The Spirit Realm

Well just wondering what you all think of the new look. Personally I think its going to be a nice upgrade from the old ones in both looks and features.

Will take a bit of time getting used to, but I like it so far. The only comment I have about it, and I already PM'd Sam about it, is I think the password system is a bit too restrictive. Upper case letter, lower case letters, numbers, -and- symbols? I've seen Department of Defense systems with classified information that didn't have such restrictive passwords.

Check out and you will see that the current password rules are in response to the site being hacked and not something that is a part of phpbb 3.0.

I stand corrected.

I love the new site Very streamlined looking, love the new class avatars, and the javatree menu for the Reference Desk is secksy.

I've had complaints about wasted space...

I think I'll give people a couple of weeks to try it out, then put up a poll about it.

What do I need to change in my profile to get my sig to read properly? I compared it to the sig data on another phpp site I go to, and it's the same, but that site is 2.0 not 3.0.

Need to use BBcode and not html.

I like the new site, probably as much or more than the old.
However as much as its nice to have the drop down menu always available on the side it wastes a great deal of space, and I cant find anything in the settings that will allow me to adjust the overall width of the message part of the boards.
For me the side menu(because its a set width and affect the width of the forum) seems to "cut off" the charts etc that are in some of the posts for an easy example in this forum the posts about MMoRPG numbers I cant see 1/3 the pie chart on the right side of it and there is no scroll bar in the post to allow me to scroll the width it just cuts off.

BTW its not meant to be a real complaint about the java tree menu I like it alot its more a complaint that it cuts off the forum for me, and it maybe an issue with myself and not understanding how to make a fix thats available already to me.
Also is the title we can enter ourselves supposed to be showing up off-center after the last hydra'd class listing?

I'm not a fan of the new colour scheme.

Also, it looks like the field that was previously used for EQPlayers profile is now being used for AOL IM.

Biggest issue i have beyond getting used to the new layout, is there's SO MUCH wasted whitespace right now, making even short threads seem incredibly long, needing a lot of scrolling.

It's not so much the stuff at the left making it tall, it's the fact that the stuff at the left doesnt display beside the message that makes the messages so damned tall., instead it doesnt show any of the stuff untill after the message, along with a huge block of white space to the right of it on every message.

Example of what i'm talking about in a photo

http://www.tharkis.com/images/temp/post.jpg

How weird, it doesn't look that way for me. The stuff on the left is even with the actual post, if that makes sense.

Upgrade your browser to something better. I think you're using IE 6.0 which had that error when tables got squished together and there wasn't a precise numeric value set on the cell, but rather a percentual value. I'm getting technical I guess, but my point is that Firefox or even IE 7 won't have that problem.

/agree - I specifically set the min width to 900 px or something so that the profile and post areas would NOT be squished enough to stack like that on the versions of firefox, opera and exploder that I have installed.

Hrm, it does the squishing exactly like that on firefox on my computer at home too. I use IE at work, and that's where I happend to be when I took the pic but I can get another from home on firefox.

In firefox it goes away only if I run in fullscreen mode, but IE does the same too.

EDIT: One thing that would probably help a lot would be to move the reference desk links and search panes to be at the top of the page above the thread rather than at the side, to allow the threads to take up the full width of someone's browser window rather than just 2/3rds or whatever. That's a huge amount of lost realestate currently, and seems to be contributing to the problems both with IE and Firefox on my end.

I think the new layout is atrocious. It's much more difficult to read. The white space on the right is annoying.

The moving graphics for new posts annoys the piss out of me.

But the password restrictions is inane. You get your password stolen and we have to change our passwords because of it?

I can't even get into my Army account because of the restrictive password changing regime on it. Last thing I would care about is if someone hacked my Video Game message board account and pretended to be me. (Oh noes, he might call you a name or something and you'll think it is me!!)

Someone pee'd in Zorbee's Cheerios this morning.

As for the password restrictions, I don't mind it at all. I don't mind having to change my password every now and then and I don't mind it being restrictive. People get complacent with their passwords. They might have the same one for many different things, like email accounts and message boards and the like (we can debate the intelligence of that in a different thread) and might really lose some sensitive information because some little shit gets bored and wants to hack someone's site. Some password restrictions seem to be a small price to pay.

The other stuff will have to be left for at least a week, as Sam has said several times. He wants people to dig in and use the new boards and then provide some feedback in the form of polls he has said he will put up. He also has said nothing is permanent if enough people want it changed. Don't let your bunched panties rub you raw just yet.

No, no cheerios ala pee mode, I'm generally always upset at idiocracy.

I DO mind. At last count I have around 247 different passwords on different places on the internet. I use an algorithm to keep track of them all so that I never have the same password in more than one place but it is able to be retrieved by my program if I can't remember it. However, they only involved alphanumeric numbers. That is an infinite number of combination and if someone was willing to force hack my password somewhere, then they deserve to have it.

This inane password regime (especially the changing of it, but also the stringent password requirements) requires me to actually have to write down the password and save it. Making it a million times more vulnerable to being compromised than a simple alphanumeric password.

Well I'm glad you've got your algorithm and your program to keep track of your passwords. Most of us don't. You don't actually have to write down your password to remember it -- just write down a teaser or something. I don't really care, but recognize that Sam put a hell of a lot of work into the revamp and your reference to "idiocracy" was just rude.

I don't mind restrictive passwords. I can memorize long strings of nonsensical sequences without much trouble; my common password is something along the lines of ept23XCfmi for example (but obviously different letters/numbers), and I remember that without having to write anything down. All I had to do was add a ! at the end of my regular password and it was accepted fine (and even that requirement was removed, I saw).

It's a bit annoying having to come up with a new one every now and then though, but I guess you can get around that by just changing something small, like a single letter or number, or the order of the sequence. Anyhow, just annoying. If the password is good enough and the board is restrictive enough with password attempts, there's no way anyone's going to hack it, so changing it is just a whole lot of trouble. I can see putting that requirement on the admins/moderators, but I really don't see why we as regular posters should have to endure that (no offense, but our accounts aren't as liable to be targeted).

It wasn't intended to be nice!

Let's follow the path here:

I have a unique password to this site that is never used anywhere else but requires me to follow certain rules in order to remember it.

Sam, apparently does use his password elsewhere and managed to get it compromised.

Sammanna's user account, accessed by his own password, puts the website at risk.

Voila, I have to change my password to something that doesn't fit in my unique algorithm. Even if my password were to be compromised, what harm would come of it? I'm not a moderator, I'm not an administrator.

Now, say that again?

Yes, I'm being rude. 1-900-MixALot sue me. I think it's inane to have to change my password because Sam can't keep a handle on his.

And when you have literally hundreds of unique passwords, you DO have to write it down if it doesn't fit your algorithm.

Maybe you might have the mental capacity to remember what each of your teasers means, but some of us aren't that smart. I write myself notes all the time and I sometimes can't even remember what I meant even after I read the note.

I have to agree with Zorbee here. This is a just a video game forum. Even if my forum account was compromised it wouldn't matter. I can see such restrictions for the admins maybe but for a regular user why bother. I can live with the current setup since I just set my browser to remember the information but I don't think mandatory password requirements and having to change it every few months is necessary on a video game forum.

I understand the upset. I used to have to keep a spreadsheet of all my work passwords, and it was inane.

So yeah, I initially overreacted. And received appropriately toned feedback. And, as I posted elsewhere, and others pointed out, I already reduced it to 8 ( to 30) numbers and mixed case letters. If that doesn't fit your system, that is unfortunate.

Hopefully, Zorbee, this won't upset you to the point where you put profanity back into your signature.

If changing your password once a quarter is a hardship, I apologize for that in advance as well.

Your qualification for what is profanity differs from mine. The medical term for a body part is not profanity in my book. The use of it was to point out your overreaction and while it certainly wasn't flattery, it also wasn't my fault you decided to communicate with me via my signature, thus I responded in kind. While I think the decision was bunk to begin with, you could have easily just deleted my signature instead of modifying it with your message.

Edit: You=Your

vulgarity

Shall we move on now?

This reminds me of a saying I once heard that went something like this: Some people would complain if you gave them 20 five dollar bills because it didn't fit well in their wallet.

I'd like to say thank you Sam for providing this site, free of charge, to me, with such a wealth of information, and accept the manner in which you ask me to access it

/bow

Nice job with the upgrade so far guys. Phpbb3.0 is a pretty solid app once you get used to it.

Well done.