***WARNING!!!***

[_NOPE_]

I'm coming here... to Excelsior. I was on Halcyon, but then they decided to make it an EU server... so I need a new home, and I'm coming here. WATCH OUT!

 

Now, the rest of this thread will be just where I waste time while I'm at work when I should be working.

 

Hey... anyone remember that time when I was a moderator for like... five minutes, before the forums were reset?

 

 

 

 

Yeah, they'll probably never make THAT mistake again...

[Apparition]

Well, dang.  There goes the neighborhood.  It was such a nice shard too...

 

Just joking.  Welcome aboard, Philotic Knight.

[Myrmidon]

See you around Excelsior, Knight.

[Call Me Awesome]

For the time being I've landed here as well, although restarting at level 1 from a max Incarnate character is a bit disappointing.

 

Call Me Awesome has been reborn as an Inv/Broadsword tank, Delta Farce stayed a Fire/EM blaster and Gortak became Broadsword/Shield instead of /regen.  All three are approaching SO levels, although I miss having the cash to IO them out in the 20's.  I suppose I'll probably recreate a few of my other 50's... at shutdown there were 25 of them all together.

[EmperorSteele]

Welcome to your new home, Phallic Knight! I'm sure you'll-

 

Wait hold on

 

(What? Are you sure? I don't... oh, crap!)

 

*AHEM* Let me start over: Welcome to your new home, Philotic Knight! I'm sure you'll have fun here!

[_NOPE_]

Welcome to your new home, Phallic Knight! I'm sure you'll-

 

Wait hold on

 

(What? Are you sure? I don't... oh, crap!)

 

*AHEM* Let me start over: Welcome to your new home, Philotic Knight! I'm sure you'll have fun here!

 

Not the first time I've heard that joke.

[_NOPE_]

So I did a thing:

 

 

 

The MOMENT there's an official Wiki, I'll wipe this thing, but I think there needs to be a wiki-type centralized place where people can learn about Homecoming. So far, I've just got pages on Shards and the team themselves.

 

Feel free to add anything you want there, it's your playground, go nuts! I'll just keep adding stuff casually as I see stuff that I think should be in a centralized location and not lost to the forums or time.

[Healix]

*throws arms wide open and squeezes the puddin' out of PK*

 

[JusticeBowler]

Everyone who's anyone is here now. Even some people that are nobody.

[_NOPE_]

So.... I made another thing. Something that's missing from our current forums that the old forums had...

 

 

I'm no graphical artist AT ALL, I'm a programmer. So I just setup a basic HTML table and am performing some XML processing on an ASP site to get you all a list, in reverse chronological order, of ALL posts by any developer, mod, GM, or whatever.

 

If the website is up (I can see it, but DNS might take some time to propogate), you can find it here:

 

http://www.coh-h-devtracker.somee.com/

 

It takes a few seconds to load, because it's sorting through a LOT of data. I haven't yet figured out how to split it into pages. And, as the name says, it's ugly. But, it's a good basis and a starting point for improvements to come!

[_NOPE_]

Now slightly LESS ugly:

 

• Added a Favicon to be pretty
  
• Fixed the code so that images are auto-sized to fit the width of the browser window with CSS Styling (most important!)
  
• Fixed the Title of the Page
  
• Fixed all of the colors to be slightly less eye-searing
  

 

 

[Erydanus]

I'm coming here... to Excelsior. I was on Halcyon, but then they decided to make it an EU server... so I need a new home, and I'm coming here. WATCH OUT!

 

Yeah I have to tell you a thing. I'm pretty sure that Excelsior = Virtue. I know Virtue was an unofficial RP server and for us that's Everlasting, but the sophistication I see in Help, broadcast, LFG just gives it more of a mature vibe. In comparison I was on Everlasting while working on screencaps for a thing I'm doing (nebulous hint), I was seriously underwhelmed by the community in that time. In the help chat a fight broke out whether tankers or brutes were better tanks, and did not stop even after someone asked them to not talk over help requests and then a GM ALSO asked that people drop it so actual help requests weren't overlooked. I did see some RP chat going on too, especially in broadcast and LFG -- but overall I get the feeling Everlasting is pretty similar to uh... which server was Merdedes Lackey and her RP group playing on? - was it Pinnacle or Liberty? It's got that vibe, kinda. (And a bit of Freedumb to be honest).

 

So anyway welcome to our server. And our server is best server. :P

[_NOPE_]

Thanks. Now, continuing on my latest obsession... making the Ugly Dev Tracker less ugly! Changes:

 

• Added a "header" color (slightly darker than the background color) to better differentiate between each post
  
• Replace the WHITE border with the same border color as the header background color, to make it less eye-searing
  
• Changed the Developer color to something less eye-searing
  
• Merged the Post Topic Title and the Post Topic Date onto one line, to condense it vertically
  

 

[Hyperman]

I remember the dev tracker from the original forums!  That use to be my go-to!  I hope to see something like that eventually added here.  Thanks for reminding me PH!

[_NOPE_]

But, but.... It IS added here...

[Erydanus]

Oh actually making a suggestion for your dev tracker here:

 

Don't use Times Roman as your font. It and other serif fonts are hard to read on web pages structured like this. For various reasons that I, a technical writer, will spare boring you with, sans serif fonts are better for this kind of application.  You could still use a serif font for the line with the Dev name as a heading if you really want to ... I personally would just bold a nice sans serif but it's reasonable to use a serif font there. However, Times is still scrunched and a bad choice for it.  (Times Roman was literally invented to scrunch as much print onto a sheet of newspaper as possible.)

 

Here's a nice repository of fonts:

https://fonts.google.com/

 

Look at Open Sans paired with Roboto! https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

 

That is the kind of easy to read look I'm suggesting for a dev info box.

 

Also, pad the entries a little bit either at the top or bottom to provide visual separation from the various lines.

 

 

 

 

[Sothoth]

Serifs get really messy at lower resolutions.

 

Also, red text on blue background is hard on the eyes.

[_NOPE_]

Oh actually making a suggestion for your dev tracker here:

 

Don't use Times Roman as your font. It and other serif fonts are hard to read on web pages structured like this. For various reasons that I, a technical writer, will spare boring you with, sans serif fonts are better for this kind of application.  You could still use a serif font for the line with the Dev name as a heading if you really want to ... I personally would just bold a nice sans serif but it's reasonable to use a serif font there. However, Times is still scrunched and a bad choice for it.  (Times Roman was literally invented to scrunch as much print onto a sheet of newspaper as possible.)

 

Here's a nice repository of fonts:

https://fonts.google.com/

 

Look at Open Sans paired with Roboto! https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

 

That is the kind of easy to read look I'm suggesting for a dev info box.

 

Also, pad the entries a little bit either at the top or bottom to provide visual separation from the various lines.

 

I LOVE the feedback, thank you! I switched it by default to use Open Sans, and if the user's browsers for some reason doesn't have access to Open Sans, Arial (which is actually my favorite font).

 

I also added a couple of NBSPs and a horizontal rule to split the records. Let me know if you can see any other improvements!

 

 

[_NOPE_]

Serifs get really messy at lower resolutions.

 

Also, red text on blue background is hard on the eyes.

 

Yeah, I was never a fan of the red text either, it does hurt my eyes. But that's the way that it always was, even on the old boards:

 

 

 

That's why I switched it to "tomato", which is the red that hurts my eyes the least against blue. The forum's background color that I screen-stole that I wanted to emulate was hex code #3A5F71. If you have a suggestion for a BETTER "red name" color than my current one of #FF4500, then please, let me know and provide the hex code and I'll swap it out if I like it! But, I do want to keep that dark blueish background color for sure, and I want to differentiate between "red names"/administrators and "Cornflower Blue names"/GMs.

[Sothoth]

Tomato is WAY better, while still keeping the theme.

 

Careful though, you won't be able to call it ugly anymore... :P

[_NOPE_]

In other news, I'm now the first and only "Hero Member" on the board. I'm guessing this is an auto-setting if someone gets over 500 posts.

 

 

 

<.< I think.... I might have a problem... >.>

[WanderingAries]

Phew, I'm on Torch....I mean...Woohoo! ;)

[WanderingAries]

In other news, I'm now the first and only "Hero Member" on the board. I'm guessing this is an auto-setting if someone gets over 500 posts.

 

*ducks*

[Erydanus]

I'm happy my suggestions were helpful! The new look is much more pleasant. I also shrank the screen to see how it'd look on a tablet or something and it still looked good. However when I visited it on my phone there's a blank space of about 1.5" on the right. (I took a screenshot but it's too big to easily attach to the forum post, sorry. ) I can zoom in to fill the screen but then the page floats around so trying to scroll is touchy. I'm not sure what is causing this but I am wondering if it's the narrow banner ad at the bottom of the page?

[_NOPE_]

Probably, it's a free host. I'm kind of hoping the Mods will notice the Dev Tracker and offer to host it on the official server and make it look pretty. I'm a coder, not a graphic designer, dammit! And the source code is out there for anyone that wants it.