Forums graphical display updates – September 2021

[Ess-Eschas]

Today, we have made some slight changes to the forums’ graphical display.

 

We have done this in response to a recent update of the software that runs these forums. This update altered some features that were an important part of our forums’ style, and added a few new features that aren’t quite compatible with our usual layout. Today’s changes effectively restore the forums’ graphical display to what it was before the update took place.

 

Restoring the forums’ original look required implementing some complex coding changes, and figuring out various workarounds. This process took a little time to work through. Thank you for your patience while we have been dealing with the issues.

 

The most notable of today’s changes are the alterations to the ‘Default’ theme.

 

The badge icons, which were introduced as a mandatory part of the recent software update, have now been removed. The little ‘rocket’ badges will no longer obscure your profile picture. The rank information that was bundled with the badges has been separated out, and appears below your profile picture once again. Custom titles, for those that have them, now also appear below the profile picture.

 

We have also taken the opportunity to fix a small, slightly older issue. A small part of the interface that is used to navigate betweens forums pages used to be quite difficult to read – the text of the interface buttons was largely obscured by the colour of a particular navigation bar. We have slightly changed the colour of this bar to make those buttons much easier to read. This is only a small alteration, and the new colour has been chosen to be as close as possible to the standard colour scheme we use on these forums.

 

We have also made one slightly larger change, one that allows for backwards compatibility with our older forums themes.

 

The badge system is only removed for the ‘Default’ theme. Our secondary theme, ‘Spiderlicious 2’, still makes use of badges. To help these badges better suit our layout, all of the rank badges used by that theme have been customised. Rank badges now use a little graphic of their respective creation, and generally take less space out of the profile picture. Here is an example of how the Spiderlicious 2 theme now looks:

 

 

 

Do by all means try out this layout, or use it if you’d prefer. You can change themes by scrolling to the very bottom of any forums page, and clicking on the ‘Theme’ button. This will open a dropdown menu. Simply select ‘Spiderlicious 2’ from this menu:

 

 

 

These changes should be loaded automatically by your browser. However, in some cases, your browser may still be loading the old interface from memory. This will be happening for you if you are still seeing rocket badges over the profile pictures.

 

In that case, you should be able to load the new style changes simply by reloading this page. If that doesn’t work, try clearing your browser’s cache. That will remove the old style information from its memory, loading up the new style changes when you next open a page on the forums.

 

We have done a fair amount of testing to ensure that all of today’s changes work smoothly. However, as with any software change, there is always a chance that there may be some small bugs or unexpected behaviour lurking that we haven’t yet spotted. If you come across any problems, or features that don’t seem to be working as intended, please do let us know!

 

Thank you again for you patience while we have been dealing with these issues!

[Chopkinsca]

I have to say, thanks for all the work, a lot of which goes on behind the scenes!