New forum/website design

Very good. Nice job Dave!

Ta chaps.

Tricky bit was to integrate the web site with the forum. The idea being that a lot of stuff is getting buried under the mountain of posts. We can push stuff of a permanent nature onto the webby and wiki to be a central repository - and everything is available from a common menu system.

Plus it's easy to forget that visitors arrive at the web site first through Google searches rather than the forum, and a lot of folk aren't forum users.

With the web site being a lot more pictorial I can concentrate on the kit building features - I'll put a spec together so that others can follow a guide on how to submit a feature. It will get players a bit more involved and hopefully avoid the questions along the lines of 'I want to get 101st Airborne loadout, tell me everything 'cos I can't be bothered to research it myself'.

Stuned by the new look Top marks there David ! You even managed ot find a picture of me not looking too fat

Hmm, the board appears to have reverted back to the old design for me....

Whattagwan?

I've turned it off for a bit while I do some revisions... didn't look too good on uncalibrated monitors.

Christ, they don't like the beige do they?

It has to be said that I'm not too happy with the beige either...

I love the rest of the site though! Top marks Dave!

Now I'm used to it I'm loving Beige! (US tan colour scheme )

My main issue from just the first few minutes is that I can't see on the page number navigation bit which page I'm on...

eh?

All the numbers on the line of pages used for navigation are the same colour. Hence there is no way to tell which page you are currently on.

Top left and bottom right of each page - unless there is only one page. I see 'em.

Its just not the way I work Dave... can you please make the current page number in the navigation list a different colour... to save my sanity!

Every other forum has it that way!

Screenshot please, no idea what you are on about.

ah... its the underlining I'm missing!

Gotcha - the selected page is in a slightly different colour and not obvious in this scheme. It's only a CSS tweek so you can have underline back if you want!

Anyhoo, switching back to old style for a bit while I build stuff underneath...

Dave... can we lose the phpBB copyright statement from the bottom... or at least obfuscate it. Its one of the things that the spam robots use to identify sites ripe for abuse.

It is a requirement of the licensing of phpBB that a link is carried on pages as well as that of the skin designer. Helps my Google rating too!

All the pages are Google indexed and all carry the standard /phpBB2/ directory location for the forum so it is academic anyway.

If we are deluged by spam then I'll re-consider.

BTW, there were only two pages you changed for the security question - now I know what they are I'll roll it out across the new skins. (I assume you inseted a new table or two in the DB as well so skin-wise, that's it).

Two skins done so far - a bodge on the 'old' green skin that incorporates web site integration (live for everyone) plus optional 'Silver' - the plain vanilla phpBB version, again adapted.

I also changed the header and footer... I removed a load of stuff from the main menu so that some stuff is not visible to non-registered users (etc). This also deters spammers as there is little point in spamming when google can't see it.

Believe me, sod what the phpbb authors might think, we need to remove or at least alter that copyright statement. It really does work. The spam robots will scan page after page on the net looking for that statement. Its the one sure way they have of identifying a phpbb forum and then spamming it to hell and back.

I suggest if you insist that it remains visible, that we mangle it somewhat. For instance we should insert some dodgy but ineffective html in the middle of it. This should mean the robots have a more difficult time when it comes round to identifying the forum.

eg.

p<b></b>hpb<strong></strong>b

etc...