Lots of great comments here! I will try to answer things where I feel like I can provide useful feedback (I tried to pick just one if there were multiple comments of the same kind, so your question might be answered here even if you don’t see your original comment):
jesolo wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:39:
How do I view the latest "active topics"?
Previously, there was a link at the top you could click on that listed the latest active topics.
I analysed server logs when deciding which links should be there, and the ones you see are the ones that were shown to be regularly used. “Active topics” was not used very often at all, surprisingly! When I did the analysis, I was so sure that the “your posts” link would have been the one nobody used, but people actually use that a lot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The “new posts” and “active topics” are almost the same thing—new posts will show you what you haven’t already read, where the “active topics” is just a limited list of topics on the site sorted by last post time. So “new posts” should be more helpful since it will filter out things for you.
Shagittarius wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:34:
Agree, the dithered background adds extra flicker on local dimming displays when you scroll, was just looking for the option to change the color.
Huh, I’m sorry about that! Several people looked at the design on different monitors (I personally reviewed on an IPS LED, retina Mac, retina iPad, and Samsung OLED) and I don’t remember anyone mentioning flickering problems due to the patterns. I’d guess this is probably due to panel overdrive on some panels, so I guess it is not really solvable other than to make it possible to replace the patterns with a solid colour when that happens. I’ve put a note on my list about this.
ATauenis wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:43:
But on a 17 "monitor even with small font size it still very cumbersome. May be need to get accustomed to it, but old design was definitely easier to use (required less scrolling).
Hey, sorry to hear that it feels like everything is too big. Unfortunately, it is difficult to make it perfect for everybody, so the default targets the most common devices: mobiles and 1080p+ monitors with a higher dpi. If you size down the whole site to 80% using your browser’s full page zoom (control-plus and control-minus) that should probably make it “correct” for you, since I’m guessing that monitor is probably closer to 72dpi and so the pixels are pretty large compared to new screens.
Jabberwock wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:56:
I had relatively strong 8 symbols password and could not login. What the hell?
I hate when somebody is telling me what to do with my passwords. There are MY passwords, anyway! Let ME balance them between security and comfort.
I fixed the stand-alone login page not accepting formerly valid passwords; sorry about that! Sometimes one tries to DRY out some code and accidentally adds constraints where they aren’t meant to be.
Unfortunately, most people will just type in something like “password”, given the chance. Also, unless a password database is using a properly configured high-cost password hashing algorithm, an 8 character search space is now small enough to be brute forced in human scale time periods. The GRC Password Haystacks calculator gives a very general idea of the strength of different passwords based on length and complexity; more technical detail on the practical speed of brute forcing hashes can be found by searching about Hashcat.
I think the most secure and comfortable way is to use a password manager which generates strong random passwords that are different for each site, but please do what works for you! 😀
ATauenis wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:49:
[…]on top of the page a new error is appearing:
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/ext/vogons/tos/event/main.php on line 507: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/ext/vogons/tos/event/main.php on line 507: Invalid argument supplied for foreach()
And attachments are not visible for guests.
Oops! This was unintended. These two things were actually related, and are now both fixed. Thank you for noticing!
ATauenis wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:43:
Why not to add theme selection like most of phpBB forums and add the the old theme as an option for registered users?
This is an excellent question. The answer is simply that there is not enough manpower for this. I know it seems silly on its face—like, hey, the old theme exists already so why can’t it just always exist?—but believe me when I say that phpBB is not as modular and customisable as it seems. Themes are not drop-in replacements, especially across different phpBB versions. Even in patch releases, the phpBB team adds, deletes, and breaks features and this often involves changes to the templates. The templating system is also super broken architecturally; among other things, it sends generated HTML to the templates to be injected instead of passing the raw model data, so things like the language files, which should be totally independent, end up needing to be rewritten to match the theme. It’s absolute lunacy, but it’s what we’re working with here.
VOGONS also has some added customisations which would need to be restyled and tested for every theme, so trying to make that all work across multiple themes would also increase the manpower requirement for maintenance. Since the only reason why this upgrade finally could happen was because I became temporarily disabled due to a medical condition so had the free time to do it, you can see how the desire to keep the maintenance cost low is a pretty strong one.
blurks wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:12:
Is this color theme supposed to be as close to the C64 as it gets or am I missing something here?
Originally it was darker and bluer, but Qbix impressed upon me the importance of purple in the identity of the site, so it became more purple. The lines are the same purple from the old theme. It was a happy coincidence that these colours were close to the C64, and so that became another part of the design.
I really tried to pull in different fragments from the technology and gaming world of the 80s and 90s so the design represented the essence of the site. This is why there is dithering instead of flat shading (the patterns are from CP850), the border (C64!), the intense colours (EGA! also, every magazine from the late 80s), the font (an open source clone of FF Meta, which was super popular in the mid-90s), the use of snake lines and connecting lines in general (also super popular in mid-to-late 90s graphic design), the mouse cursors (Win9x!), etc. It’s hard to tell since this is an in-thing now, but even the thin bordered round buttons took some inspiration from Palm OS.
It’s supposed to be an amalgam, reminiscent of many retro things, not just one thing. This is spoilt largely by accommodations to modern technology and sensibility, and limitations of the web platform:
1. You would definitely murder me if I’d gone all brutalist design and created something that felt like it fell straight out of 1996. You have no idea how much I wanted to do this though. So, so much. You’re welcome I guess.
2. Modern touch devices have tiny screens, and modern humans have fat fingers. So, icons get used more often than text because of the tiny screens, and the buttons (and the spacing around them) gets increased to make sure you can use them. This is pretty not-retro, since early computers didn’t have memory for lots of graphics,
3. Web browsers really don’t want you to be able to do things like draw text without antialiasing. Or lines without antialiasing. Or anything without antialiasing. This is probably for the best when it comes to actually not getting fatigued reading lots of text, but it does take away from that retro feeling. (Also, because this is a forum with user-generated content, it would be basically impossible to do this correctly with a fake-aliased font, since those don’t do what old bitmap fonts did when it comes to making text bigger/smaller.)
4. In the late 80s, desktop publishing became a thing, and boy was that an exciting way for magazine designers to suddenly create insane bespoke layouts on every page. Unfortunately since this whole place is user-generated content it’s not possible to do that.
blurks wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:12:I especially don't like that I'm unable to directly access the last pages of certain multipage topics from the topic list. Feels counterintuitive to me.
The link in the last post column does still go to the last post of the topic. Is there something else you want to see here? If so, please send it over to the feedback thread.
OK. That is it from me for now. This post is too long so I will follow up with remarks on some of the new posts that exist here since I started writing this in a separate post 😀
