Forum Makeover
Printed From: Illyriad
Category: News & Announcements
Forum Name: News & Announcements
Forum Description: Changes, patch release dates, server launch dates, downtime notifications etc.
URL: http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/forum_posts.asp?TID=3236
Printed Date: 17 Apr 2022 at 09:48
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.03 - http://www.webwizforums.com
Topic: Forum Makeover
Posted By: Tinuviel's Voice
Subject: Forum Makeover
Date Posted: 27 Feb 2012 at 23:58
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That's not white. It's cream. Or champagne. Cream is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color" rel="nofollow - colour of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cream" rel="nofollow - cream produced by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle" rel="nofollow - cattle grazing on natural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasture" rel="nofollow - pasture with plants rich in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow" rel="nofollow - yellow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenoid" rel="nofollow - carotenoid pigments, some of which are incorporated into the cream, to give a yellow tone to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White" rel="nofollow - white . Cream is the pastel colour of yellow, much like as pink is to red. Cream is used as a skin tone in some forms of art, mostly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anime" rel="nofollow - Anime . By mixing yellow and white, cream can be produced.Champagne (color)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz" rel="nofollow -
The color champagne is a name given for various very pale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tint" rel="nofollow - tints of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow" rel="nofollow - yellowish - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28colour%29" rel="nofollow - orange that are close to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beige" rel="nofollow - beige . The color's name is derived from the typical color of the beverage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champagne_%28wine%29" rel="nofollow - champagne . -wikipedia |
Replies:
Posted By: Aurordan
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:06
| Looks white to me. Also it hurts my eyes after getting used to the old forum. Is there some sort of conspiracy to make the whole game brighter? |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:11
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The forum is undergoing a makeover to match the look of the new website. Don't be alarmed if things look a little different as we work on the change. :) Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk 
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Posted By: Aurordan
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:13
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The light, it burns us! *shields eyes*
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Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:21
Ow. 
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Posted By: SunStorm
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:24
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Luna, Goddess of the moon; who shines brightest when dwelling in darkness... You, of all people, must see that this change is quite a lot... I recommend keeping it black with a 75% blackness and 25% transparency bleed for the background to poke through.... additionally, make the background anchored so it stays put as we scroll. please, not this bright - it burns us precocious.... -------------
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Posted By: SunStorm
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:25
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oh, btw - I LOVE seeing changes! keep them coming - but this one still needs tweaking....
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Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:30
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The goal of the new forum theme is it bring it in line graphically with not only the rest of the website, but the game as well. We can certainly make tweaks as needed (and are still doing so) but going back to black wouldn't really be in line with the new look. The black was a carryover from the very first website and game UI which is not in use anymore. Hope that helps. Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:36
| In that case, I repeat my suggestion to reverse the chocolate and cream which I made earlier down below in the suggestions section. |
Posted By: SunStorm
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:46
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Understood Luna. How might that look with the background as chocolate? hummm -------------
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Posted By: Bonaparta
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:50
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I really hate this new colors. Previous color template was much more eye friendly and energy friendly as well. And practically all my previous posts are now unreadable, since I used yellow for all my texts. Actually many posts are unreadable now... |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 00:52
Are you able to edit your previous posts if needed to change the colors? Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Bonaparta wrote:Posted By: Bonaparta
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 01:01
Yes, I'm able to edit my posts, but there are just too many to manual edit them. And like I said, many old posts are unreadable. If background changes to almost inverse colors, almost every text that didn't used default colors is not readable or it just look very strange. Sunstorms rainbow posts are very weird now... Perhaps you should remove custom colors from all past posts. |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 01:06
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do that. It would have to be done manually. I'm sorry. I know this is inconvenient to people who used a lot of custom colors in the past. Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Posted By: SunStorm
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 01:08
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unfortunately I agree. there are players that have posted white text and other cream colors for their font... looking back on these posts (which I just did go look at my own and they are not pretty) is discouraging. I am not about to go back and edit some 300 odd posts... If this is the direction taken, for everyone's sake, there needs to be a huge DEV button (like microsoft word) which does a "Clear Formatting" on all past posts... -------------
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Posted By: Learner
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 01:30
| Or one could just highlight the text one is reading...right? |
Posted By: invictusa
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 01:42
ditto
------------- ...and miles to go before I sleep. |
Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 02:38
| It's possible that a serif font might be more readable in black on cream. I haven't read the research on that, but I'm just throwing that idea out there. |
Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 02:46
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A serif font probably would be easier to follow, yes. The serifs provide a sort of 'guide rule' to keep the eye moving left to right. It also helps distinguish certain characters apart, like i and l. Personally, I find the lighter brown used for names in the chat window, and the darker cream-colored banding in chat easier on the eyes than this bright cream and black motif.
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Posted By: Bonaparta
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 03:59
Classic LCD monitors use about the same amount of energy no matter how bright the screen is. But new LCD monitors with LED backlit technology use much less energy on dark screens, since most of the LEDs are turned off. More and more users have LED LCD displays, including me. So the debate from 3-4 years how Blackle is useless on LCD displays is outdated. New LED displays make Blackle popular again... |
Posted By: Ander
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 04:19
This is much better than having to write in white on black background.  |
Posted By: HonoredMule
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 04:33
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I can read!! Experts have long held the opinion that serif fonts improve readability for text while non-serif fonts are best on back-lit mediums, and subsequently that serif is best for black on light while non-serif best for light on black. Neither of these widely accepted opinions have held up to proper studies however, and the perceived inappropriateness of serif for any particular medium turns out to frequently be a symptom of other issues such as bad contrast or color/contrast bleed (esp. specific to certain display types or LCD matrices). In similar fashion, there has been no study able to successfully identify advantages for serif fonts (i.e. flow of text, ease of following the line) not gained from good kerning, letter spacing, and line spacing. In other words, the whole point of using a serif font anywhere for any reason still stands largely unproven, except as a means of compensating for other typographical flaws. People who have spent a lot of time here with their eyes heavily adjusted to the weak/soft white on black are going to find this change harsh. Still having a lot of black background actually makes it worse, as our eyes are still being subjected to very inconsistent back light. I number among the people who hate black on endless fields of glaring white. My desktop theme is rife with muted greys, consoles using large-font grey on black, and only soft splashes of color. On a backlit display, white is just way too bright for anything. But the white on black was even worse, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time on normal sites as well. The white text was barely legible. Light text on dark background always needs to be thick/bold to appear solid and distinct. The font needed to be bolder, or darker (light grey) or anything but what it was. Adjusting to a new theme will take a while for the hard-core visitors, but they will adjust. And for everyone else the forums will appear more friendly and inviting. If you're one of the people adjusting, or if you have a hard time coping with bright displays, do what I do: put a white fluorescent lamp behind your monitor. This will help a lot to reduce the perceived brightness of white or light-colored materials, without compromising color or contrast. The real issue our eyes have with bright displays isn't the brightness itself (which is still way less than our eyes absorb when we're outside). It is with the harsh inconsistencies in ambiance. The problem is that we have only one pupil per eye and can't control the range of brightness contrast we perceive. This is also why the site will be even easier on the eyes if the rest of the black background is abolished. I assume from some of the color artifacts I still see that this is an ongoing process. As for those of you who's posts' readability was compromised by the color change, I can't cackle hard enough. That's what you get for screwing with readability in the first place. Your posts were always an eyesore, except now you can see it too. ------------- "Apparently, quoting me is a 'thing' now." - HonoredMule |
Posted By: HonoredMule
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 04:38
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By the way, it might be a good idea to set position: fixed for the body's background image. That, or bring the mountains into some color and fade off to a muted green or something. It's a very nice image and its contrast with the cream is decent enough, but this being a forum, most of the time we just see the black below it which is too much brightness contrast. The preview pane still shows some white text on the cream background too. ------------- "Apparently, quoting me is a 'thing' now." - HonoredMule |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 04:42
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When you say black do you mean the dark grey/blue that the background fades to? ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 05:09
In some of my longer posts (guides), I changed the font to a lighter shade of white to enhance readability; I did the same when posting some battle reports. This enhanced readability under the old system (where as you noted the grey was sometimes hard to read), but now those posts are invisible. I've gone back and corrected the posts that I remember changing in that way. If anyone sees more of my posts that are unreadable, let me know and I'll fix them too.
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Posted By: HonoredMule
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 05:15
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If that is not black, it's completely indistinguishable from black on either of my monitors (which each use different panel types and both are properly calibrated using nVidia's excellent system for such). The color being used (#1C232B, brightness of 17/255 in HSL) is about 20 points away from distinguishable color. ------------- "Apparently, quoting me is a 'thing' now." - HonoredMule |
Posted By: GM ThunderCat
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 05:52
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Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 06:59
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It now does a weird 'banding' effect, like it's copying and pasting over itself, whenever I scroll up and down.
Edit: Only seems to do it once inside individual threads, not when on a main board page, and not when on the Edit Post page. Perhaps due to the length of the thread pages?
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Posted By: Aurordan
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 07:02
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EDIT 2: And started up right after the first edit. I'm pretty sure it's just screwing with me now.
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Posted By: SunStorm
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 07:22
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YAY!!! *high fives whoever anchored the background so it doesn't scroll with the text* Now do that for the Illy homepage as well (^_^) -------------
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Posted By: HonoredMule
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 07:25
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Thanks, TC. Beri, are you referring to tearing? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing" rel="nofollow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing ) This is something older machines will do if they aren't using hardware compositing to render web pages which are rendered inefficiently. I get it too in Firefox with my secondary monitor, but not in Chrome (the difference being that Chrome doesn't do smooth scrolling) or on my primary monitor (the secondary suffers from performance stutter when it is turned sideways as now). EDIT: ok, I see what you're talking about, and no, that's not normal at all. It looks almost like the page is being rendered and then re-drawn with some post-load display changes. The way it flashes over itself is something I've never seen before. The background always appears a moment later as well, which could be the same kind of bad caching that makes the town view in-game excruciatingly painful in Firefox. ------------- "Apparently, quoting me is a 'thing' now." - HonoredMule |
Posted By: Gilthoniel
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 11:45
I strongly recommend that the forums return to their original colour and format!  |
Posted By: GM ThunderCat
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 12:56
The "social" buttons Twitter, Facebook and Google+ were causing some issues with page load performance due to these third party sites not always responding in a timely manner, so these are added post load. The background issue seems to be a browser bug with the fixed position and a script applied background - so we have added this back into normal flow, which resolves it.
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Posted By: fluffy
Date Posted: 28 Feb 2012 at 23:02
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Im not sure what it is doing, but every time i make a post, it automatically centers the text when i start typing, and when I post, it adds some random line of broken code below it. (see below) < id="_npwlo" ="applicationpwlo" height="0">
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Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 00:15
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Liking the new icons based on the game buttons :) They're much cleaner. One question Is it possible to *EASILY* change the color of the "new posts" yellow star to red, blue or something that stands out better against the icon, or is that set-in-stone by the forum software? By easily I mean "click a button in the backend of the forum platform." Yellow on yellowish-gold color is hard to pick out easily.
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Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 00:20
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Yes. I can take a look at changing star colors. :) Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Posted By: Mara Zira
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 04:15
While I like the change of colors, my " http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/topic2354_post26194.html#26194" rel="nofollow - Alliance Leaders, Give Us " thread isn't under my control and yet this change has made most of the replies (which make up the information content) unreadable. I don't suppose, Luna, that you could somehow format everything in that thread to black and let each poster change their text to some other color if they take the time to notice and care? 
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Posted By: dunnoob
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 13:40
The forum content exists somewhere, and can be modified. A script could find all old articles, look for whatever constitutes "set foreground colour x", and replace it by black. A good test article is the http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/quest-guide_topic2064.html" rel="nofollow - quest-guide : Everybody needs it when the wiki is unavailable; and parts of it use a foreground colour suited only for a dark background. For old read "last modified at a time with a black background", not the creation time -- the bulk update script should not touch any manually fixed articles.
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Posted By: Brisinger
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 16:42
Hi. I think I found a small problem with the new colour scheme. When searching in the forums it'll look like this, right? Forum: forum_topics.asp?FID=1" rel="nofollow - News The problem here is the background of the above text is in dark chocolate, and so is the font colour of the links. The font colour of the words "Topic" and "Forum" are in black, which doesn't make it any easier to read. I'm not sure if it is a problem just on my machine, but I've tested on both Firefox and Chrome, with the same results. |
Posted By: SugarFree
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 16:43
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i don't get it why can we just keep it dark? ------------- Nuisance |
Posted By: GM Luna
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 17:33
@HM Below reference for black vs. dark blue. It's a subtle difference, but a difference. Especially to a designer. ;) @Mara Everything in the Alliance leader thread should now be readable. I really am happy to just go in and fix any evergreen type threads (guides, etc) that need attention for this. Just report them to me if the original poster isn't able to fix it themselves. I'd rather be the one dealing with this than having the dev team writing scripts for font color changes rather than working on other more important things. :) @Brisinger Thanks for finding that. We'll fix it. @SugarFree Sometimes things in life change. Is the saying something like, "we must adapt or die"? Or in this case... adapt or be slightly inconvenienced. ;) Luna ------------- GM Luna | Illyriad Community Manager | community@illyriad.co.uk
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Posted By: SunStorm
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 19:14
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Because change is difficult at first, I took bias against this new color scheme... however, it is starting to grow on me. (just thought I would say...)
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Posted By: Mara Zira
Date Posted: 29 Feb 2012 at 21:45
| Thank you, Luna. I appreciate it. |
Posted By: HonoredMule
Date Posted: 04 Mar 2012 at 11:21
I can tell the difference, but only just. I have two monitors--one using the traditional TN panel technology, and another using C-PVA, one of the early cheap IPS knockoffs. If my TN panel weren't calibrated, the difference would be substantial. On the other hand if my C-PVA panel weren't calibrated, it would be impossible to tell the difference even with all other light sources removed and the surrounding monitor shielded from my eyes. That, and the two panels would look wildly different from each other in brightness, contrast, saturation, and even hue (and even the differences themselves would be very inconsistent), which would be pretty nasty. Incidentally, TN panels are still the more common ones owned, but can hardly be found on the market any more (due to the IPS knockoffs getting better). IPS panels, by the way, are the nice 1-1.5 thousand dollar displays designers use for their excellent brightness profile and accurate color reproduction. Of course when I say designers, I mean of print media, since expecting that level of control over the images people perceive in desktop publishing is still a pipe dream. Some of the new VA type panels are bringing us closer with excellent hardware gamma profiles and decent color reproduction, but that's in comparison to the old TN panels. TN panels don't even support more than 6 bits of color per channel--there's no point since the error margin is much larger than the last 2 bits of precision anyway. ------------- "Apparently, quoting me is a 'thing' now." - HonoredMule |
Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2012 at 06:29
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WHOO! Red stars for unread posts!!! Thanks Devs. They stick out a lot more than the yellow ones did!
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Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 06 Mar 2012 at 06:36
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I have noticed that bullet points • are now showing up as diamonds with ? marks in them unless I switch Chrome's encoding from Unicode (UTF-8) to Western (ISO-8859-1). I'm not sure what other characters this might affect. The fix is easy enough (just a drop-down menu and a click) on my end to correct it, but it raises the question of "Did y'all mean to do that?"
Also just noticed: http://www.illyriad.co.uk/terms-and-conditions Server Error in '/' Application.The resource cannot be found.Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.Requested URL: /terms-and-conditions |