Check your premise: I voiced no 'opinions' for anyone to 'challenge'; and you've posted nothing of veracity or worthy of 'taking into heart' -- or to effect me in any way with regard to emotion; perhaps you're projecting...

I posted a suggestion... For you to dive bomb a literal, straight-forward, post statement that contains no guile, and invites no discussion the way you have with all your: bizarre assumptions, sarcasm, personalizations, histrionics, and disingenuous psychologizing is not a 'challenge', it's trolloing and nut bag crack-potting...


Reproaching someone for ridiculous assumptions is not 'flying off the handle' of anything; if any of your questions were in fact 'sincere', you would not have presumed to answer your own question when asking, and you would not regard your nasty remarks as above reproach...

Perhaps there's a semantic language barrier issue; I don't speak Hrvatski, and as you're making the effort at translation I supposed some forbearance at understanding on my part is due -- but your statements are so loaded with irrelevant personalization, hostility, and histrionics it doesn't invite much enthusiasm or sympathy from me in discussing anything with you again...

Didn't read the whole topic, but please stop quarreling with each other and try to avoid getting into this non-constructive downward spiral. What I see is: one starts with a little personal criticism towards the other, the other responds to that with some more etc. etc. I don't want to play the cop around here who has to stop all arguments. Just be a little tolerant to each other. Anyway, enough about this.
I'm postponing upgrading the phpBB software each time, but will try to do it coming weekend. I already set up a test environment on a local webserver to see how the migration goes and which plugins look useful for this forum. The plugins I'm currently looking at are:

• AutoMOD
• Topic Solved
• Thanks for posts or something alike; a ranking system to show appreciation.
• Some plugin that uses the icons in front of the topic name to indicate some version of Windows. Any Suggestions?

The thing I don't like about phpBB is the support for plugins. In most cases you manually have to replace many lines of code and modify several template-files if you are not using one of the default templates. I hope AutoMOD will [partially] automate this process.

You are right about the link colors, they are hardly distinguishable from the normal text. I think a quick fix in the css will solve this.

Sounds well; we could possibly make it a little more specific like 'Application Tips', what do you think?

That's what I thought. My idea about the new grouping is as follows:


Any suggestions are welcome!

For phpBB plugins I'd suggest any one of the many spell checkers, and re. sub-sections I'd suggest seperating Applications from Games entirely, i.e. just have generic 'Games' and 'Applications' forums, mixing Games and Applications and having a seperate Applicatios Tips forum seems redundant and confusing...

My biggest concern though is there are some really valuable Windows OS version specific threads that will be obscured if all OS version threads are merged into one common sub-forum. If no update to topic titles is made it might be a bit confusing opening a thread you thought would relate to what you were looking for when it's actually discussing a different version of Windows.

Looking through the soon-to-be-merged subforums, I see only two topics that don't explicitly state the OS in the title, and one of those isn't OS-specific anyway, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Don't todays' browsers have spell checking for all text-fields? At least my Firefox has an English Spell Checking plugin in it.

That's a good advise! How about the following structure?

I have seen forum software in which it is possible to set the topic icon at the moment you create a new topic. Don't know if this is also possible in phpBB but is currently not possible because of the custom template, or if there is an other reason. By adding custom icons it will be possible to quickly indicate about which OS the topic is about. If all of this isn't possible for some reason, we 'll have to make some rules regarding topic names and I will have to manually edit the existing topics, because indeed, it would be confusing if we just migrate the topics to a Windows General section. It isn't that much work like Indrek says.

Icons are a good idea, but they won't work in case the topic covers more than one OS (eg. "Vista vs Win7" or "XP vs WS2003"). Besides, I think that most people will automatically mention the OS in the topic title anyway if there's possibility for ambiguity. A simple mention of this in the rules topic (or subforum description) should suffice.

The structure you proposed looks good to me, except I believe it's more common to have the Misc subforum last. Although, looking at the existing forums, the reverse has also worked out just fine. Thought I'd mention it just the same, though.

Well IE does not by default, and while you can get IE spell check add-ons, they're slow and ugly in their execution... The phpBB spell-check plugs I've used are very fast, much better behaved then anything I've tried in IE, and are easy to install in phpBB. So while it's not a forum necessity by any measure, it is a nice feature/benefit; as many posting here that would benefit most from a spell checker probably aren't native English speakers, and any spell checker they have installed in their browser may not be English...


I think it's fine but Applications, Tips, and Tweaks & Tricks have some overlap and probably could be reduced to two sub-forums for more clarity...


Yes Icons would be neeto; but anything that works is good! There appear to be quite a lot of Server 2008 topics that won't apply to 2008 R2, and could create confusion if they were just merged without some kind of indicator of which iteration of the OS was being discussed.

Lastly, it warrants mention that not just forum link color, but also the quote and code contrast colors are not very contrasty; so in this vein I'd suggest always allowing the native phpBB3 theme as a user option, as while it's not very pretty, it is very functional across a wide range of issues like: color blind Users, different displays and display settings, it has a lot of carefully thought out details that individual theme Developers frequently miss, and your forum will still present publicly in the site theme default.

Updated the forum structure. What do you think? Haven't looked at a plugin to be able to use a Windows version as icon for a new topic, but will look at this soon. For now, one should use the Windows version in the topic name (as most of the cases is indeed done automatically).

You sound convincing, so I'll check if it's easy to implement it in the new forum installation!

It is a user option in the UCP so that's fine. Besides that I'll still the style of the links posted in the topics to make them more visible.

Arris

Looks good Arris! Didn't see that you had a bunch of themes in the UCP, don't know how I missed that! Is the board on phpBB3 now?