Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 22, 2024 9:10:54 GMT -8
Aesthetically, I tend to recommend folks stay away from saturated colours when it comes to any background that may have text on it. Even if there's nothing the matter medically with a person, a large amount of saturated colours that you look at for a long time will cause eye strain. I presume you want people to spend a lot of time on the forum, so if that's the case, I would recommend a more desaturated blue. I've made a thing below to show you the difference between having something saturated versus not. | this is what you have | this is desaturated |
I also recommend setting your background image to fixed instead of "scroll"; since the pattern is repeating, the background doesn't need to move with the rest of the content. Content is honestly something that isn't for me. That doesn't mean it's bad, I'm just not your target audience — general chatting forums have always been popular, but I tend to prefer more singularly-focused forum communities, like RP forums or art forums, etc. I will say that you look to be active on your forum, which is great! And lastly, the organisation of the forum is a little confusing to me, the boards seem to all be in one category, rather than broken up into different buckets of topics. Breaking stuff up isn't a hard requirement to be successful as a forum or anything, but it might make the barrier for entry / new membership lower if people can quickly find the boards that interest them since they're grouped together in a clear fashion based on the overarching topics (eg: a category for Current Events could be used to group together the Celeb news board and the 21st century board). If you don't want to have more categories, that's totally okay, but i maybe would then suggest rearranging the order of the boards so that similarly themed boards are grouped together. In the above example, the celeb board and the 21s century board are nearly the entire length of the forum apart. Overall, I think you have a good start, and I think it will be appealing to your target audience. The only real considerations are the background scrolling, saturated blue text backgrounds, and maybe how the boards themselves are grouped together (but this last one is definitely a personal preference thing). Hope that was helpful, good luck!
|
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 21, 2024 17:10:58 GMT -8
Yeah, it's me. Thanks for the feedback, Kami ^_^ I'm stuck in the late 00s and don't know how to make the forum feel more modern I guess. If you have any suggestions on how to do that let me know. Thanks again ^_^ This will get lengthy since that's like a decade of changes to style haha, mind if we take it to PM? |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 20, 2024 15:36:31 GMT -8
Earth OneJust looking for any feedback you can offer me on the forum. Whether it be layout, design, or plot. I appreciate any and all feedback you give me so thanks in advance  lmao wait, tori is that you? welcome back if so feedback: - aesthetically im a little confused. it's not bad per se, but feels maybe a little outdated? reminds me of the themes that were popular in the late 00's, early 10's. i'd expect something a little more modern in this day and age to compete with other, similarly themed RPs. again it's not bad, and there's no reason you HAVE to change it.
- plot-wise: again nothing bad, i'm just curious what the motivation for the player would be? i don't see a plot event or anything to serve as a sort of impetuous for the players to get involved and create motivations for character and narrative development -- "close the portals before baddies maybe come through" is really vague. why would you think baddies might come through? do we know there are baddies? all we know are that there are multiverse portals. your ending line asks where players will stand for the battle of the multiverse but there isn't a battle yet the description says you're trying to prevent one. gently i would say this is less of a plot than it is a hook into the setting. a plot, imo, would be something to drive people have an emotional investment in the success of their character's activities (directly plot related, or slice-of-life around the plot). again, it's not BAD i just don't know if this is going to be sufficiently motivating enough to get players invested enough to make a character and engage with the premise.
- organisation: i like it, and i like that you followed a sensical hierarchical order (info > character > rp > ooc) in your categories. you also made sure to have at least 1 thread in each visible-to-guest board, so 0 feedback here, it's pretty much set up how i would have it.
- other: bits and bobs, take 'em or leave 'em - i noticed you don't have a split between OOC and IC accounts, i would generally advise that if you want to keep it that way, to at least separate your admin/staff posts so that people aren't confused about "who" is speaking. similarly, there aren't any guidelines on behavioural expectations OOC; it's not uncommon for sites that don't split ooc and ic posts by having a dedicated ooc account to get spillover drama between players due to misunderstanding stuff that happens ooc and ic due to the names being the same so just food for thought that you might want to put a few guidelines in there to acknowledge the split between ooc and ic areas.
overall, a solid entry into pb's RP community, just might need some aesthetic updates & a clearer motivation for players about this "battle of the multiverse" when nothing bad has happened yet. |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 20, 2024 10:55:19 GMT -8
disclaimer: i am not a pb employee + i am not a lawyer / this is not legal advice. -- from a practical, personal perspective, please also be aware that genAI art has been ruled ineligible for copyright protections in the US. if you post genAI music, there is also a risk that any copyright claims you make if someone reposts it or uses it without your consent (on PB or otherwise) may not be honoured. |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 20, 2024 10:38:28 GMT -8
I normally post more in-depth stuff, but it looks like this is still in early stages...? So truncated version, unless you want something more expansive. - Aesthetics: fine, i guess? personally, i feel there's not a whole lot in the visuals that tells me this is a 'medieval fantasy' except a lady (in clothing that is not indicative, really, of anything medieval or fantasy themed) holding a sword in the banner. maybe this is some minimalist trend that i don't really understand being an old fogey, but i'm always biased towards RP forums that manage to balance being minimal and slick while being thematic. if it were me, i'd add a little bit more to the theme -- maybe something in the category title backgrounds that is representative of some medieval era architecture or aesthetics, or a very subtle texture pattern that is on-theme (something vines or magical for the fantasy, something medieval for the time period inspiration) in the background to make the theme feel less flat and have more layered depth.
- Content: fine, but verbose. i think this isn't really on you, exactly, but just an issue with original RPs as a whole -- there's so much world building, but extensive documentation on said word building is often a negative when it comes to RPs because the initial investment cost for a player in order to start participating is a lot higher than a pre-existing IP / setting that only requires players to invest on the unique aspect of the forum since they already have the base knowledge of the IP / setting. i don't have an answer on the "right" way to balance between getting the info you need players to have, versus keeping the bar for entry as low as possible. i think it would be worth it for you to figure out which parts of the lore you can let go from defining, and give players freedom to make their own decisions on how those aspects work without making any one thing strict canon. i'm personally overwhelmed by the amount of time i would need to spend here if i were to participate (and this is definitely my type of RP), i just don't have that much to invest between my work + familial & social obligations + personal responsibilities.
tldr: i think you have the makings of something good, but there's not a lot to judge more holistically. aesthetics are fine but could be pushed to be a bit more visually thematic / interesting, and content is intriguing but has a high initial investment for players that may be too high of a bar for entry for initial membership growth. hope this helps! please let me know if you have any questions / want a deeper dive on the content itself. |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 20, 2024 6:56:19 GMT -8
^ just wanted to confirm this is the case, imgur forbids using their service as a CDN and will ban your account, your website, and potentially the service if this usage is discovered.
Imgur provides "share links" and one of them is a BBC link (as it states) for use in forums. To further elaborate on the response BBOY posted, a content delivery network (CDN) is not simply "an image host". CDNs refer to a system wherein content is repeatedly, and frequently, loaded. The occasional image being posted once in a thread is fine — the image will be requested from the host only when that specific page / post is loaded. The relative strain on the server, even if the page is loaded many, many times, is low because of the singular occurrence in that specific post. But images that are regularly used and may appear multiple times per page load, or appear repeatedly across different page loads -- theme images, smileys, avatars, signature banners -- have a heavier strain on the host's servers even if the page is loaded the exact same number of times as in the first example; this is especially true if all of the images of this nature are hosted on a single account and/or requested by traffic from a single site. Image hosts are generally not okay with being CDNs because it eats up resources, especially if the host is free and ad-supported. This is a large part of why Photobucket closed down tinypic, and a large part of why Photobucket is no longer allowing their services to be used without subscribing financially (and even then you cannot use them as a CDN without paying for the highest tier of service). |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 20, 2024 6:03:10 GMT -8
It would probably be safer to have your forum emotes uploaded directly to the theme. Imgur may not allow you to use their service as a content delivery network, and even if they do now, they can change that tomorrow and all emotes everywhere could show up as broken images. ^ just wanted to confirm this is the case, imgur forbids using their service as a CDN and will ban your account, your website, and potentially the service if this usage is discovered. |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 19, 2024 18:30:01 GMT -8
Could someone direct me to some place, or someone, that can actually confirm to me, or explain in plain English, the precise meaning of that copyright notice? I have some specific questions about it. Unfortunately, that goes beyond what PB is able to help with; the notice is dealing with EA's claims to the property, not PB's. PB admins also do not speak to legal issues such as copyright disclaimers as a broad rule, and would advise you to seek the appropriate legal counsel instead. For the record you'd likely need to talk to a copyright attorney or reach out to EA directly (I cannot guarantee EA would answer, but their Support team will be the best team to point you in the right direction outside of consulting a legal professional). |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 17, 2024 19:45:02 GMT -8
For clarity this is the section for help with PB's Layout Templates, as in the structure of the forum. If you need help with posting templates, particularly one that relies on the Style Tags plugin (a third party plugin made by a volunteer), there really isn't a good place here to get help with that. My suggestion on this forum at least might be to post on the plugin support thread, here: support.proboards.com/thread/470310/style-tag-plugin-support-thread |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 15, 2024 6:12:46 GMT -8
Lol forgot I asked. But they are kids. They don't have jobs or money. Not sure if contacting their parents to pay for this is the right answer. I'm asking for suggestions on how to approach the kids about this This question kind of goes beyond the purpose of this section of this forum — this board is for technical support with the software. Maybe an admin can move this into the Managing Your Forum section :) My suggestion to your question though is to approach them like you would any other adult user. They're kids, not glass, they're not going to break because someone tells them they're doing something silly. I've been running my forum for nearly twenty years now and due to the subject matter the audience for the forum tends to include a lot of kids in the 13-19 age group. There is absolutely no reason you can't just reach out and tell them to stop. Talk to them individually via PM to not embarrass them, and just be direct and casual. Don't try to be overly cool, but don't be overbearing or threatening. A simple "Hey, just wanted to reach out. If you didn't see the mass PM from (date), please don't reload the forum so much; doing that uses up our ad-free page views, and our budget won't last us the month at this rate. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks!" will probably far more effective than nebulously asking the forum as a whole to stop doing something. |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 14, 2024 23:21:40 GMT -8
did you check your censored words list?
|
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 14, 2024 6:27:24 GMT -8
Just a note that an IP and ISP ban are different. IP Address (shortened to IP usually) is the individual address a user has when accessing the internet. ISP is internet service provider (the company that provides internet access to a user). Banning an ISP would be a pretty big button (and kind of hard to do on an individual forum level) to press just for one spammer :)
|
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 6, 2024 15:36:46 GMT -8
I don't know if you guys can do this...but a plugin button for marquee in the reply buttons would be a cool feature. If someone has already asked for this, I apologize in advance. Can you be more specific? It would help to know what you expect to see visually (where, appearance) + what you want as a function (what you want to happen when it is used) to determine what the possibility is on making the plugin. |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Aug 5, 2024 18:56:37 GMT -8
It's very annoying to, once you've reached the bottom of a page, have to scroll all the way back up to the top to move on to the next one. I host a forum for creative writing, so posts here are often hundreds, if not thousands of words, leading to very long scrolls back to the top. Even just having additional previous / next buttons on the bottom would be very convenient. Is your forum customised? The default behaviour of the pagination is to "float" -- it's stickied to the top of the page as you scroll. Is this not your experience? |
|
Kami
Forum Cat
Posts: 40,199
Mini-Profile Theme: Kami's Mini-Profile
#f35f71
156500
0
Offline
Jul 24, 2021 11:48:29 GMT -8
Kami
40,199
July 2010
kamiyakaoru
Kami's Mini-Profile
|
Post by Kami on Jul 28, 2024 13:15:59 GMT -8
"Group Brackety Things" are either:
- $[variables]
or
- {conditional statements}
depending on which brackets you're referring to.
|
|
