BBCode fixed but…

Thanks for calling that out, I missed it. Most of the changes I mentioned are for www side of the site, which helps funnel new people into the forums.

Thanks for the suggestions!

@CentralCommando said in Celebrating 25 Years:

@djensen All of them seem interesting, as long as you get AI summaries to work properly, Apple sort of made that feature look bad. Here are some ideas to consider:

I’ll be using something more like ChatGPT.

Dynamic Forum Icons: Many Icons on the forums are just speech bubbles, which takes away some of the identity of the games. Instead, you could have each icon sort of represent the games. (North Africa could have a silhouette of Libya and Egypt, Anniversary could have a 25th or 40th, etc.)

I can work on that. I’m not a graphic designer so it’s a little more difficult for me to get it just right. GenAI is okay at monochromatic vector art but not quite there yet.

“Pinned” Categories: What I mean by this is that users can right-click categories and “pin” them to the top of the forum page. The reason why the pinning is air quoted is because it would only show up on that users end (If I “pinned” a category, only I could see it).

That sounds like a functionality request for NodeBB. It would be fairly core so I’m not sure I can write a plugin to do this.

Themes: While it could just be light and dark mode, I think it would be cool to have ones based off of Axis and Allies games. For example, 1984 Classic would have almost like that 80s paint style, 1914 could have the gradient of the map over a tan background and have trenches and gas masks at the bottom. This is just another thing that would add flavor.

Themes can be difficult to maintain. I’m actually considering moving to the new default “look and feel” of NodeBB soon. I’ll have to re-theme that with the colors I would prefer so I’ll take a look at making multiple themes.

I hope you consider these additions!

@djensen ahh yes that was the problem. It shows up now. TY :)

@Panther said in How to change name of thread:

@VictoryFirst said in How to change name of thread:

Is there any way to change the name of threads manually?

Sure. Just move to the very first posting of the topic, hit “Edit” and change the headline.
This is possible in most forum categories, but not in “Play Boardgames” where edits are never allowed. So type carefully there ;-) . However, you can ask a moderator by pm to edit the title, there.

In that case it is important to send the link to the respective topic and what you want to have corrected there.

@VictoryFirst

The answer of @djensen implies that the issue could be resolved by switching to a newer forum theme, what might lead to other problems.

In the meantime you can always access every chat by klicking “Continue chat with” from your chat partner’s profile page.

d0c64202-5539-4f61-a6a8-498ba7f08bf7-image.png

@avner Yes, the same problem occurred today… and it looks like it has been already solved.

You also need to understand that in my day job I’m a software engineer (programmer) and I build scalable websites. It takes a lot of work to do it right. phpBB and SMF work but it does mean they were built right. Not to say those programmers are bad but I doubt anybody who originally worked on phpBB and SMF would ever code something in that same manner ever again. The codebase intertwines the data models, the views, and has no templating system. The code is spaghetti and my eyes bleed whenever I have to read it.

I’ve avoided building my own forum in the past because I know how much work it will be. Enough of that, if nobody else will do it right, then I’ll do it.

VanillaForums comes the closest and has a much cleaner codebase but there are many things that I would still have to implement to run Vanilla.

@Field:

@djensen:

If I upgrade, it will break everything. The next upgrade will be a migration to new forum software, which I will be writing myself because the current state of the forum-world is horrendous. If we don’t evolve, everybody will migrate to Quora and StackExchange.

I’m not too familiar with the SMF system but you should be able to upgrade without breaking links. With phpBB you upgrade the forum not the data. the data is in a separate dbase and is a slave to the forum software. In the beginning at the Underground we were spammed to death so I added a simple security question to the registration process and we haven’t had even one spammer in a year. The question is simple but bots don’t know the answer. “What war does the game cover?” Any doh-head knows the answer, but bots don’t. I honestly have few issues with the phpBB software.

OK good I guess I’m allowed to spam myself if I want  :-D :-D :-D

I have removed the BBCode for posting images in message topics and in signature files. Feel free to use the url BBCode to link to the images that you wish to share with everybody.

Thanks for understanding this new policy change.