looking at some stuff.
I have some plans, but they're on hold til I can get the look of the place hammered out, which is going super super slow.
for now, basically all we're going to have is a functional message board that's kinda ugly.
I've been messing with several different possibilities there.
Problem is (well one of them) is I have very little time to do stuff. Around mid-January I'm guessing things will slow down enough that I can try to get somewhere I want to actually be with the message board.
for now it's gonna limp along as is.
I'm at kind of an unhappy place right now, because my job sucks (doesn't everyone's?) and they're demanding a lot of my time. Frankly they don't deserve it. But they're getting it because paycheck.
I may plod ahead without getting the design right. But the design is way more important than I suspect anyone out there realizes.
The only example I can provide is - if you look at the Proboards forum, just the simplicity of how it looks without all the dumbass dividers and background graphics and fucking ridiculous-ass shades of grey and whatever other dumbass shit they put in these dumbass themes. The Proboard is black, white - simple lines, the blue links add a nice touch of color, but not too much. the only thing wrong with it visually is the SN colors don't show up on the list.
But the point being - that board is something that people look at and want to use. It doesn't make people go "oh what a pretty board" or anything like that. It's just pleasant and simple and inviting.
the fucking themes for SMF are pretty much all just - stupid. full of pointless graphics that stick out like sore thumbs and random color schemes and just - like awful.
We couldn't use Proboards because they have mandatory ads, they don't allow for the content to move to another software package, and the content restrictions are silly and random.
On SMF, with the fapptron 2000 server, we don't have to worry about the board content, it's ours to keep and move as we need to, no ads, and no content restrictions.
we need all that stuff.
BUT - the Proboard (at least design-wise) is pretty fucking close to perfect.
The feat I'm attempting atm is to marry those two things. So we have our data here, no restrictions, no ads, etc, but it looks and functions more simply (IE more like the Proboard).