Headers...?

[crono_logical]

Originally posted by Dr Unne
I don't care, I'm not part of Staff any more, they'll decide whatever they want. I just remember last time we had them and it sucked. Looking at 400 different colored posts will be bad enough. The MB will once again be all about showing off your crap in your posts instead of actually keeping up what little conversation we have around here now. Little kids and spam junkies flock to MBs where they can show off their pretty colors. All for what? What purpose does adding colors serve other than to give Unne a headache and make the MB unreadable?

When it's put that way, I think it might be better off without headers Thinking about it, I appreciate seeing almost all posts fairly uniform as well, even font wise if the odd user decides to change their colours, which isn't all too often Headers might be nice at small message boards where there isn't much going on, but at a place as large as EoFF, I'll have to agree with Unne that reading all these different styles of posts would get annoying rather quickly

[Shlup]

Too many good arguments here... Luckily, my decision on this isn't at all important. I think I'll have to go with the "too many colors hurt me" opinion.

[Zell's Fists of Fury]

I agree. Fifteen diffrent colors including neon green and puke brown would probably cause my brain to melt and that's something I could definatly do without. I say leave it just the way it is. *nod*

[The Man]

I would like to point out for the sake of all those who dislike people using custom font colours that those of us who enjoy using them wouldn't have to bother you by our use of such colours anymore were headers suddenly enable, as an option to disable the usage of custom text colours, fonts, or sizes in forum viewing could surely be introduced. I think it would be a very nice introduction to the site, myself -- I could see it making more people happy than currently are.

And yes, I just decided to start colouring my own posts. If headers are re-introduced, I won't need to do that by hand anymore, and I won't bug those of you who seem not to enjoy the custom font colours.

Whatever. Just my thoughts.

Edit: Also, I realised that we wouldn't have to close users' font tags when we quoted them anymore, were headers implemented. At least we wouldn't have to do that if the quote function were implemented like it is in FFI.

If anyone is annoyed by my recent decision to use custom font colours, I'll take that into consideration, but I'm unlikely to change that, as I happen to like my colour green very much. If you don't like it, remember that the sooner headers get implemented with the option to disable their viewing, the sooner you won't have to put up with it anymore. That said, I think headers would be a good thing for all of us.

Peace
The Man

[crono_logical]

Heck, if headers were enabled here, I'd be using them too to be honest, as you may have seen by my rollover/clickable effects I have on my posts elsewhere, and as demonstrated in this post But I'm still sticking with that they can get too distracting at such a large board with so many users such as this one, they're stil better suited to smaller boards

[The Man]

I'd support the use of three tags for headers: font face, font size, and font colour. That'd be all. Each of these could be enabled or disabled by users at will. While I like your magically-changing text, crono, I think some users would take it even further than that, and it could be distracting.

Just think about it -- yes, old posts by various users who already use their custom colour tags would still retain their old colouration, but the new ones would not, and I think this would make some people very happy. I believe that I post more often than any other user, so perhaps my new adherence to my font colour will change people's minds.

Yeah indeed, try clicking on crono's text after moving your mouse over it. Very cool.

Peace
The Man

[Dr Unne]

Yep, that's an eyesore all right. Oh well. It takes two keystrokes to insert a font tag into a post. CTRL+V.

[The Man]

Yes, it does. And if we have custom headers, we won't even need those two keystrokes, and you won't have to look at them anymore, since you'll be able to disable them.

Peace
The Man

[Britt]

What makes you think that implementing a disable-feature for viewing of headers would be so easy, Man?

[The Man]

Originally posted by Britt
What makes you think that implementing a disable-feature for viewing of headers would be so easy, Man?

Uh... because there's one for the signatures and it should be more or less the same algorithm. Shouldn't it?

Peace
The Man

[CloudDragon]

I'm agreeing with The Man on this one. I don't know much about all the technical stuff and such of this but I think there should be at least those three tags. It may mean looking at 15 different colors to a page but even so, who knows how many people are actually going to set their colors other than the default white that is already here. I know many people probably are too used to their white colored font here and may NOT want to change.

[Dr Unne]

It would involve at least editing the user control panel template to include a new option, creating a new server-side variable to every user to use as a flag, adding three more server-side variables at least for storing the font attributes the user sets, and hacking the php code for displaying posts to include a check against each user's flag in every post to see whether to display the fonts stuff or not. We've had bad experiences in the past with hacking the .php's. Last time we had headers and all the other extra stuff, we ended up wiping the VBB clean and installing it fresh to get rid of it all. Last time, one "little" hack led to another "little" hack until the MB was bogged down so much it was hardly usable. The option for the signatures comes installed with the VBB standard, I believe, so it's different than writing a hack. The people who wrote the sig code wrote the rest of the VBB code too, they probably know what they're doing. But I don't really know all that much about php, I might be wrong about all of that.

[The Man]

Originally posted by Dr Unne
It would involve at least editing the user control panel template to include a new option, creating a new server-side variable to every user to use as a flag, adding three more server-side variables at least for storing the font attributes the user sets, and hacking the php code for displaying posts to include a check against each user's flag in every post to see whether to display the fonts stuff or not. We've had bad experiences in the past with hacking the .php's. Last time we had headers and all the other extra stuff, we ended up wiping the VBB clean and installing it fresh to get rid of it all. Last time, one "little" hack led to another "little" hack until the MB was bogged down so much it was hardly usable. The option for the signatures comes installed with the VBB standard, I believe, so it's different than writing a hack. The people who wrote the sig code wrote the rest of the VBB code too, they probably know what they're doing. But I don't really know all that much about php, I might be wrong about all of that.

Ouch. Perish the thought, then.

Well, if anyone can figure out a way to do it easily, then I'd say go for it. I know next to nothing about vBulletin code myself, so yeah.

If you could get the signature code from the company that make vBulletin yourself, then that would make the hack a lot easier, I'd guess. I suppose there might also be some way to test it out on a smaller mock-message board or something, but I don't know about that, either.

Peace
The Man

[Britt]

Originally posted by The Man
Uh... because there's one for the signatures and it should be more or less the same algorithm. Shouldn't it?

Not necessarily. The signature one was written entirely by vBulliten, and since we'd have to code our very OWN header hack, it would very likely be quite different from anything like that.

At any rate, what Unne said is very true. The last time we installed headers, the board went to Hell under the weight of the enormous amount of hacks we were using. Load times were almost doubled if not tripled, the system became incredibly unstable and prone to crashing for hours each day, and flaws in the hacks were exploited.

Let's consider the two options:

1.) Someone slaves away for hours writing a hack to create post headers, works even harder to limit the hack to your specifications, and then installs it while running the risk of screwing up absolutely everything. In addition, usability of the fora may be lessened in addition to many people being angry about eyesores.

The eyesore complaints lead to ANOTHER hack that takes hours to write, which will make headers disappear. This will then be implemented into the various required sections of the fora, at the cost of more time. This leads to further possibility of mishap within the fora's opperation.

Finally, everyone has what they want after multiple hours of slaving performed by someone that probably didn't even want headers ANYWAY.

2.) People utilize CTRL+V.

I may be an insensitive fascist, but I think I know which one makes a lot more sense.

[The Man]

Originally posted by Britt
Not necessarily. The signature one was written entirely by vBulliten, and since we'd have to code our very OWN header hack, it would very likely be quite different from anything like that.

Then Unne was right. Okay... well, would vBulletin give out the header hack if we asked for it? Just a thought. If they'd give it to us, that would probably simplify the issue significantly.

Peace
The Man