The Energon Pub

During the past week, I have implemented a ton of minor changes intended to improve everyone's experience here at the Seibertron.com Forums. Now that I've made several rounds of initial changes, I'd like to get your input about what you think could be done to improve the forums. I'd like to have this be an open discussion ... a sharing of our minds. There is no wrong idea, no stupid idea, no idea to small ... let's bounce ideas off each other to see what can be done to improve the forums.

Here are a few things that were changed in the past week:

1. Search engine friendly URLs ... this basically means the URLs for forums, topics and posts are now readable to the human eye. The URLs now also include keywords which will help improve Seibertron.com's results on various search engines.

2. I fixed some CSS (stylesheet) issues. I decreased the margins and padding to bring the whole page up about 30 or 40 pixels. Not a big issue until you're looking at the site on a mobile phone.

3. I fixed the CSS for the "advanced search" so that it would be a dark color on a light background instead of a light color on a light background.

4. I removed the "Smilies" text that appeared above the smilies below the textarea for editing posts. I think everyone knows what smilies are now ... no sense wasting space.

5. I decreased the font size of the text below the smilies, again to decrease the distance between the textarea and the submit button when you are editing a post.

6. I moved the "Moderator(s)" text string to the bottom of the forums and topics instead of appearing below the forum and topic name. If you guys need to find out who the appropriate moderator is for a particular forum, you can now find the links for the moderators at the bottom of the page instead of wasting space at the top of the page. Again, just trying to make the page more accessible.

7. I got rid of a few forums this past week. Merged the Philosopher's forum with General Discussion due to how little traffic the Philosopher's Forum got in the past year (not ever 100 topics). I looked through that forum and didn't see anything that couldn't have been discussed in General Discussion, which is the point of having a "general" discussion forum. I also merged HMW's Maximal and Predacon forums with their respective Autobot and Decepticon forums.

8. I moved the Toy Sightings forum to be a subforum of the Transformers Toys forum. I figured it would be more noticeable if the sightings forum was available in the toys forum. Hopefully this will get some more attention.

9. HMW, Transtopia, and RPG forums are now subforums of the "Feature Forums" section. None of the links changed, I just thought the front page of the forums might look cleaner, more focused, and less intimidating if the individual sub-forums for those sections didn't appear on the Forum's main page.

10. And of course, there's the new BB codes that allow you to easily post YouTube videos, do strikes through text, and easily add spoiler text (finally).

So now I turn to all of you. What ideas do you guys have? No idea is too small, not idea is too unimportant. Small details make the world of difference. Share your thoughts!

The search function is a PITA. How about giving us the choice of searching forum text or forum titles?

I just fixed the "quote" code in the news section so that our quotes from the message board will display properly, particularly with user comments below a news post.

http://www.seibertron.com/transformers/ ... oss/17821/

Mykltron wrote:The search function is a PITA. How about giving us the choice of searching forum text or forum titles?

You have that option when you click on "Advanced Search":

search.php

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're requesting ...

Large photos are cropped when posted in forums. Can they be auto-thumbed if they are above a certain size?

When signing up to the site forums the verification code is extremely hard to work out. When you can see the code through the speckles the letters and numbers look like they were written by a 2 year old using MSpaint and just look like scrawl. It took me about 15 tries through several hours to sign up.

Party Forum Resurrection anyone?

Large photo test ...

Seibertron wrote:Large photo test ...

Unless you posted half of Banzai-tron's face, test failed.
EDIT- That's better.

The post times are about 10 minutes out.

The Legend wrote:The post times are about 10 minutes out.

Should be fixed now.

The Legend wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Large photo test ...

Unless you posted half of Banzai-tron's face, test failed.
EDIT- That's better.

Ah, much better. I applied "max-width:100%" in the style sheet to images. Now they will scale according to your browser's width. Ugh. I should've done this years ago. I never thought about doing max-width:100% ... I kept thinking that I should have a fixed pixel width.

I applied this change to the front end for the news section as well. Another awesome side-effect is that this will fix the images in the forums and the news section for mobile devices as well.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Night Raid and I mentioned this on the Trouble thread, but just in case: the Mark Topics Read button doesn't seem to be working.

That picture thing was the only thing that bothered me, I have no complaints....as long as I can see the whole picture

Not so much an improvement to the forums so much as it is a suggestion for the galleries. Over the years when I've looked at the galleries I always like to take a closer look at the pictures but always have to go back to see the thumbnails again.

Why not have the thumbnails available under the larger images. This way you have the option of going forward through the gallery of larger images while still being able to see and cycle through the thumbnail images?

Also I'd like to see an import emoticon feature. People always seem to have there own hilarious emoticons, and while ours are pretty good there are some good ones out there not gracing the pages here on Seibertron.com.

Down_Shift wrote:Not so much an improvement to the forums so much as it is a suggestion for the galleries. Over the years when I've looked at the galleries I always like to take a closer look at the pictures but always have to go back to see the thumbnails again. Why not have the thumbnails available under the larger images. This way you have the option of going forward through the gallery of larger images while still being able to see and cycle through the thumbnail images?

This is an interesting suggestion and definitely something for me to ponder. I guess I always assumed that people would hold down the "ctrl" button on their keyboard and then click on the thumbnails to open the images up in new tabs in their browser or would click on the "thumbs" button in the top right hand corner of the galleries to move forward while viewing new images (when you do this, it makes the last image you viewed the first thumbnail on the page followed by the next batch of images following the image you just viewed).

Down_Shift wrote:Also I'd like to see an import emoticon feature. People always seem to have there own hilarious emoticons, and while ours are pretty good there are some good ones out there not gracing the pages here on Seibertron.com.

If you've got some awesome emoticons that you think we should have available here, please send them my way and I'll see about adding them if they're appropriate.

The only thing I'd like at the moment is for the Mark Forums Read button to work again.

Edit: Oops, just noticed this has already been reported. Sorry.

Tekka wrote:The only thing I'd like at the moment is for the Mark Forums Read button to work again.

Edit: Oops, just noticed this has already been reported. Sorry.

How long has it not been working for you guys? Did it just stop working last week? I'm trying to assess if the changes I made last week broke this or if it's been broken for a while.

Yeah, it stopped working when you made the changes.

Before it would include the session id in the url when you clicked the link, now the sid isn't there, but it still doesn't work even if you put the &sid=123456etc on the url manually.

can we condense some of the announcement. it looks like an aweful lot could be combined. do we need 7 stickied topics? cant we get it down to 3 or 4

edit: i guess its just GD that has the big problem. but cant "Posting in spambot threads", "General warning about trolling, flaming and not respecting others opinions", "Info about our warning and ban system", and "Sig size guidelines" all be put into "**BOARD RULES PLEASE READ** ". all of thoses just seem like they could be in the 1 board rules thread which would de-clutter the top of the forum

How about seprating the cartoons and comics into 2 fourms or have a sub-forum featuring comics or cartoons?

Cyberstrike wrote:How about seprating the cartoons and comics into 2 fourms or have a sub-forum featuring comics or cartoons?

I had the forums separated like that a few years ago, but neither separate forum was getting a lot of traffic. I merged them to help generate more interest but that still hasn't really seemed to work. There have only been 100 topics posted in since December 21st so I'm not sure what to do with that forum at this time.

I'm open to suggestions and ideas though on how to improve activity in the cartoon and comics forum(s).

Seibertron wrote:I'm open to suggestions and ideas though on how to improve activity in the cartoon and comics forum(s).

Seperate the forums and have have the staff create a topic when a new issue/episode is released to kick start a conversation. Oftentimes people have thoughts on issues/episodes that they don't feel the need to create their own topic for so their opinions go unvoiced. A catch-all topic to discuss in would be welcome.

Name_Violation wrote:can we condense some of the announcement. it looks like an aweful lot could be combined. do we need 7 stickied topics? cant we get it down to 3 or 4

edit: i guess its just GD that has the big problem. but cant "Posting in spambot threads", "General warning about trolling, flaming and not respecting others opinions", "Info about our warning and ban system", and "Sig size guidelines" all be put into "**BOARD RULES PLEASE READ** ". all of thoses just seem like they could be in the 1 board rules thread which would de-clutter the top of the forum

This has been a concern of mine for a while. I created a new Subforum, which now appears under General Discussion called "Rules Forum". I moved all of the rules topics into that forum, modified the topic titles, and unlocked the topics in order to allow users to ask questions if necessary.

general-discussion-f14.html
rules-forum-f214.html

Now to create a "Rules" link somewhere in the forum's header.

Skyfire77 wrote:Night Raid and I mentioned this on the Trouble thread, but just in case: the Mark Topics Read button doesn't seem to be working.

Tekka wrote:The only thing I'd like at the moment is for the Mark Forums Read button to work again.

Edit: Oops, just noticed this has already been reported. Sorry.

Tekka wrote:Yeah, it stopped working when you made the changes.

Before it would include the session id in the url when you clicked the link, now the sid isn't there, but it still doesn't work even if you put the &sid=123456etc on the url manually.

This should be working properly now. Can you guys confirm?

I meant to mention yesterday that I fixed the "quotes" so that they will display properly in the news section and display slightly differently than they used to in the forums.

share-your-ideas-about-ways-to-improve-seibertron-com-s-forums-t63300s20.html

Also modified the smilies and added back in some old favorites. Moved the smilies back to the right of the textarea that we type in, again to help free up some space following the textarea and the submit button.