Elements the Game Forum - Free Online Fantasy Card Game
Other Topics => Forum Bugs, Suggestions and Feedback => Topic started by: CleanOnion on February 06, 2018, 08:51:06 pm
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I believe that that even the smallest, least consequential, cosmetic change ideas are still worth suggesting and discussing. Here's a not-very consequential cosmetic change that I'd like to discuss.
I'd like to suggest having separate favicons for certain boards of the forum. Currently, the favicon is the Life symbol, and appears as the tab icon for all pages of the forum.
Right now I've got a bunch of tabs open, and a bunch of those are forum tabs, because I'm trying to do three things at once and I've gotta have the right pages open for writing stuff and other pages for researching stuff. It'd be easier to know what I'm doing if these tabs were broken up a bit, if they weren't all green.
Additionally, I think that certain sections - say War, Brawl, competitions, maybe even forum games - would benefit from having a slice of individuality, to get players "in the zone", that sort of thing.
The bulk of the forums, such as player profile pages, messaging, the rules page, etc, and any other more minor sections - eg FG Proposals as an offhand example - would have the standard War-winner icon.
On a similar vein, would it be too far to suggest full-on cosmetic changes for those same boards?
For an exaggerated example of what I mean, I'll refer you to the SCP wiki site and their Group of Interest formats. Articles "published by" the SCP Foundations themselves have the default theme (example (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1548)), wheres pages "published by" certain Groups use an identical but thematically changed style (example (http://www.scp-wiki.net/grant-request-for-the-construction-of-an-interstellar-scienc)).
I wouldn't want to propose a change as drastic as changing the background, that'd be blasphemy, but something as simple as a modification of the title image in the top right to read "Elements Forum Brawl" or "Elements War #XX" as opposed to "Elements Official Forums" for those boards would be a nice touch.
I'm all about nice touches.
Thoughts?
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Why haven't you suggested this sooner?
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Favicons - yes. It's a fairly small change, and hopefully, it'd be easy to implement.
Full on cosmetic change - maybe/probably not. Personally, we want to see the change implemented, but there are two seeds of doubt:
*It's a fairly large process to apply those for a forum that has about three-five dozens of active members, meaning that community is barely alive.
*If that wasn't bad on its own, chrome and a bunch of other browsers are gonna remove flash support in a matter of years, actually killing the game, and, most likely, our community (at least parts that rely heavily on PvP, deckbuilding, cardcrafting and stuff like that).
So yeah, we don't think it'd be a good idea to make cosmetic changes on the scale of SCP wiki (bonus points for referencing that, btw =D), seeing that there's not much people or time left to appreciate the change (especially since some might not even like it).
However, since we are on the topic of cosmetic changes, it does seem to us that our forum could look more appealing in general. We don't mean to put down the current design of the forum, but it could really use some aesthetic improvement. =p
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Just to let you know, Anti has been talking about possibly changing the forum software to: https://www.discourse.org/.
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Different favicons for every section solves the problem of the game having the same favicon as the forums, so I'm all for it.
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Nice idea, but generally browsers cache the favicon. It's not going to update each time you load a new page unless you do a hard refresh (and sometimes not even then).
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Nice idea, but generally browsers cache the favicon. It's not going to update each time you load a new page unless you do a hard refresh (and sometimes not even then).
According to this StackExchange answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/7116701/4958427), you can prevent caching by appending a version value to each favicon:
<link rel="icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico?v=2" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://www.elementscommunity.org/forum/war/favicon.ico?v=3" />
You'd probably need a different version value for each favicon for it to work. Also, I've not actually tried it.
That being said, I don't imagine it would be easy for SMF to accept such dynamic changes.
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+1 for the favicons (I truly hate that all of my ETG bookmarks have the :life icon - extra work is needed for the organization).
Having a different look for the sections - maybe.