I have seen the Codrex Magna admin panel

I have stared into the Codrex Magna admin panel.

And ye gods, my friends, the admin panel stared back.

In other words: Wally is leveraging my web dev experience to help them refresh the site's appearance. I want to keep the early-'00s hole-in-the-wall feel we all know and love, while making the site a bit friendlier on modern monitors.

So, I ask of you: what is it you like best about the look and feel of Codrex Magna? What do you like the least? Anything that's been bothering you for years that you'd like annihilated (besides me... eh heh heh)? Do let me know! I can also provide some of Wally's and my current ideas if desired.

To be honest, its appearance has never really mattered to much to me. (I started typing up some stuff that has more to do with organization than graphic design, see my blog.)

I guess I prefer the sort of blocky, mechanical way one currently navigates this site. I'm not as big a fan of the kind of features where you click "reply" and a text field spontaneously appears on the same page, probably with a gratuitous "expanding" animation that only slows down a busy page. I'm more Windows 95 than Mac's current OS X 9?

Despite the predominantly blue color scheme, I always picture swampy, light-olive-green as this site's secondary color (after gray, of course.)

And, while I'm not sure if this falls under the same perviews, our emoticons are eclectic and mostly ripped off of BZPower, so maybe those could use some tidying.

Ah... that blog post is still underway. XD

The Spectral Mask wrote:

I guess I prefer the sort of blocky, mechanical way one currently navigates this site. I'm not as big a fan of the kind of features where you click "reply" and a text field spontaneously appears on the same page, probably with a gratuitous "expanding" animation that only slows down a busy page. I'm more Windows 95 than Mac's current OS X 9?

I'm glad you like the basic text- and image-based navigation, too. ^^ I really, really like simple websites that do everything with CSS and limited Javascript - the sort of websites that were more common in the early '00s. I want to keep that look and feel as I work on the site's theme.

I am not about page-element animation, so no worries on that front. It's probably not even possible in this framework.

The Spectral Mask wrote:

Despite the predominantly blue color scheme, I always picture swampy, light-olive-green as this site's secondary color (after gray, of course.)

Wally is more in charge of color schemes (I might be a little colorblind), but I agree that a sort of swampy green is part of the CM color scheme? I think we could bring that out a bit more, if Wally wants. (Perhaps they can come up with something in the near future and refine it after they take their color theory class next semester.)

The Spectral Mask wrote:

And, while I'm not sure if this falls under the same perviews, our emoticons are eclectic and mostly ripped off of BZPower, so maybe those could use some tidying.

I've been wanting to revamp the emoticon selection for several years. I think a number of them could be removed without anyone noticing. Are there any y'all particularly want to see removed (or anything you want added)?

There are basically two sets of emoticons: A ( ) and B ( ). I think A comes from BZPower and I'm willing to eliminate them entirely, and see all emoticons done in the style of B.

For reasons that should slowly be growing obvious, a "no" sign in style B might be appropriate in the near future.

From a design standpoint, I strongly prefer set A. B might go better with the look+feel we're going for. In any case, I'm not going to make anything new from scratch in the near future - if we need new emoticons, I'll pull them from somewhere else.

I can add a "no" sign but I would rather know why and/or wait until it is relevant.

Blog post is done! I whittled down the structure related stuff; other matters pertaining to the "no" signs and my plans for the imminent future have to be sorted first.

And personally, I prefer Set B. Perhaps we should set it to a vote? I'll go poke Arty, he'll vote Set B, and then I'll be overruled. XD

I prefer making faces out of alphanumeric characters and punctuation anyway! (n_n)

Edit: Used color and underline to emphasize the link.

Edit 2: Oh, and that's how "slow" is "slowly." To Starry's point, the avatar change was prefatory to the announcement of a new project which, if all goes well, should shake things up around here.

Thanks for clearing that up, Spectral! Looks like a cool idea, and it'd be nice for our freeway-bypassed small town of a forum to have a bit more exposure. Maybe let me know when you plan on starting; there's some work I'd like to finish before potentially having traffic driven here.

Yes, let's vote! Though I think there are a couple Set A emoticons we should keep, regardless of the outcome.

Spoiler:

Also: um. Would you guys please call me Indigo or my IRL nickname (Cat) instead of my former CM nickname? My sexually abusive ex leveraged that as "his" nickname for me, and it triggers some bad stuff. 

You'll know well in advance, I move slowly because but I love making progress reports.

However, I bring up Not the Critic here to illustrate a point. (Yes, now the "thoughts on structure" will be revealed!) This site is now and always has been almost exclusively about sharing and discussing original content. Some of it was good, some of it suffered from a poor execution, maybe a little was a bad idea from the start, most of it was neglected, but all of it was experimental, and all of it was beautiful.

Yes, we have restructured our website to accommodate our content before. Immediate Association has gone from the very bottom subforum (traditionally known as "Completely Off-Topic") to a conveniently high perch. Now, to be perfectly honest, I found the low rung of Immediate Association useful during a chat, here and on BAW. I could refresh the page and not miss a beat in the chatbox, open up the thread in a new tab, respond quickly, close, and repeat. It provides an incentive to scroll down and see every subforum, and notice any new activity.

But the other changes reflect an acknowledgement of our priorities. First, the Scroll of Preperations. The community (Codrex Magna Discussion) above all else. Then our creative work, and then, begrudgingly, discussion of other media.

However, I find things spread out somewhat uncomfortably. Firstly, there are a lot of silly nested subfora. Under "LEGO Sets and Themes" we have seven subfora and only fifteen topics spread amongst them. These feel like exactly what they are - odds and ends thrown in a junk drawer because there's no place better to put them. More importantly, related topics can be scattered across the whole site. Look at what we're doing - switching back and forth between my blog and this thread to articulate a plan for the future. "Check the blog post I haven't made," "Here's a link back to that, "Check back over there." I think we often use our blogs to post updates about our projects, but given any the three projects a blog post might reference, it's possible that they are in three different subfora, all at different levels of organization!

I propose a system based on the most essential element of our site - the project, and its review topic.

Each major content creator gets a subfora. Contained therein are all of their stories, interactive fictions, comics, or other projects. Present also is their blog, pinned to the top. The subfora for collaborations is the first one listed, and its "blog" can be an official news outlet. "Codrex Magna Ideas and Synthesis," though often a site of creative development, is annihilated and immediate association given its own unnested subfora (if it shared space on the main page with anything else, it would bury its competition.) An additional, "miscellaneous" subfora provides a venue for other content creators. Such creators can be promoted at the administrator's' discretion, and anyone can be demoted - although even if it is abandoned, their work may remain enshrined. Each content creator is, of course, moderator for their subfora.

As for your name:

Spoiler:

I appreciate your ideas and have been considering their implementation in my limited free time. I can't address everything right now, but I will say this: I think many of the subfora could be merged or removed entirely. I'm not big on deeply-nested forum structure; it makes navigation confusing and difficult. Having topics compartmentalized is, to me, less useful than having broad categories that are different enough from each other that one can easily guess in which category a given topic would be. I just don't like clicking through navigation trees - perhaps a side effect of the awful internet at my abode.

Unrelated, but we should do something about the gender marker in profiles. I'd rather not have a gender listed, and the system won't let you remove it after you've set one. (You can change it, but the options are not helpful.)

Not the Critic wrote:

As for your name:

Spoiler:

Where did you get this picture of me?

Any thoughts about creator-based subfora, rather than subject-matter-based?

To be clear, there also needs to be a "collaborations" subforum and a miscellaneous subforum for creators who don't have their own (yet). I realize that my original pitch might have left that unclear.

I'm not into creator-based subfora, though I think it's a bit premature to worry about the site being clogged with them. I don't like the walled-garden approach to content management, especially if we're trying to draw in new members; having everyone post vaguely similar content in the same fora lends itself better to content discovery. Also: creator-based subfora seem quite similar to blogs, at least to my understanding. 

Wally: I think the new structure is an improvement, but let's brainstorm more once I have invaded your space.

I got done with school yesterday, and today I'm moving all my possessions 5 hours northeast because FML. I'm taking a bit of a break from internet stuff for the next week or two to let my eyestrain diminish (can't go outside when it's sunny right now; this is what I get for actually doing the readings for my classes), but I will probably end up getting bored and making some changes to the site. Wisconsin is boring. Beautiful, but uneventful.

I'm not a fan of the new "artistic media" subfora. "2D Motion and Multimedia," "2D Art and Media," and "3D Art and Media" sound like an attempt to taxonomize all kinds of "art." Even ignoring arguments as to what does and doesn't constitute art, given the number of MOCs on this site, and given my inclination to keep building, I think erasing that particular subforum was a strange idea. Surely there's some merit in basing the subfora on the nature of the site's existing content? Or are we deliberately trying to leave LEGO/BIONICLE behind us?

But what's more important is that the nested subfora are laid out much more sensibly now; things are now logical and symmetric, and I'm very happy about that, even if most of those subfora are likely to go untouched for a while. Thanks for that!

Isn't there also merit to moving Immediate Association downwards, though?

And is anyone else getting this hideous top-of-page-banner in Chrome?

I think we should move IA down and into its own forum. I agree with Spectral that it would be good to have it right above the chatbox, and it also clutters up the forum it's currently in.

I'm definitely not getting that "banner," and I'm using Chrome on Windows 10. Looks like some CSS is missing or rendered incorrectly. What version of Chrome/Windows[?] are you using? Is this happening on every page?

Ah! Re-installing Chrome did the trick. Thanks so much! It's a huge relief.

Moved IA and other forum games into a forum just above the chatbox.

Glad reinstalling Chrome did the trick.

Sorry for the double post; just wanted to update. I haven't been around much lately because APPARENTLY your vision isn't supposed to ripple/disappear partly after you spend time on the computer and Wally has been making me "rest" my "eyes."

I'm planning to work on the UI/graphic design next, since Wally is here to help me with color-matching. I think we'll also tidy up postranks, though I'm not sure where we'll go with those; we want them to be as numerous as they currently are, but deciding on a theme has proven difficult.

Yeah, so I had all these plans for the summer and then I had to go and get the Mystery Disease. It's probably some kind of migraine disorder. Basically, it's painful to go outside during the day or look at a computer screen for an extended time. The longer I look at a screen, the worse it gets. This is unfortunate because I am a web developer.

This project is on hold until I find a treatment that works. Sorry about this, everyone.