New Site Details

You know the problem with this thread? It doesn't bump up to the top of the forum when people talk about it. Too easily forgotten. All the more reason to create a section for it. At least, in my opinion

WishLine wrote:You know the problem with this thread? It doesn't bump up to the top of the forum when people talk about it. Too easily forgotten. All the more reason to create a section for it. At least, in my opinion

I get email notifications about it on my iPod so I'm good either way :p But yeah. +1 for the new site discussion section.

So wait. Did this die again? Or are we waiting for something/someone?

MegaSonicX wrote:So wait. Did this die again? Or are we waiting for something/someone?

Everybody thought you were working on the style.

Question: Why does the style even matter?

We should be blazing our own trail as a community instead of clinging onto this notion of trying to restore things to how they were before. We don't NEED the old tangerine style from TD's site. We just need a new site that we can fully call our own.

I agree with mhenr honestly. I love the old red look, but it was irtls look, wrtl needs its own face because honestly, there's a lot of difference between the two now which I think is rather unique in a way. If I knew anything about making a website I'd help out with this, but I don't, so unfortunately I'm not much use. But I've had some ideas for new looks (part of my nostalgia while I was gone) and what not, I just don't exactly know the best way to go about making a hard copy of them because again, I know nothing of how to make the internet go.

Then why not just use a premade style then for MyBB? .

RABID DO THAT AND GET US A BETTER SITE UP.

We should definitely go for purple. It's a cross between blue and red, and it's the most awesome colour ever.

Just putting it out there.

Hedgehogs4Me wrote:We should definitely go for purple. It's a cross between blue and red, and it's the most awesome colour ever.

Just putting it out there.

I look good in purple
/pimp

but I honestly had an idea with purple, so like that could work.

also idk if any of you are familiar with fringefx... or facebook... but their chat styles are very similar to one another and might be something worth looking into. i.e. sidebar of users online, chat capabilities, and theres still a community chatbox on fringe fx. or in our case the wrtl stream which i think is a very good idea

Spoiler:

. but people in clans could have their own page and private chats so to say. less about post counts and more about communication between members. this also kinda eliminates/combines pms. so each message sent through the chat box is actually just a pm. again, I know nothing of making this work/how complicated it is to make this work, but its a neat feature I see a lot of big deal websites using. something I do know however is fringefx is an ipboard I think, and facebook is well facebook, and this is phpBB. whether that matters again is beyond me.

Regardless of theme, let's get somewhere first. It doesn't need to be done on Day 1 - we aren't looking for some amazing first impression like TD did when he wanted to leech members from .org.

Then we can start a dialogue about the site's functionality and appearance. The only important decision that needs to be made now is what software we're going to use, so that we aren't limited in the future.

^ The design is important for that very reason. We don't want the design to be limited by the software.
Can MyBB do the columns idea? Or listing the users in a sidebar, if we want to do that?
I suppose we should decide what the bare minimum is that we want, because anything more isn't that likely to happen. Then again, though, the bare minimum is pretty much our site right now.

TheRevTastic wrote:

MegaSonicX wrote:So wait. Did this die again? Or are we waiting for something/someone?

Everybody thought you were working on the style.

[censored]. Sorry. I thought we needed some more things straightened out first before we began. But it looks like we won't be remaking the old design anyway.

To whoever suggested the 2 column idea. I don't think that'll be possible. And I don't think there's a single theme out there that'll let us do that. With the forum software code, we're basically limited to only doing single column forums. Personally I think we should just stick with the single column.

As for using a pre made theme, I'm all for that. It might require some tweaking here and there to get everything we need on it. But it's still far simpler than making our own from scratch.

While we're on the topic of pre made themes, what do you guys think of adding a theme switcher and letting users switch the theme? Sorta like what .org did.

Meh, I don't really see the point in theme switiching if not between daymode / nightmode. The website kinda loses its style without a definite theme. :C

IMO the appearance of a website shouldn't be defined by the user. The designer should choose the layout that's the best and stay with that.

Once we move to the site, I'll look at mods like dual columns, sidebars and the like. You don't choose the software on the basis of "can x do y". You choose it on the basis of "how easy is it to make x do ANY y" - you want a forum that you're comfortable with modifying because any forum can do anything, depending on how much time you have.

The two pressing questions that everyone should be talking about right now are:

1. What forum software do the admins prefer using (in terms of the ACP), and how easy is it to mod in general (not for specific mods ie columns/chat)?
2. What host do we want, and how do we want to pay for it? Does someone just cover it all themselves, or does the community donate at certain intervals? If the forum software we've chosen requires a license/payment, who's paying for that?

With these two questions answered, we can get the actual move done. Once this happens, we're already 50% of the way there. With an actual WRtL website set up, it means we can start thinking outside our current boundaries - why not have WRtL facilitate track sharing between members? Why don't we embed the livestream on the WRtL page so that if you wanted to you could have the stream and the shoutbox on one side of the page, and the forum itself on the other?

If we want to promote WRtL, we don't want to have people register here only for us to all move and reregister somewhere a few days later. We need this move done now.


NB: The selection of host is EXTREMELY important. We need to get set up with a quality webhost who has very good uptime and powerful site management tools (cPanel 11 is amazing). Don't go with some cheap/free or shady host. Don't go with "unlimited" hosts because you have no way of stopping them from screwing you over. Get a host who explicitly states all of their limits so that you know what you're getting into. TD chose badly and we paid the price.

^ I don't think the host was really the problem for TD. I think the problem was that vB only supported up to a 100 MB database, and we went waaay over that, and the thing crashed, and he wasn't around to prune it. Then a bunch of people DDOSed it, which, I admit, may have been partly the host's fault. Then again, if we want to make it 100% DDOS proof, we have to spend a fortune on hosting, and I don't think we can do that.

As for "how easy is it to make x do ANY y", if we already struggle with the idea of making a skin, do you really think we can make our own forum mods? Unless, of course, you're volunteering, but I know you're already super-busy.

And, for the ACP part, I don't think we really have a preference, because none of us have any experience with anything except vB and this forum.

Hedgehogs4Me wrote:^ I don't think the host was really the problem for TD. I think the problem was that vB only supported up to a 100 MB database, and we went waaay over that, and the thing crashed, and he wasn't around to prune it. Then a bunch of people DDOSed it, which, I admit, may have been partly the host's fault. Then again, if we want to make it 100% DDOS proof, we have to spend a fortune on hosting, and I don't think we can do that.

As for "how easy is it to make x do ANY y", if we already struggle with the idea of making a skin, do you really think we can make our own forum mods? Unless, of course, you're volunteering, but I know you're already super-busy.

And, for the ACP part, I don't think we really have a preference, because none of us have any experience with anything except vB and this forum.

It was actually the host's fault for the 100MB database, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/, way more members and way more posts then IRtL ever had.

I would go with HostGator, they are reliable and have a great uptime and probably protect against DDoS'ing better then 1&1, don't know what they limit the database size to though.

Alright, here's the way I see it. I remain clouded about hosting sites and what not, but that's completely beside the point. It would appear we need to make a decision about this and we need to do it soon. Can those who know what they are talking about (so people like mhenr and hedge and rev) come to an agreement or a majority vote for a server/host/whatever, discuss a payment plan, and start switching over to it in a week? 2 weeks? etc.

As far as a possible payment plan: donations proceeded by reward. Donate any amount of money (paypal, credit, what have you) and become a "premium member." Simple as that. One new pip bar, forum lounge, and rank and we might have some money. It's not required of anyone to donate money, and people can still advance in rank if they aren't premium, but I think a lot of people would be willing to donate, myself included. Possible minimum fees for the "premium membership" might be necessary depending on the cost of site maintenance, or if not enough money is being raised to cover the costs, but again I still think people would be willing to donate enough money. Plenty of sites already implement this already and it seems to be a system that works for several of them. The one draw back I could possibly see is we might be too small of a community for this to work, so until we can get estimates on site costs and possible quotes from members, run the numbers and base a determining factor around that.

This project isn't dead, but simply put, we need Rabid and the admins to rush through in team place the forum for discussion of ideas.

The forum software is definitely the starting point. You can do almost anything to it once you have it. MyBB seems a sensible choice due to its powerful ACP and price, or lack of it. Then, we modify away. Theme...I mean really, it's something that's nice to have, but not super-super important. We've gotten along here just fine.

We just want something that can do more features, support more members and is easy to run and add to. And we need to discuss what we want.

WishLine wrote:MyBB seems a sensible choice due to its powerful ACP and price, or lack of it.

Actually MyBB is a package I have a lot of experience with (you may _vaguely_ remember HQ, right?), and the admin backend isn't as cluttered as phpBB's and definitely not as 20th century confusing as vBulletin's. Plus, for almost all of the mods, literally zero file edits are required ever, and all mods edit every skin for you so you don't have to worry about incompatibility.

Also Wish, when did you suddenly decide to pull a Lazarus? Last I remember, you left the community forever.

StingReay wrote:

WishLine wrote:MyBB seems a sensible choice due to its powerful ACP and price, or lack of it.

Actually MyBB is a package I have a lot of experience with (you may _vaguely_ remember HQ, right?), and the admin backend isn't as cluttered as phpBB's and definitely not as 20th century confusing as vBulletin's. Plus, for almost all of the mods, literally zero file edits are required ever, and all mods edit every skin for you so you don't have to worry about incompatibility.

Also Wish, when did you suddenly decide to pull a Lazarus? Last I remember, you left the community forever.

I'll be honest with you, part of my inspiration for the recommendation was LRHQ. I liked the place!

Well, you PMed me, so you get a PM back. But suffice to say, nostalgia and a desire to play Line Rider had a lot to do with it!

WishLine wrote:

StingReay wrote:

WishLine wrote:MyBB seems a sensible choice due to its powerful ACP and price, or lack of it.

Actually MyBB is a package I have a lot of experience with (you may _vaguely_ remember HQ, right?), and the admin backend isn't as cluttered as phpBB's and definitely not as 20th century confusing as vBulletin's. Plus, for almost all of the mods, literally zero file edits are required ever, and all mods edit every skin for you so you don't have to worry about incompatibility.

Also Wish, when did you suddenly decide to pull a Lazarus? Last I remember, you left the community forever.

I'll be honest with you, part of my inspiration for the recommendation was LRHQ. I liked the place!

Well, you PMed me, so you get a PM back. But suffice to say, nostalgia and a desire to play Line Rider had a lot to do with it!

HQ ran on 1.2. MyBB's backend has changed a lot since the days of unnecessary IFrames, it's now a cleaner tabbed layout with a quick access sidebar, and the software itself is now LGPL instead of proprietary in terms of licensing. It's a really good choice because it's similar to vB without being vB. I'll see if I can find my old tutorial for making showthread pages look like vB 3.6, too.

Hate to double-post, but any closure on what we're going with? Any more suggestions?

StingReay wrote:Hate to double-post, but any closure on what we're going with? Any more suggestions?

We wait for rabid.

https://iridethelines.forumotion.com/f52-new-site-discussion

Eventually decided to make it