Welcome to the new Message Centre (3.0)

[Antony]

Welcome to the new SillyDog701 Message Centre (3.0)!

Firstly, I apologise for the long delay, and the generic look of this forum.

There are still quite a few things to do to complete the transition. However, I've decided to enable it before any further delay.

Stay turned for more updates.

Avatar has been relaxed to 100 x 100 pixels. Not all previous avatars are ported.

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[Antony]

Some issues:

The phpBB 3 supports automatically adjusting for Daylight Saving. However, I might not set the time of this board correctly).

Not all smilies are uploaded. I might remove some old smilies.

I personally don't like this default theme. I will try to adjust the theme to have more SillyDog701 style.

Not all features are back yet. Sorry for that.

Not all avatars are re-uploaded. And no default avatar yet (if a user does not upload any).

I don't like the icons provided by default. I will try to bring back our familiar ones.



Any issues please report.

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[Antony]

Forum theme updated to softer colour for the time being. The default theme (of phpBB 3) was a bit too bright for our style.

Forum icons and topic icons are changed to more closer to previous SillyDog701 Message Centre (2.0) style.

More updates are coming.

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[iJohnE]

Antony-

The site looks great, and I really like the new softer gray theme.

It's nice to see the forum updated.

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[Antony]

Thanks, John. Still more adjusting of the forum layout will be done.

Another issue, search does not work. I will need to re-index the search thing.

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[James]

I like the changes made over the past day... from the default that was presented yesterday. The colors are less straining on the eyes. Overall, a very professional look to the forum. Good work, Antony.

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[Mandrake]

Very nice, thanks for the update Antony. It's certainly been long overdue. The increase in size of avatars is certainly welcome. Has there been any change to the acceptable width of an image? The old 550 pixel limit was getting a bit anemic.

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[iJohnE]

I was wondering the same thing about the images last night when I was showing Richard about the attatchments.

The 550 rule is really outdated. On another forum I visit it has been expanded to 800.

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[Mandrake]

I was wondering the same thing about the images last night when I was showing Richard about the attatchments.

The 550 rule is really outdated. On another forum I visit it has been expanded to 800.

I think 800 pixels wide is fine. That way the forum should display OK for those with a 1024x768 resolution and that really should be the minimum resolution we target. I really doubt there are many people still running at 800x600 now!

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[Antony]

The 550-pixel width rule will be updated later, the exact number will be decided later. I would say at least 600 or 640-pixels.

I really doubt there are many people still running at 800x600 now!

Well, we have to consider those who visit the forum from a non-computer devices, e.g. mobile phones.

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[Antony]

issue
Some characters are broken e.g. °(degree), £ (pound), ... etc due to the fact that the old forum uses the good-old iso-8859-1 character set. We now use the popular de facto standard UTF-8.

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[Mandrake]

The 550-pixel width rule will be updated later, the exact number will be decided later. I would say at least 600 or 640-pixels.

I really doubt there are many people still running at 800x600 now!

Well, we have to consider those who visit the forum from a non-computer devices, e.g. mobile phones.

With an average resolution of something like 480x320, horizontal scrolling would still be necessary for people on mobile phones even with the old 550 pixel wide limit.

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[Don_HH2K]

With an average resolution of something like 480x320, horizontal scrolling would still be necessary for people on mobile phones even with the old 550 pixel wide limit.

I actually had a conversation about this about a month ago with a friend of mine. Smartphones are quickly moving to the pinch-to-zoom paradigm for their Web browsers - Android, iPhone OS, Symbian^3, and Maemo/MeeGo already do it, and the upcoming Windows Mobile 7 Series and BlackBerry OS 6.0 are both slated to support it. That said, I don't think that design constraints for mobile devices are going to be as much of a problem long-term, so it might not even be worth it to design with respect to devices that are going to be replaced in a year or two.

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[profman]

The "Mark topics read" button has not worked for me since the redo of SillyDog.

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[James]

I'm experiencing the same problem as profman. When I mark all posts read and then immediately check on new posts, the same posts show up once more.

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