The Energon Pub

The beta version of the site is available to those of you I selected or that asked to be part of the beta testing. You have to be logged in and have been granted access rights in order to view it.

Per Glyph's request, there is now a "convert" button in the top right hand corner of the website in the top bar that allows you to switch back and forth. Bizarrely, in order to get that to work properly over the past couple of weeks, I actually had to do a crazy amount of programming on the old site (which I wasn't prepared to spend that much time on the old version of Seibertron). But now it's there and I think it'll be a nice fallback for those of you who don't want to switch just yet or are interested in checking out the new site but find that the new site is too buggy in order to use day-to-day yet.

This is NOT open to the general population of SEIBERTRON yet.

Working on some crazy UI stuff (well, at least crazy for me and SEIBERTRON) ... more much more than meets the eye!

I have used the convert button, but don't see much (if any) difference yet, besides maybe some formatting. I do see a message scroll across the top that says something about a redirecting signal?

And then another one that says "The Silver Age of Seibertron is coming, Bounti76. When the moment arrives, which path will you take?"

Well, I just spent another 10 to 12 hours debugging all of these issues. It lead me down a rabbit hole that took me to user functions that I've had for almost 20 years and I find 3 bugs in that code. Urgh. I ended up rewriting the /convert/ code and SiteVersion() several times trying to get all of the scenarios resolved. I think I was finally successful. I don't know why this bug threw me for a loop so much. Probably because of some of the legacy code that is getting carried over. Ah well. the Beta version of the site should be up now for those of you with access. It's a significant change from the old site ... and is really just the beginning of what's to come.

The new homepage is now available to those of you with access. It is not complete yet but has a lot of the key functionality in place. All of it is subject to change.

Caption contest is next. It'll be the first section on the site to be part of a mew user engagement system (UES) that will allow liked, favorites and comments. I thought the caption contest would be the perfect place to start since it is just comments on a photo. (Guess what that will be a pre cursor to???)

Post text size is a couple of points too small for my eyes, and I don't want to have to use Firefox to zoom in.

Just post text. Every other font size around it is fine.

Burn wrote:Post text size is a couple of points too small for my eyes, and I don't want to have to use Firefox to zoom in.

Just post text. Every other font size around it is fine.

How's that now, Burn? You might have to force a refresh in your browser.

Much much better. These bi-focal glasses can be a pain in the arse at times.

Burn wrote:Much much better. These bi-focal glasses can be a pain in the arse at times.

No problem my friend from down under. That's why I want people like yourself helping me beta test. All of these little things are important for me to fix. It also helps me focus on things that I might not be thinking about.

Couple things I've noticed while getting the podcast going this morning:

• The quotes at the very very top, what the heck are some of these? Got one earlier of "We remember when “Shattered Glass” meant fanfic, not Funko." Huh? Right now it says "We date girls who know what a Pretender shell is." That's so cringey! My apologies if you came up with these on your own man, but they're more embarrassing (to me) than enjoyable Why not just populate that with a random Tech Spec motto?
• Post input doesn't have spell-check red squiggly underline indication anymore
• Maybe run the top right links ("Search", "Translate", "Contact" and so on) through an accessibility tool, if you have access to one. The light blue text over a background with some opacity applied may fall short of what would be best practice for contrast. Alternately, maybe just make that text a little brighter. Or ignore this altogether, you don't have to worry about this like we do in Fintech land lol

Specifically in the "reading a news article" view, for example https://www.seibertron.com/transformers ... eal/48605/

• The links under the article for "Most Popular Transformers News" and "Most Recent Transformers News" look like they have some CSS issues going on. Each link is on a line followed by something on another line with a view count. The view counts have either no background, a (random?) solid colored background, or a cropped image background. It's messy.
• Scrolling through the view of posts/comments has very very little styling applied, which makes it somewhat hard to parse through when one post ends and another begins. There's only a single bold line separating posts. A horizontal divider, alternating div background with contrasting colors or something might help.

Looking great so far overall dude!

ScottyP wrote:Couple things I've noticed while getting the podcast going this morning:

• The quotes at the very very top, what the heck are some of these? Got one earlier of "We remember when “Shattered Glass” meant fanfic, not Funko." Huh? Right now it says "We date girls who know what a Pretender shell is." That's so cringey! My apologies if you came up with these on your own man, but they're more embarrassing (to me) than enjoyable Why not just populate that with a random Tech Spec motto?

They're all supposed to be riffs. There are a lot of them. I don't want them to be tech spec mottos, but smart ass one liners is what I was going for. I'll have an entire admin section that we'll be able to manage these at a later date. In the meantime ... don't like the tagline? There's a vote icon to the right of the tagline which should now be functional. There are 3 states to the caret. The default "up" caret that is colored the same as the tagline. If you click on the caret, it turns white to show that you voted. Then click it again and it shows a down caret. I'll use this eventually to get rid of taglines people don't like or that don't make sense to them and then we'll also be able to manage taglines as well.

ScottyP wrote:

Post input doesn't have spell-check red squiggly underline indication anymore

That sounds like a browser issue unless I'm misunderstanding what you are pointing out. I wonder if I'm using some class that clashes with that functionality in Chrome (I'm assuming that's what you are using).

ScottyP wrote:

Maybe run the top right links ("Search", "Translate", "Contact" and so on) through an accessibility tool, if you have access to one. The light blue text over a background with some opacity applied may fall short of what would be best practice for contrast. Alternately, maybe just make that text a little brighter. Or ignore this altogether, you don't have to worry about this like we do in Fintech land lol

We have 100,000+ users accessing Seibertron.com throughout a month. I should definitely be running all of this through an accessibility checker. Any recommendations for one that you like?

ScottyP wrote:Specifically in the "reading a news article" view, for example https://www.seibertron.com/transformers ... eal/48605/ ....

The old news section is getting replaced with a brand new "Transmissions" section. I got it in my head that we needed to call it something different than the "News" section because "news" isn't the only thing that gets posted there but "Transmissions" seems like a better catch-all phrase and is different than what all of the other major fansites are doing. I am not done with the new Transmissions section yet but you can see a teaser of what I'm working on here: https://www.seibertron.com/transmission ... s_id=48605

If you click on that link above, you'll see the new lightbox gallery that works in some cases but not all for some reason. It is working properly on that example though. This will give us a "gallery" feel without it being an actual gallery. This logic currently does not work in many situations and I haven't spent much time on it during the past couple of weeks because I was working on "fixing" the old site to work with the "convert" option in the top right hand corner and dealing with all of the issues with getting the BETA site to work for those of you with access to it.

ScottyP wrote:Looking great so far overall dude!

Thank you, Scott. It's been an absurd amount of work over the past 3 months. I'm feeling really good about it. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. There's going to be an insane amount of stuff to go through and it won't be perfect at first.

The "Main 3" transmissions featured on the homepage- where the user posted is not an active link, where the smaller transmissions seems to be a link to the user profile- is it intentional to not have a link to the news poster on the first 3?

kuhlio wrote:The "Main 3" transmissions featured on the homepage- where the user posted is not an active link, where the smaller transmissions seems to be a link to the user profile- is it intentional to not have a link to the news poster on the first 3?

Nope that is not intentional. I'll add it to the list of things to address. The BETA version is a work in progress. It is not available to the public, just Seibertronians who have logged in during past 6 months.

Seibertron wrote:

kuhlio wrote:The "Main 3" transmissions featured on the homepage- where the user posted is not an active link, where the smaller transmissions seems to be a link to the user profile- is it intentional to not have a link to the news poster on the first 3?

Nope that is not intentional. I'll add it to the list of things to address. The BETA version is a work in progress. It is not available to the public, just Seibertronians who have logged in during past 6 months.

I fixed those links. I also fixed the links for the Recent Twincasts section as well (the links weren't working with the old site (again because we're moving to a new transmissions section where the links work differently) and the topic links weren't working for the topic icon.

The MOST IMPORTANT thing is the Twincast- nothing else matters other than that lol

So, new homepage just came up for me on mobile. I thought the website got hacked or something because the massive Temu ad was all I could see. Then there was a break for the website banner, then another massive ad.

Soooo is there a way to shrink the ad space size?

Fires_Of_Inferno wrote:So, new homepage just came up for me on mobile. I thought the website got hacked or something because the massive Temu ad was all I could see. Then there was a break for the website banner, then another massive ad.

Soooo is there a way to shrink the ad space size?

I haven't figured out quite what to do with the large ad in the header. I think Google is being a little aggressive with the ad size. Their terms of agreement say that I can't have it underneath the navigation so I haven't come up with a proper solution yet. I appreciate the feedback.

The second ad comes after the logo, the navigation and the 5 featured "spotlight" news articles so I think that one is good. All of the major websites have obnoxious ads on them these days so I'm not quite sure that it's a different experience that elsewhere as far as the ads go. I'm open to suggests though ... ad revenue is part of what pays the bills so they're necessary. If you can show me examples of what other major sites do that you prefer, I'm all ears!

Are the "Featured Galleries" on the front page still in dev? I see the spaces for them, and they are listed as figure galleries, however, no picture is in the box, and link to view the gallery just pulls me to the top of the main page

kuhlio wrote:Are the "Featured Galleries" on the front page still in dev? I see the spaces for them, and they are listed as figure galleries, however, no picture is in the box, and link to view the gallery just pulls me to the top of the main page

Everything is still in development. It has not launched to the public yet and is only available to members of seibertron who have logged in during past 6 months.

Fires_Of_Inferno wrote:So, new homepage just came up for me on mobile. I thought the website got hacked or something because the massive Temu ad was all I could see. Then there was a break for the website banner, then another massive ad.

Soooo is there a way to shrink the ad space size?

Yeah, what's with the Temu ads? I had to look at the Temu ad one more time...

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Is there a way to make the font more user friendly (larger) for the mobile experience? I'm that age where bi-focal glasses is a must.

Something I just noticed on mobile Chrome is that I cannot pinch zoom on gallery images. The light box functionality being used is somehow overriding even the Chrome setting to always force allow zoom. Makes it difficult when using gallery images to remember precisely how certain parts of things are meant to be arranged in robot mode. Thanks First Edition Bulkhead

Another issue I've noticed, at least on mobile Chrome once again, is that if I open the menu and tap to expand "Forums", both "Transmissions" and "Forums" expand. Other options don't do that as far as I've noticed, only "Forums"

Seibertron wrote:
They're all supposed to be riffs. There are a lot of them. I don't want them to be tech spec mottos, but smart ass one liners is what I was going for. I'll have an entire admin section that we'll be able to manage these at a later date. In the meantime ... don't like the tagline? There's a vote icon to the right of the tagline which should now be functional. There are 3 states to the caret. The default "up" caret that is colored the same as the tagline. If you click on the caret, it turns white to show that you voted. Then click it again and it shows a down caret. I'll use this eventually to get rid of taglines people don't like or that don't make sense to them and then we'll also be able to manage taglines as well.

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I'm trying with these, I really am and I promise I am not down voting every one of them I see, but after some weeks I just really, really, extremely hate this feature Most of them are cringe at best, edgy or nonsense at worst, some are tolerable, but none are good, to me.

I will stress that I realize comedy is both extremely difficult and extremely subjective. If I'm the only one that really hates the feature, it's just something I'll have to live with

ScottyP wrote:I'm trying with these, I really am and I promise I am not down voting every one of them I see, but after some weeks I just really, really, extremely hate this feature Most of them are cringe at best, edgy or nonsense at worst, some are tolerable, but none are good, to me.

I will stress that I realize comedy is both extremely difficult and extremely subjective. If I'm the only one that really hates the feature, it's just something I'll have to live with

There is no logic currently that prevents them from showing up if you downvoted it. I need to build out the new "members" section that allows you to view everything you've liked, favorited, commented on, etc. so that a user can undo them easily as well. there's also no fallback logic if everything is downvoted nor is there a way to disable them (which you would probably like to do). This is something I plan to roll out with the new S.T.A.R.S. system.

Some of them are non-sensical. Some of them are Transformers riffs on other popular quotes or movie lines or product taglines so maybe out-of-context they don't make sense. I need to build an admin section to manage those and would like to get a few of you involved with figuring out what to keep or add if you'd be interested.

I realized yesterday that the taglines are a bit large on mobile so I need to adjust that.

ScottyP wrote:Another issue I've noticed, at least on mobile Chrome once again, is that if I open the menu and tap to expand "Forums", both "Transmissions" and "Forums" expand. Other options don't do that as far as I've noticed, only "Forums"

Thanks for pointing that out. I just fixed this. I forgot to give the "forums" menu a unique name/ID when I copied and pasted the code from Transmissions yesterday (forums didn't have a dropdown on mobile as of yesterday). After I made the change just now, I tested and verified that it's working on mobile.

Scott, I added some styling to reduce the font size of the taglines on mobile. There are different taglines that show up on mobile, tablets and desktop as well based on the length of the taglines. I'm sorry they annoy you. We're going to be at odds about them but I promise figuring out a way to manage them is definitely on my list of things to do as I continue making improvements. Hopefully we can find some that you like or maybe once we see what other people have to say about them with likes and dislikes maybe we can have a feature where only ones that are highly rated are shown to people like you or maybe I have a user submission one or something. It's a feature I really like that I think is lighthearted fun that I first rolled out in the 2006 version of SEIBERTRON.