted to the whole console thing; it just kinda overwhelmed us and the forums never adjusted as they should. With connectivity and Xbox Live and everything else; keeping consoles separate is idiotic.

 

It's all about the game *type*.

 

So, aside from CSS and L4D2 main forums broken out due to our server popularities, everything else is now in broad game categories. You can read the forum descriptions on the board index but we've got:

 

Multi-Player FPS

Adventure, Action, RPG (FPS or otherwise)

MMOs

Strategy, Sim, Construction, Sports

Puzzle, Casual, Web, Music, Facebook

Arcade, Classic Consoles and Handhelds

 

We still have a UT server and that will be parked under the MP FPS group. We've got a great Minecraft server but we'll keep all that discussion in the SSCS group. Only the big breakout server hits will get pulled out from now on to save some clutter (or if we are trying a push a new gametype or something)

 

The important thing now is that we are PLATFORM AGNOSTIC! It's the game and honestly has always been about the game. If you need to talk shop about specific console hardware, we can accommodate you in the Tech Support, Hardware Discussion, Builds forum.

 

We have Fitness Center and a Garage now as well. The fitness one has been around forever but it didn't seem a good match to merge with general chat. Same with the Garage (formerly Carz and the little used t00lt1me construction forum). Just enough off the beaten path to stay the way they are.

 

Wonderland remains. GC hosted clan forums remain, Fragfest remains, Mmmm remains (though parked under the clans area now) and the Christian, religion, and politics joints stay of course. Memorials ain't going anywhere.

 

All in all, a grand ole' consolidation. Now we gotta use them.

 

But wait! There's more!

 

A lot of this ain't practical except for an addition IPB made and a killer, well supported mod...

[Flitterkill]

Prefixes and Tags - Welcome to the new (old) frontier!

 

IPB added in a tagging system with the 3.2 line. It's very nice. Naturally the tagging concept has been around forever in internet years but it's really nice to get this as part of the IPB forums now.

 

For your post add any damn thing you'd like. Limit of ten tags I believe? Not sure on the character length per tag... Have fun. Be constructive. Language filters still in play .

 

I strongly encourage you to use those tags! Clicking on a tag does an immediate search on them which bring ups, naturally, all other same-tagged stuff.

 

The whopper for us is the prefix system and this has been enhanced with a pretty sweet mod.

 

The way we are using this is the following.

 

 

1) Many of our main forums will REQUIRE the use of a prefix.

 

You'll have to choose something from a drop down list of choices. There will always be a "generic"-ish choice as a catch all so no worries there. And of course new prefixes can and will be added as needed for new stuff, by request, etc. These are only defined/added by Board member types so chaos does not reign. Tags are the free-for-all Thunderdome for you rabble.

 

 

2) Tags and Prefixes are technically the same.

 

Prefixes just appear BEFORE a topic title as a sort of categorical marker. Think of them as subforums without their being subforums. Just like tags, click a prefix and up pops the search. Sweet.

 

 

3) Prefixes required in the non-GC forums at the moment are...

 

Everything in Spawn Point.

Everything in Game Central.

 

Not gonna require stuff in any other forums unless it makes sense and or by request. But our main active forums will have this structure.

 

 

4) And this is why we could consolidate our forums like this...

 

The Counter Strike forum has tags for CS. Original, CS.Source, CS.Global Ops, GC CSS Server, etc. Ditto for L4D2 in the way that you imagine. Probably add CSS Maps, L4D2 Maps, CSS Strategy, etc...

 

The Multi-Player FPS group has UT2K4, UT3, GC UT Server, Bulletstorm, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc...

 

Again these forums all have generic equivalents as well. The Strategy, Construction ,etc forum has the requisite Strategy, Construction, etc. tags for all the broad game categories. New stuff pops up you prefix with the broad category, and then you can tag with the specic game name or whatever. If we've got a hot game, hey, new prefix and just change it on the few posts that need it. No subforums to manage. Sweet.

 

For the Adventure, Action, RPG we've got Mass Effect, Diablo, etc... And here is one thing where we'll need to be slightly careful. These lists of prefixes can get insane in some of these forums; in many cases we'll just stick with the overall game ie Mass Effect for ME1, 2 and 3. You get the idea. We are of course flexible and there is no reason why we can't go specific now and then remove the prefix and revert to a more base one later. For example Skyrim as a tag now and later revert them all to Elder Scrolls or something. Again, this is why the regular tags are also important - use them!

 

Colors for the tags will be primarily earth tones so as not to turn our forums into Circus Atari or a package of Skittles.

 

 

It's early days...

 

I'm inclined to turn the forums back on before all this is completely in place. Those few with IPB powers should hold back on moving or adding prefixes until I get stuff parked where it needs to be. There is a mass prefix add function but it isn't perfect so there is a dance between moving topics and forums and adding prefixes before just moving them before hand.

 

Not everything old will get prefixed. 100,000+ posts here. Yeah, no, ain't happening. As we go forward, people get comfortable, stuff will get moved, prefixed, etc...No rush and ultimately no need. Maybe we get some people interested in hosting forums as a mod and can do the work? Would love it if we had the forum action that demanded forum moderating again.

 

All these changes are mainly forward looking. In a month, we will be awash in prefixed colors, and the old stories pushed down the indexed recesses known as page 3 of, page 4 of, page 5 of ...

[Flitterkill]

Leftovers.

 

If I forget stuff I'll post it here.

 

Questions and comments are in the following thread in Chit-Chat:

 

http://gamerscoaliti...showtopic=41029

 

 

1) Expect formatting errors and other weirdness now and then.

 

For example, many elements have text shadows. Oddly enough the shadows are all on the top of the text elements. It looks awful and honestly, unnatural. I've changed most of them already to be traditional shadows (that fall downward and to the right of the text) but there are buttons here and there I've missed. Crap like that will be stamped out eventually.

 

 

2) Use a lot of AJAX, get the occasional AJAX errors.

 

These forum use AJAX, which is updating webpages without reloading the whole page. Like the post editor not going away bug that pops up occasionally, you will get this AJAX "I'm doing something" rotating flasher thingy at the top of the page when you are updating something or other. Sometimes that doesn't go away. Like before, all is well, just ignore it or refresh the page proper to make it go away.

 

 

3) It takes a bit to get the hang of adding tags.

 

They are separated by commas but it will feel like a strange dance as you type and they appear or don't appear. You'll get it eventually.

 

 

4) Banned forum will likely be decommissioned.

 

Unless there is a hew and cry not to, with the prefixes "banned" and "ban request" we should be able to push this stuff into the respective L4D2 and CSS forums. This will be ongoing for a bit. Give it a day or two.

 

 

5) As people do stuff, more css formatting/color changes will become apparent.

 

For example, the edited by bit that shows up when a forum lord dares to rewrite your wonderful prose is now a large yellow bar. Stuff like this make a note of in the commenting thread and It'll get taken care of.