WATMM Skin Requests and Issues

Since the default skin for the newly upgraded forum has been met with the usual mixture of complaints and praise, and the fact that I was waiting on this upgrade before taking the time to create a WATMM-specific skin for the forum, now's the time to let me know what you'd like to see in a custom skin for the forums - any reasonable suggestions are welcome, and I'll do my best to try and address the most valid concerns and ideas. Functionality ideas and concerns may or may not be able to be addressed, but hopefully the skinning system this time around is flexible enough that we may be able to do some long-standing feature requests we've had in the past. So, let's get the ball rolling and let me know what you'd like to see in a custom skin here.

gimme some skin man

compact minimalism. work on increasing post density. right now only 1 or 2 replies fit on a 1024x768 screen. it should be more like 4 or 5. this is one of the things xltronic does right. a one sentence reply shouldn't require 500 vertical pixels.

  On 7/1/2009 at 4:54 PM, chaosmachine said:

compact minimalism. work on increasing post density. right now only 1 or 2 replies fit on a 1024x768 screen. it should be more like 4 or 5. this is one of the things xltronic does right. a one sentence reply shouldn't require 500 vertical pixels.

That might have to do more with allowing 300px high avatars...

yeah, it would be more effective to allow wide avatars than tall ones. vertical space is at a premium on websites. horizontal space is almost free, especially with widescreen becoming standard.

a skin like the old one, would be nice.

  On 7/1/2009 at 5:06 PM, chaosmachine said:

yeah, it would be more effective to allow wide avatars than tall ones. vertical space is at a premium on websites. horizontal space is almost free, especially with widescreen becoming standard.

Agreed - perhaps if we set the avatar size to say 150x200, and try and put the member info to the right of the avatar instead of below it...

  On 7/1/2009 at 5:07 PM, chris moss acid said:

a skin like the old one, would be nice.

LOL, you mean the last default skin (the gray one)?

the one that it was about 2 days ago. it was nice to the eye, this one seems to be massive sigs and tiny replys.

  On 7/1/2009 at 5:24 PM, chris moss acid said:

the one that it was about 2 days ago. it was nice to the eye, this one seems to be massive sigs and tiny replys.

Well, nothing's changed with the signatures, and yes, that was the prior version's default skin. Unfortunately, they didn't port it over to this version, as the skinning system's totally changed.

I agree with you that signatures seem to dominate these days, my PSN thingy included.

I disabled sigs a while ago. It's one of those things you think you'd miss, but I quickly forgot they even existed.

I'd also get rid of images in sigs, and limit them to say 200 chars.

I totally agree with chaos' recommendations. I made similar (but less well-put) comments in the 'Welcome to the new board' thread.

I like the idea of trading vertical for horizontal space.

Beyond that, I don't care what the skin looks like.

My favourite WATMM so far has always been the clean and minimal dark blue theme back in (checks wayback machine....) woah was it really as long ago as 2003 ! - http://web.archive.org/web/20031203163711/http://forum.watmm.com/

Me too. Those were also the golden days of WATMM. Burlap.

I'm probably missing something really obvious, because I've been drinking this afternoon, but I can't seem to get nested quotes to work?

having no avatar does not improve board readability imo because i see an image and instantly register who is saying what, but now i have to read "encey" to know that you're posting

  On 7/1/2009 at 6:00 PM, Iain C said:

I'm probably missing something really obvious, because I've been drinking this afternoon, but I can't seem to get nested quotes to work?

I turned it off - quotes should now appear one below the other, I think...

  On 7/1/2009 at 6:08 PM, Fred McGriff said:

having no avatar does not improve board readability imo because i see an image and instantly register who is saying what, but now i have to read "encey" to know that you're posting

I agree that while signatures should be trimmed down, avatars give each member personality and I personally associate members with their avatars.

  On 7/1/2009 at 6:17 PM, Joyrex said:

I turned it off - quotes should now appear one below the other, I think...

Only if you press the multiquote button, it seems...

  On 7/1/2009 at 6:22 PM, Iain C said:

Only if you press the multiquote button, it seems...

Let's see if that's the case...

  On 7/1/2009 at 6:08 PM, Fred McGriff said:

having no avatar does not improve board readability imo because i see an image and instantly register who is saying what, but now i have to read "encey" to know that you're posting

*jots it down*

*takes it into account*

*performs actions in the present tense*

  On 7/1/2009 at 5:07 PM, chris moss acid said:

a skin like the old one, would be nice.

Yeah that last skin was really nice!!

To me the best thing would be a skin that doesn't use any images for the design (so no facebookesque curves on the corners etc), and yeah, smaller the better.

Also I don't know if administrators have control over which things appear under people's names, but I think it should be limited to these:

Group:

Posts:

Joined:

Location:

  On 7/1/2009 at 7:08 PM, Tamas said:

Yeah that last skin was really nice!!

 

To me the best thing would be a skin that doesn't use any images for the design (so no facebookesque curves on the corners etc), and yeah, smaller the better.

 

Also I don't know if administrators have control over which things appear under people's names, but I think it should be limited to these:

Group:

Posts:

Joined:

Location:

Try the Lo-Fi skin if you like minimal graphics - I use it when I browse on my Blackberry and it works great and is very very fast.

Could we get the whole thing to throb in rainbow colours? with strobing text?

My main concern was changing the color of the user names

don't know if this belongs here, but i would like to see the creator of threads along with the last poster, instead of just the last poster when i View New Content

  On 7/1/2009 at 7:35 PM, Joyrex said:

Try the Lo-Fi skin if you like minimal graphics - I use it when I browse on my Blackberry and it works great and is very very fast.

Yeah I actually tried that one before with the previous version's templates, but then I grew to start liking the default, maybe that will happen again. The problem with the lo-fi one though is that it doesn't show who started a thread, I think that's a lot more important than who posted in it last.

Too bad those template files suck to edit... Or at least they did when I used them.