I'm thinking I should add a feedback form thing that would allow users to leave comments about page and fill in the page information and all that. I think I would want it to just generate a post or something because it easier for me to check here than have an email box full of messages. The fewer places I have to check the better...

The Settings page code is basically complete. It's just not used anywhere around the site yet... The linkage will not happen until I start making rounds again. Now, for the rest of the TO-DO list...

I think that's good idea, but to achieve this a forum is more convenient for your decision of what information should be on the web site or not. :whisper:

This is a http://lhammonds.game-host.org/forum/index.php I'm quite http://www.elderscrolls.se/forums/ with. :twirl:

I'm going to be completely honest with you here. My eyes do not like the brightness of the layout.

Sorry for jumping in like this, but are you suggesting Tomlong's site include a phpBB? If that is what you meant, I would strongly recommend against that plan of action. Tomlong's site has a very well-defined pupose to achieve a particular goal, and I think she is doing a marvelous job. But adding a forum would: 1) detract from the intended purpose of helping people in a step-like fashion, 2) allow tons of opinions to pour in that only confuse people (the same reason I felt she should not make it a wiki), and 3) add significantly to the maintenance demands of the site. Forums are great for what they do, and phpBB is a decent one. But Tomlong is well established on this forum already, and her chosen form of communication about the site has been a thread here. I think this is perfectly appropriate. I understand what you're thinking, but so many sites suffer by trying to do too much... I do not want to see that happen with this one. It is off to such a brilliant start!

If that is not what you meant, please forgive the intrusion!


That's a valid point... studies have shown that appearance my have more to do with adoption than anyone ever thought. CSS can be used to make skins for the site. Not terribly difficult once the master CSS has been done.

Neither do I because I already know what colour scheme she wants, but thanks for your honesty.


You're welcome to point out your opinion, but I only made a suggestion for her to decide besides that she has already said it http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1094618-tesivpositive-site-redesign/page__view__findpost__p__16152938 to have the all information in one place.

I just noticed this, but could you change the font(s) to be sans-serifs? The serifs tend to make reading more difficult, especially with small text, and I'm pretty sure it's been shown that on the net SS fonts are more widely used/accepted because of this, or something like that.

Well, it's not my opinion; it's a matter of good site design. You really would not want to hear my opinion! <_< But as you say, it is for Tomlong to decide, and she is certainly capable of deciding what is best for her site.

By the way, you did not to answer the question, but judging from your response I assume that you did mean to add a forum to her site?

I THINK, I may have misunderstood something here.

The CURRENT color scheme burns my eyes.

Obviously, I have not read the bit about the colors she wants.

Edit: I don't wont my opinions on this layout jumped on or singled out. Move on, there's nothing to see here >_>.

I'll stick to the thread here, at least for now. The website is a big enough project by itself for now.


I felt exactly the same way the first time I put it together, but now my eyes have gotten used to it. I started pulling all of the color styling out of the two CSS sheets, but I got side-tracked by the "Complete" guide. I have quickly put together a slightly darker theme, and I have an idea for a much darker theme. The latter will have to wait, but I will add a toggle option to switch to the darker theme later tonight.


Exactly...and thanks, haha.


Right, I just want all of the information here. Three threads is enough. I'll be happy when there are only two again, frankly.... Actually, that would've meant killing the main thread sooner. Well, the plan is to definitely only have the other two, but if a third thread specifically for structural feedback seems necessary, at least for a while, I can continue the separate thread.


I am using san-serif. I only have Times New Roman (TNR, haha) in the sidebar, but I can change that. This post kind of confuses me though...


I know how you feel, seriously...

Greetings! I do hope you are well this evening.

Anyway, I think the thing to do is to see if there is an API for IP.Board, and if so, does it offer a hook in to make posts programatically. If so, you are in luck, as that would far and away be the most reliable method. A web service would be golden, but that may be hoping for a bit much! Ha ha! Short of that, there are a number of things you can do to simulate a post submission, but it gets messy. But yeah, unless the Bethesda servers are locked down incredibly tight, it should be possible to do what you mentioned (converting user input into posts in your thread(s)).

I created a darker theme. It is not super dark. I plan on getting to that later. My eyes were dying with all of the color switching, haha. The theme is an odd one, and the final result happened through a couple of accidents. Everything, at this point, is temporary until further notice.


Happy gaming!
- Tomlong75210

Sorry, I should have said, I was speaking in regards to both sidebars and the row of links at the top of the page, which incidently aren't displaying properly for me (they're being bisected between the blue header and the content below that). This is only on Chrome though, FF displays it fine. You gotta love web 'standards'...

Found an error on http://tesivpositive.animolious.com/index.php?page=intro_to_mods page, where it says:

?OBSE - This folder is present in many people's Oblivion setups. It contains the "Plugin" folder in which you would actually find the DLLs and INI files of various OBSE plugins. The Oblivion Script Extender has seriously expanded the capability of mods to modify the game by tremendous.

Also the next line where it refers to "scripting feature" - should that read "features"?

Perhaps more importantly, it should read "'Plugins' folder". I know of one plugin - http://zenthought.org/content/project/refstuff which is incorrectly packaged like this.

Congrats on the new site Tomlong... it's vital. :thumbsup:

Okay. I'll switch them to sans-serif. I opted against that because of the width and so chose 'Arial Narrow'. Once I have the CSS organized a bit more, I can provide you all with options to mix and match things and see what people like. I have plans in my head for at least two more layout, maybe four.

The navbar floating issue is really bothersome. It usually clears up for me when I refresh the page, but you can be sure I will get on that while I am working on this layout madness. I am trying to switch back to full CSS without tables, but that may take some time. It will certainly take some JavaScript. The only way I could get around the JavaScript is to use menus that opened up to the side, expanding divs, but someone earlier expressed preference for static menus, and I understand that very well. I'll see how the JavaScript and CSS approach works, but it is tables for now.

All of the top stuff is really temporary. I added the toggle button to make the other layout available quickly, and threw it up where people would notice it. The search bar has not been formatted much at all, and the navbar just bothers me all together. I'm really going to push my sister to get the two banners out so I can scrap the top part.



Thank you very much. I will take care of that as soon as possible. Typos are very embarrassing...


I like the plural, but the apostrophe has to go, haha. That is the first thing that jumped out at me in the post. I can include instructions RefStuff on that page too. Thank you for pointing that out. The OBSE plugins are packaged in all kinds of ways. I don't think two of those that I mentioned are supposed to be unzipped from the same location, haha. Thanks to BAIN's package structure printing function, I can think of a few much simpler ways to express that better than what I already have written there.

Thank you all for all of the feedback. I'd probably be worrying about the lengths of various paragraphs instead of chopping down on my to-do list without you all. Plus, all of this comes from the TES communities anyway. ^____^


Happy gaming!
- Tomlong75210

Another thought occurred to me last night that may be problematic with this. Even if you can make posts programatically, there is still going to be the issue with (unfortunately) how you handle an unruly user and authentication. When I first went over this in my head, I was envisioning a virtual user that would represent your site, and that "user" would be the one making the posts. That's perfect as long as everone plays nicely together. But that doesn't work so well if you have a troll (who gets warned? or even banned? the virtual TES4POSitive user? no, that's no good) Ideally, users would put in their feedback in a form, including their gamesas forum username and password, and then submit. That way they remain accountable for the posts they make even though it was through your site. If that can not be done, there are other solutions, but none are really "good".

I realize this is geting ahead, but it is something to think about as you get closer to that point.

veg

I meant to clear this up earlier, but I guess I forgot in my state of fatigue. Anyway, what I meant with that post was that I would create a feature that would format the feeback response for posting. The form might look like the following:

Feeback Post
Name: (optional)
Location: (URL, default: current page/section)
Type: (Drop down, specify on other)
Message:


I'll setup one of those "direct" email thingies too, once the site is more settled (and I figure out how to do that.)

Ahhh, I see! Yes, I suppose that would be simplest of all. Still, I'm curious myself about what is possible. I shall look into it myself when I have a little time. But yeah, that is a good solution, and it would only require a copy/paste from the user, just like the mod lists (if I am following you correctly). Good plan!

Yup, I was going to do that too. For the load orders and BAIN list, the tool may only be available on the relevant page. Ehh, I don't know, the tool will be exactly the same, really. I thought of making the tool so that users would not have to copy and paste the URL from the browser. Whenever people post quotes about mistakes and problems, it is sometimes hard for me to immediately figure out the context of the issue. I often need to know exactly where the problem is because content overlaps among the utility pages, the general pages and the guides/tutorials. If users can just click a button, have the feedback tool popup write on the page (a fixed div) and copy and paste the exact quote and all that, my hope is that they will be less likely to forget the location (since the tool would have that information already there if the user is still one the relevant page.)

That is a very good solution, indeed. When I have been involved in sites that had bug-reporting systems, we tried to do the same thing (capture the page they were on when they made the report). It worked well as long as people didn't submit a problem about a page from a different page, as you noted. The only down side was that it required a "report problems with this page" link on every page, but we typically pushed it down into the footer where you find legal info and what-not.

I was going to make the tool available threw a "page-action" sort of button, but adding such a link at the bottom where it is always visible is good too.

Notes to self:
- need to fix codebox colors in dark theme
- correct "Console Commands" quick link reference

I got rid of the nasty table, all CSS now. ^____^


Edit: The body font is now sans-serif and the codebox colors have been altered on the dark theme.

Edit: The type on the "Intro" page is fixed. I still need to get the package structures up for the OBSE plugins. I'll try to figure out how to get BAIN to do that (since the packages are invalid I guess) tomorrow or on Friday. I really need sleep, haha...

I've seen the new colour scheme and I think the background is excellent, but you could change the text colour for the buttons to yellow / white or cyan perhaps.

Good luck and well done. :clap: