Forum Features and Feedback

[Jes]

Forum Features

Hi, guys!

Some of you may have noticed that we have a lot of the same features here that we did on the old forum. The custom BBCode is much the same, since I was able to carry them over. That saves time in copying old topics - which I'm in the process of doing now for the admin-related stuff. Remember that if you guys have any PC stories or notices that you want to save, be sure to carry them over yourself. We won't be able to transfer all that over for you. Handily, we'll (theoretically) be able to keep the old forums in archive mode for some time. We'll see how that goes when we get Disco's domain transfer.

Let's get to the fun stuff next.

New Features

-You'll notice the smilies are on the right-hand side, and there are a handful of new (animated) ones. Had to include the little chicken, too, because it's a classic Amia thing. And also a Like smiley.

-Coloring text is done through the little water drop next to the [Normal] text size dropdown. Clicking that will open up the color picker, but it is otherwise done the same with the color code.

-You'll also notice that media can be embedded properly. I'm leaving this available for now because I like it, so don't go crazy with it or we'll have to turn it off.

-The List feature was changed in PHPbb a few versions ago and if you want to use it to kind of "indent" the text without any bullets or ordering, you'll have to show it like this, otherwise it'll put a bullet on the first option by default:

Code: Select all

[list=none]List Item 1.
List Item 2.
List Item 3.[/list]

-The Column feature was changed in PHPbb in the latest release also. You can only use it for one line at a time for now. I'll be researching a way to fix this, but don't have time for it yet. Right now, you have to treat it like a table and use it for one line/paragraph of text and can't use any other bbcodes inside of it, but you can use a few other options outside of the column brackets, at least (like list, alignment, or olala - no text-formatting ones like italics or bold, though). See below:

• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

-You'll notice Code is implemented a little differently also. It sticks out!

-These forums have a Friend/Enemy feature which allow for easy private messaging or blocking content from someone you don't want to hear from. This is entirely optional and may be disabled later if it causes any problems. Gonna try things with it activated for now, though, and see how it goes. You can see your friends in your profile, and you can set your friends/enemies by looking at other profiles.

-There is a quick-chat area at the bottom of the main forum page, in case you can't access Discord or something and you need quick help or just wanna chat at people.

-The forum categories are collapsible, so if you get tired of scrolling or only wanna check certain forums now and then, you can collapse the ones you don't want to see.

-More BBCode stuff:

• sup: Superscript text. If you like to annotate^{or something}.
• sub: Subscript text. If you want_this.
• spoiler: An inline spoiler so you can hide small text lines. You can include =Text to give the Spoiler button text that doesn't say Spoiler. Yes, it's mostly for my forum OCD. I like things like this.
• ex: Another way to hide text under a button dropdown. Include = after the ex or it won't work, even if you don't give it extra text.
   Click Me

  
  Works the same as spoiler and is effectively just an aesthetic choice.
  
  
• font: You can change the font of a certain set of text, if you use the name of the font itself. You'll wanna use the browser-friendly generic ones, if you wanna make sure everyone sees what you do, although technically anything installed on your machine will work for you. I tested it. Just the lowercase full name (spaces are okay) goes after the font= part of the code.
• divbox: You can set a colored box around a heading for organization or just to make things pretty. Just use the regular color codes that we use for text with divbox=#colorcode. Try not to be glaring about it.
  Example divbox. Text is default color, but You Can Change and Format the font Normally, of course. It'll work in this box.

(I'll update this with more if I find I've forgotten something, or add something later).

Post any general Amia EE/forum feedback here, please!

[Jes]

Updated post with more BBCode stuff. New features added and explained.

[Bhaalorian]

If it's possible, if you could add the functionality to dot-point each new line with the list function when you select a whole text.

• Here
  Is
  An
  Example

So it's like this without having to manually use the list command for each individual line.

• Here

• Is

• Another

• Example

Also, spellcheck, when you get the time.

[Jes]

This works like it already does on the current forums. You need to use the List Item asterisk. Use it like this:

Code: Select all

[list][*]Here
[*]Is
[*]An
[*]Example[/list]

[Bhaalorian]

Did not know that, good to know!

[Underdork]

Can we make the default colours for hyperlinks to be coloured? They're easily missed otherwise.

Also can the default Sound option for mChat be set to off?

[Jes]

Hyperlinks are on my list. It's just the visited ones that don't show colored.

You should be able to toggle the chat settings in the menu at the top of the forum. There's a drop-down that says mChat.

[Google]

Can we end up adding in some of the playertools features of the old forum and the playercount?

[Jes]

That's something that we have to work on a bit later and requires more than just me pushing buttons and writing php/html!

[Jes]

Fixed the visited links. They'll be orange now instead of grey.

[LastDragonRider]

Can we get a Reskin Request area added to the request forums, please?

[charles1810]

Can this get turned into a sticky, am sure over time this may get lost and new users this would always be relevant to.

[Jes]

Sure.

[Jes]

Removed [hquote] from the options because it broke after a phpbb update and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I went through and replaced existing usage of it with either ex or spoiler tags, depending on which worked better. There weren't that many, so that worked out. xD

Also, updated the ex feature to have the missing + and - symbols for the dropdown, and removed the garish black background on the resulting box.