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IP.Board Software Update 3.4.4


Koby

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I finally got around to updating the forums software to the latest release.


 


  • The default IP.Board skin has been reverted back to it's default state and fully updated.

  • The Brave skin I didn't update to the latest release because I've customized so much about it and didn't want to lose our customizations. So hopefully everything works fine as-is. If you have any issues please let me know. I'll probably work on updating the skin to the latest release and re-applying my changes when I get the chance.

Still waiting on our custom design to be completed. I think we may add another light theme anyways. Judging from the voting results, it'll likely either be Spectrum or Uniform, though I'm leaning more towards Spectrum. I have some alterations in mind for it and think I can spruce it up nicely. I'm just unsure if we really need it along with our custom skin. Spectrum costs $30, as does Uniform, so if anyone absolutely must have it you can donate towards it!


 


Also, I'd like to talk about the forums boards. Which boards do you think we should get rid of and do you have any suggestions on boards we might could use? I'm likely to start removing most of the sub-forums around here and condense a little.


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Hm the only ones I could think of that would be good to get rid of/merge are the gaming ones. It's weird how Final Fantasy, Grandia, Kingdom Hearts, and Shadow Hearts have their own subforum. If I remember correctly it was because you guys were affiliated with sites like those? But yeah seems a little excessive now.

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I like the slightly narrower look of Uniform and the expanded background options, but either is great because wow, I could have a pink forum to look at!


 


Other than snipping off the excess subfora (like the ones under the Gaming Realm especially), I don't really have anything.


 


Maybe merge Entertainment threads with Balamb? Sometimes people post stuff in Balamb that could go under Entertainment, and it's not like either Balamb or Entertainment are mega popular outside a few threads. That would displace the TCG subforum, though, which might be able to go under Gaming?


 


I mean it seems our primary niches are Anime & Gaming, so it makes sense to give those their own special category. Entertainment is a little displaced.


 


Also hide the Farplane, haha. That would make for four major subfora per category (bar the downloads, for those with access to Premium).


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I agree with the above sentiments. Having so many subforums under anime and gaming only spread out the discussion and make the forum as a whole look emptier (since there may only one or two active topics in each). If you ask me, I'd say the gaming forum description should just be broadened to cover console, TCG, and any other sort of game (barring forum games, of course), streamlining the whole thing. Recommendations seems like it could be a pinned topic just as well as a whole forum (though it generates topics well enough, so I get why you'd want it.) and the reviews bit can fit in the appropriate medium related board. The opinion forum, too, seems kind of odd to me as well, since most of those topics would be equally at home in Balamb or one of the medium specific boards (anime, gaming, etc.). The forum is laid out really well if we had some two thousand users a day, but -- not being there yet -- it makes things look emptier than they are. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it really feels like there's a lot of overlap in that section.


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The Two Cents subforum is actually more of a trash bin. ono


 


It was created because there were a lot of "WHO'S BETTER NARUTO OR GOKU" type threads everywhere on the forum, burying all the legit discussion threads. It was one of our attempts to help foster discussion, by shuffling low content threads away into its own purgatory.


 


In an ideal world, I would just shuffle all low content (funny, informative, or interesting--a la Something Awful) threads into the Farplane, but I'm a bit weird like that, haha.


 


Also I think recommendations tended to get spammed by people who would just randomly post "recommend me good anime" and then disappear after they made their fifteen posts. I think that's why asking for recs in the Anime subforum was once a suspendable offense.


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I can agree the the sub-fora in gaming and anime could be weeded down a bit...combine them or what not.  They may have used to be super popular back when they were created...but I think they are less so now.  Your the boss, so it up to you.


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For the boards, seasonal anime, all the sub fora of the Gaming Realm, and the Graveyard should be scrapped and merged with other boards. Only one that could maybe be kept is the Graveyard, but few if any people spend time there so dropping it would be good. Addtionally, the Trading Card Games should be made a subfora of the the Gaming Realm as well as the Soundtracks and Manga board should be made a subfora of Anime Downloads. Finally, the description of the Crusader+ board should drop the part about anime, there is no anime in there. Similarly, all of Chiyo's posts should be moved to the Farplane.


 


Also not sure if its a bug with the new system, but Admins now have a different icons. Doesn't match the other forum members any more


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Hm the only ones I could think of that would be good to get rid of/merge are the gaming ones. It's weird how Final Fantasy, Grandia, Kingdom Hearts, and Shadow Hearts have their own subforum. If I remember correctly it was because you guys were affiliated with sites like those? But yeah seems a little excessive now.

It's because Kametsu Forums was originally Forgotten Memories Forums, and Forgotten Memories was a Final Fantasy fansite. I also owned Kingdom Hearts Trinity, Grandia Online, and The Judgement Ring. The Judgement Ring has been rebranded as Shadow Hearts Infoholic though. Kingdom Hearts Trinity was shutdown and it's contents merged into Forgotten Memories. Overall; all the sites have pretty much gone without any done to them since 2008. Would really love to get someone to take over the updates of them, but they may just fade away eventually instead.

 

I like the slightly narrower look of Uniform and the expanded background options, but either is great because wow, I could have a pink forum to look at!

 

Other than snipping off the excess subfora (like the ones under the Gaming Realm especially), I don't really have anything.

 

Maybe merge Entertainment threads with Balamb? Sometimes people post stuff in Balamb that could go under Entertainment, and it's not like either Balamb or Entertainment are mega popular outside a few threads. That would displace the TCG subforum, though, which might be able to go under Gaming?

 

I mean it seems our primary niches are Anime & Gaming, so it makes sense to give those their own special category. Entertainment is a little displaced.

 

Also hide the Farplane, haha. That would make for four major subfora per category (bar the downloads, for those with access to Premium).

Maybe we could figure out how to allow custom backgrounds on Spectrum too at some point, IDK. The width of Spectrum was something I was definitely going to change if we got it.

 

I really don't want to get rid of the Entertainment section. I just wished more people would discuss their favorite tv shows, talk about the latest books in their favorite series, discuss new music artists and releases, etc... I've been trying to spark interest by posting some of my favorite shows there.

 

Hiding the Farplane is something that most of the staff seem to agree on.

 

I agree with the above sentiments. Having so many subforums under anime and gaming only spread out the discussion and make the forum as a whole look emptier (since there may only one or two active topics in each). If you ask me, I'd say the gaming forum description should just be broadened to cover console, TCG, and any other sort of game (barring forum games, of course), streamlining the whole thing. Recommendations seems like it could be a pinned topic just as well as a whole forum (though it generates topics well enough, so I get why you'd want it.) and the reviews bit can fit in the appropriate medium related board. The opinion forum, too, seems kind of odd to me as well, since most of those topics would be equally at home in Balamb or one of the medium specific boards (anime, gaming, etc.). The forum is laid out really well if we had some two thousand users a day, but -- not being there yet -- it makes things look emptier than they are. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it really feels like there's a lot of overlap in that section.

Recommendations as a single thread may work, IDK, or some peoples requests may simply go unnoticed if a lot of people spam asking for recommendations all within a short period. It'd also be a bit weird with people responding randomly to peoples requests and being unable to keep things sorted.

 

As for the Two Cents board; EO hit the nail: "The Two Cents subforum is actually more of a trash bin. It was created because there were a lot of "WHO'S BETTER NARUTO OR GOKU" type threads everywhere on the forum, burying all the legit discussion threads. It was one of our attempts to help foster discussion, by shuffling low content threads away into its own purgatory."

 

For the boards, seasonal anime, all the sub fora of the Gaming Realm, and the Graveyard should be scrapped and merged with other boards. Only one that could maybe be kept is the Graveyard, but few if any people spend time there so dropping it would be good. Addtionally, the Trading Card Games should be made a subfora of the the Gaming Realm as well as the Soundtracks and Manga board should be made a subfora of Anime Downloads. Finally, the description of the Crusader+ board should drop the part about anime, there is no anime in there. Similarly, all of Chiyo's posts should be moved to the Farplane.

 

Also not sure if its a bug with the new system, but Admins now have a different icons. Doesn't match the other forum members any more

Seasonal anime won't be going anywhere. It's a board intended to allow the current airing shows to be discussed without being buried under the other ruble. Problem is, lack of staff who keep up with anime to be able to move topics out of there after they're done and a lack of people willing to actually act like a community forum and discuss things they like. People come here for the community, but yet ignore the community aspect of the community... which is just complete and utterly confusing to me.

 

As for the icons, that's on your end. You apparently didn't read the latest news about the new icons and your browser has the old ones cached. You'll need to delete your cache, or try ctrl+f5 on all of the icons.

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Also I think it's pretty much time to say Alexandria Inn doesn't seem like it'll ever be used enough again to warrant it's existence any longer.


 


Only 2 RP's have been posted in THIS YEAR. One of which hasn't been posted in within the last 4 months. That leaves a single active RP and it's been over 2 weeks since it's last response.


 


So yeah, no one is really doing anything there at all. Your thoughts on this?


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Before I get into the RP subforum--I understand the intent behind the Farplane, so perhaps we could have a junk subforum where we put all the crappy posts no one wants to look at, and then an actual archive for threads that aren't problematic, but just retired for age/size?


 


This might make cleaning out some of the other subfora a bit easier, so old threads aren't just lumped in with the trash. I'd be willing to divide up the Farplane if we did that, I've already trawled through that nightmarish landscape a few times before already.


 


Anyway.


 


There is a lot of negativity and pessimism about the RP subforum!! I think people are really turned off from posting there because it's notoriously ignored and hostile. I will be sad to see it go, but the amount of history attached to it makes it difficult to post in. It's not attractive to new users and it's not attractive to old users, so it really isn't serving its purpose at all.


 


Perhaps we could nix the Alexandria Inn and make it so people can RP in the Art & Lit subforum? People already do sign-up stories, it's not that much different. This way, if we do notice a surge in interest for RPs, we can split them off again.


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Perhaps we could nix the Alexandria Inn and make it so people can RP in the Art & Lit subforum? People already do sign-up stories, it's not that much different. This way, if we do notice a surge in interest for RPs, we can split them off again.

That sounds fine with me.

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Also not sure if its a bug with the new system, but Admins now have a different icons. Doesn't match the other forum members any more

 

I'm also seeing a different icon for admins than the rest of the members. Everyone else has the newer icons with the arrows on top, but the ones for admins are showing up with one I haven't seen before. I've checked in both Dragon(Chromium) and Firefox. I've also tried clearing the cache and ctrl+f5 but neither has helped. I had the problem with the favicon on Dragon, like other Chrome users did, and that took a day to fix itself. It may be a similar problem so I'll report back tomorrow. Would like to add that Firerfox worked fine with the favicon and the newer icons until today. Below is what I'm seeing but I'm not sure if it's the same as lemmingllama.

 

icon.png

 

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On Deviant 3, for some reason every thread I open, including this one, claims:

 

"This topic has been archived. This means that you cannot reply to this topic. You cannot perform any moderation actions on this topic."

 

But I can reply. And moderate. The message is a lie.

The Deviant 3 skin has several issues I've noted. Including the lack of quote bar in the editor.

 

Take a look here: http://www.finalprestige.net/skinning/index.php?/topic/30367-deviant-3/?p=43988

 

 

It's why it was originally removed from our forum after the last upgrade to 3.4.1, I had hoped the issues had been fixed, but apparently it's only been fixed on their site and not in the actual package available to download. So if it's not patched soon, Deviant 3 will be removed again.

 

====================

 

What do you think of Clean-Cut Sense? It's effectively the default IP.Board skin with slight image adjustments and a few css edits.

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Our old skin is back. Currently called Kametsu.


I'm still doing some adjustments to it, customizing it a bit more, etc..


Once I'm finished with all that, I'll make it the default skin.


Hopefully I have the time to finish it all up before I head home.


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i love the kametsu skin js

RE alexandria inn: what about instead of nixing the subforum, clearing it out and naming it something else? maybe a fresh coat of paint by way of a new name and a spring cleaning with clearing out the old old threads that potentially have drama in them would make it seem friendlier? and maybe there could be one subforum for the ancient rp threads and just have the signups/oocs/interest checks and rps in the same section.

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