Big changes coming soon

[Ben]

There are big changes coming to SSC soon.

The News forum has been reopened for the first time since 2003. The CuteNews script we use on our current website is prone to spam and was a pain to work with. This will keep everything simple. Community Leaders (isoaker_com, M4, etc.), note that you can post new threads in the News forum as well. If you have any news for the community, please post it. The forum disallows new thread posts from anyone else.

The New Users and Pick of the Best forums have been deleted. They were redundant. Some other boards had their titles and descriptions modified. Some other smaller sections were added.

More organization might be in store as well. I'm considering adding sub-forums for different modifications and homemade water guns. Would those be good ideas?

After looking at some of the posts I've moved, I'm disappointed with how we've run this forum in the past. I can see a lot of mistakes made over the years that I've forgotten or never noticed. There is a lot of poor posts made here and I'd like to prevent that in the future. My intention is to practice a "keep the trash off the board" policy from now on. I've been too light on some people because I wanted to avoid alienating them, but I think I've alienated people like myself.

I might just be feeling really weird reading some old posts though.

The site update is coming along nicely. We're looking to launch before next summer. There is no reason we can not launch then. The new site maintenance system has eased changes very much that I can't see us using anything else.

A new forum style will also be made to match the website, making our website more similar to some of its older versions.

I'm very excited with the direction we're taking. There's good things on the horizon.

[Ben]

Any comments on the changes I have made so far?

I've added sub-sections for power and capacity modifications as well as water balloon launchers. Are these sections appreciated or do they make things too complicated?

Does anyone have any suggestions for forum organization?

[isoaker_com]

Tighter, cleaner arrangement on the forums (plus less vertical scrolling which is always good). I look forward to the upcoming updates/upgrades to SSC!

Sidenote: in Firefox, perhaps the graphics are not loading, but I'm seeing text instead of buttons on the menu for "Search", "New Posts", "Mark Forums Read", and "Open Buddy List".

Soak on!

[isoaker_com]

Changes taking more shape? These forums sure look/feel a lot different right now!

[Silence]

Woah...I entirely missed this thread until now!

I agree the forums are looking more shipshape now. Once again, a more mature atmosphere is needed as the content itself matures.

How will the News forum be used? It seems like it would contain many threads that could also go in the Internet forum, although it's just being restarted now. You might also want to try synchronizing a Wordpress news setup on the main site with the forum here, although I've only seen that done with phpBB.

[Specter]

Originally Posted by isoaker_com

Sidenote: in Firefox, perhaps the graphics are not loading, but I'm seeing text instead of buttons on the menu for "Search", "New Posts", "Mark Forums Read", and "Open Buddy List".

Soak on!

that sometimes happens to me too, but its only one or two at a time, not all of them. I think it just doesn't load correctly, because they usually come back when i refresh the page.

[Ben]

I'm experimenting with different settings to see what works and what doesn't work. If I change something and you don't like it, let me know here.

Right now I've figured out how to fix the broken avatars and added the subforums to the forum home. I've also made posts made in Off Topic not count towards post counts. Consequently everyone's post count has decreased, but, I don't think anyone will mind much. I went down from 5188 to 4620.

The News forum will be used how SSC v1 was used. I now realize that back then we did a lot of things right. The news was put on the homepage of the website with SSI. Later some PHP errors kept displaying, so as opposed to figuring out how to fix the errors and keep using the News forum, we switched to CuteNews. Now I consider that a mistake, especially considering that importing CuteNews into vB is not possible at the moment.

Essentially, posting a thread here in the future will put it on the website's news section.

I've been considering adding a link to the forum rules on the forum home to increase their exposure. Of course, the link I want to point towards is on the new site, and I don't want to pre-release anything. When we complete the redesign, I'll give it a try.

I'm also looking into simplifying or removing many features here. vB has a lot of features. vB has so many features, I consider it bloated. The new forum skin is going to be completely custom. With that, I will selectively add only the features that we'll use.

As for the buttons disappearing, that happens on the SSC skin when I turn some JavaScript menus off. There's a lot of problems with that skin.

I'd write more, but I have to take a shower.

[Ben]

In about a week, heavier work will begin on SSC. The winter break will be our work period. From only a few short months of work, we have about 150 pages started or completed. I'd imagine that we'll end around 500 pages. Most of the pages will be new content. The current plan is to keep the reviews, tactics, and war stories from the old website and rewrite most everything else. However, some of content in the categories that I plan to keep will be removed to reduce redundancy and increase the overall quality of the website.

We're aiming for a release date in late winter or early spring.

If you have anything in particular you would like to submit, feel free to email me with it: ben at sscentral.org

[Ben]

The break has definitely seen some more activity towards the website. While it's a work in progress, as of today, I think the website in development surpasses our old website in terms of usefulness and especially comprehensiveness.

Again, we're looking at a release date sometime in late winter or early spring, but if we feel the website is completed enough earlier than that time, we'll release what's finished. I figure regular updates are always better than gigantic ones.

If you have any suggestions, submissions, or would like to help in any way, let me know.

[Ben]

An update:

Most of the necessary sections are done at this point. When we launch there will obviously be some places that need some work, but we've got the basics covered now after I finished off the modifications section. We're coming up on the dirty work, that is, adding redirects from old pages, finalizing the design and graphics, checking for broken links and [link here]s, etc. There's a lot of cleanup to do, but we're beating any schedule I had going in my mind, so we can and should take our time.

Again, to reiterate much of what I've said before, if you have any suggestions, comments, submissions, or anything, let me know either in this thread or by PM/email. If you think it might sound mean or something, I don't care as long as it's constructive. We're only try to make as good of a website as possible.

After the launch, we'll be open to suggestions and corrections to the website. I am sure there are a lot of little errors like broken links, bad spelling, etc. At that point, we'll try to get a few new things out each week. I'll also focus on making the forums seem like more of a part of the website, like our forum was back in 2004.