Thudgame.com site upgrade

Hi Lee,

Can't wait, mate! Page loading takes forever, so I'm glad you tackled it.
Here's my lists.

Complaints:
1. login. It takes too long. It used to be on first page, but then moved to its own page. Can that be undone?
2. people can post in "forums", the general forum section. They shouldn't be able to do that, because after a while no one can find that thread any more.

Wishlist:
1. Page one has a lot of leftover space in the right hand menu. So have all other pages. Could the "New forum topics" list be a little longer (8 to 10, maybe), and the "Recent comments" list be a lot longer (the rest of the space that's left)?
2. the "track" list in "my account" is helpfull for games, but slightly less for topics I posted in once and lost interest afterwards. An option to stop tracking certain threads I posted in would be nice.

You asked for three to four of each, but I can't think of anything else, so it seems you're doing fine

Happy Thudding!

I think it would be good if i could seperate Thudgames and general forums from each other on the recent comments section.

i want to see the current chat etc and socialize but oftne most is just games which only the players need to see realy, although others may want to examine them.

i thought that there could be a 'recent comments' and a 'current games' section possibly?

cheers

i think what OB says about those page download times is good,it's been extremely slow to upload pages on this site,but now apparently you've sorted that out,that's great news,already makes things easier.OB's suggestion of having longer 'recent comments' and 'new topics' lists is a valid one.it's a bit annoying to go into your track every time the forum you want to comment in is out of the recent comments list.otherwise i'm quite happy

The reason it moved in the first place was, I understand, so that it's on an encrypted page, so your login details are harder to steal. I just bookmarked the "login" page, so it's the first page I go to on thudgame. Then I dont need to worry about an extra page to click through.

Mr Scrub

Well, I'll tell you. I still have some of the same complaints from last upgrade. Pretty much no matter what I do, the Forum Thud list always comes up first to last, which is very annoying. At least, to me. Once I have gone to a thread, if I use the link at the top to return to the forum list, it always comes up flat, no matter what I've chosen. My preferences don't appear to be sticky. Perhaps my preferences are a tad odd, and I should just get over it, I don't know. But since, yes, the page is taking a long time to load, it's taking me a long time to make my plays in the ITT07, because I have to ask each page to return to my preferences.

And again, I tried to edit my account, and simply got stuck on the login page - can't go anywhere. Remember that, Lee? It happened before. Related to persistent sessions, I suppose, but I do leave myself logged in all the time. (I figure, if anyone steals my identity here, they can probably play better than me anyway, so what the heck.)

Same problem here, when using firefox (which I do all the time).

i also keep the login page bookmarked,is faster than running back and forth each time.and if you keep your username 'remembered' then it's a bit faster again.

Done! On this site too; let's know what you think. Working on some of the other things. It's very good feedback so please keep it coming!

Anyone seen any eye candy elsewhere you think's cool? Point me to it (PM or e-mail) and we'll see what we can do

There's a bug in the persistent login module. The workaround is to go to the homepage and click "logout". Then click "login" and log back in and you should be able to both edit your account and to reset your persistent login to re-initialise.

Hopefully we'll have it sorted in a coupla weeks

Would you define "eye candy" please? I mean, Gerard Butler is my idea of eye candy, but he's got his own website.

hm...can we have a fan-forum?I know itz not so er... impotant...but I think we can talk there about a few fan-attractions And someone (if you said that please not be annoyed;-))posted a complaint about the forum games.I think so too cos itz not so...nice when a new guest comes to the site and then *boom!* he/she sees a list of a lot of forum games....that could made this site more disliked than...before
...yes.Ok.that's it......

Wizz

I was about to request that you look at the "X new" link to take people to the most recent post, when I discovered that you've already fixed it, I just failed to notice . So credit where it's due there. However (and here comes the sad part), I uploaded an image to demonstrate what I was talking about, and that took me into the scarey world of the site image galleries...

When you click on the "Image Galleries" link in the right hand navigation column, you're taken to the thudgame.com/galleries page, which has almost no options - from this it's very difficult to work out how to get to any gallery other than the tweo listed there, which I suspect is not the intention. However, things get worse from there: at least for me (using firefox 1.5.0.11 on Mandriva 2007) the gallery pages themselves are horrible: layers of text running over each other and images on top of text, making it impossible to read most of what's there. This seems to apply to specific gallery pages, and to the thudgame.com/image page (accessed by clicking on the "image galleries" link at the top of the specific gallery pages) which seems to be trying to replicate thudgame.com/galleries, and would be doing a better job (since there are far more options on that page), were it not for the fact that it's too illegible to use.

Mr Scrub

LOL!!
Now we know the standard we have to live up to to count in Magrat's world! (I personally had to Google on him as I'm a bit out of touch on the cinema scene... )

What we meant was what would you all like to see as decorative features on the site? OK, no spinning or flaming logos, but what kind of funky graphics or nice effects have you seen on a site elsewhere that we could have a look at?

Meanwhile, off to the gym to work on the ole biceps...

please lee,be careful!we don't want you breaking anything.anyway,what i think is that you (and i'm assuming here,so correct me if i'm wrong) don't want to crowd and overdo the site in terms of decorations and stuff,and i dunno if you mean by decorations that you want something decorative,or like a background image.

Something I've seen on another forum I visit frequently: a clock with the date and time of the place where it originated, and most users live. For thudgame that would be GMT (or BST in summer).
That way, you could see what time it is in forum, and how long ago the last post was posted without having to do maths every time. Not very usefull for UK residents, but for everyone else it would be a very nice tool.

Those things tend to go horribly on your cpu usage even when the page is open in the background (and I've seen some funny effects with those things: There is one page where the clock starts to run to catch up with the time when you get the page back into the foreground (which gives you 100% cpu usage until it manages to catch up or crashes your browser if you try to close the tab while it's still running)).

Lee
on the edit page of the my acount page the left hand menus overlap
just seeing if there is anything you can do about it?
+++Hexon+++
+++melonmelonmelonmelonmelonmelonmelon+++

OK, last minute thang - we've had some warp jump success with some chronic and persistent problems we've been trying to crack (I think... tried it on 3 OS's with 9 browsers; seems to work... ) so we're going to take the site down and flip it in the morning. Hardly anyone is on then (sorry Australia and E. Asia, that wasn't meant to demean your timezone action ) and Dewi's away partying tonite so it'll wait till then.

We've been getting some good speeds on the test site, even without caching or pipelining enabled, so we're looking forward to some pleasing results. After culling what I thought were a load of redundant, superfluous and unnecessary software modules it seems we've ended up with more than we started with. As long as it doesn't impact site performance we can live with it.

In the interest of getting the site up and stable without tempting fate I've decided to gradually add on eye candy and fancy bits later on. The existing Thud-dark theme seems to have survived intact; sadly the Koom Valley winter may take some more coding thus all accounts should default to the dark side for the moment.

Now, of course, playing it safe and cautious like that isn't really that exciting or fun, so for a laugh (and, hopefully, to sort out some other annoying issues we've had simmering in the background) I changed the sites DNS and MX hosting this afternoon to a third party provider we've used before. Basically site domain lookups should resolve just a bit faster (and are localised for performance increase and resilience as well) and our problems talking to Hotmail should go away soon as well. There shouldn't have been any problems with this (hopefully no one even noticed! ) but should your browser take extra long "looking up thudgame.com"let me know and we'll look into it.

Anyway, continue posting until you see the site tell you not to

ok,(by the way have you noticed how 'ok' is used as a way to order your thoughts?or is it just me)

ok,i can't remember where i posted about this last but i'll post here because this is a problem i'm still having since the upgrade....i still can't see any green arrows on bogwoppit's comic pages.does anyone else have this problem?

This comment has been moved http://www.thudgame.com/node/1137#comment-20704">here.

Try to stay on topic, please - although in mitigation I did just discover that the thread I've moved your post to wasn't too obvious before, not being in any specific forum (it's now been put into the drum).

MS