Ultimate Collectors' Forums

Hey folks! Just giving everyone a heads up, we're going to be doing some maintenance to the boards later today (figure between 12:00 PM-2:00 PM EST). There may be some brief downtime, but I don't expect it to last more than a few minutes.

Hey folks! Update has been completed. I know the forums look a little different at the moment as a result, but I assure you this is temporary. The latest version of phpBB made a LOT of changes, and as a result the style we used previously is no longer usable! We'll be looking into something new shortly, so bear with us until then!

Good to know! I was here earlier today and everything was fine... came back and thought I put in the wrong URL!

Yep, looks pretty funky right now. Not so bad, actually, except it's not placing the most recently posted to threads on top, or listing the user that made the last post.

Yeah...it was a slightly bigger change than I anticipated!

If folks want to browse the styles available to us, feel free to do so and give us any feedback/requests! We can try out top contenders.

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... 0ec3bf29b9

There is a 3.1.9 Black that looks just like our old version, but I don't know what version we just upgraded to. If it's 3.2 the Green-style isn't horrible.

Using green is OK, but it's just a teensy bright.
If you can tone it down I'm OK with the overall combo.

We've upgraded to 3.2, and there were massive changes to Styles in this go-round, apparently.

There's likely some changes that can be made to the colors themselves, but a lot of styles have different functionality to 'em, too. There aren't too many 3.2 styles at the moment, but it the numbers should come up soon enough.

I dont mind the color scheme... but i miss the "new posts" button right on the top tool bar

Wow, this is a different look! I initially thought I'd gone to the wrong URL...

As was already mentioned, the green is a tad intense. It's appropriate as we approach St. Patrick's Day, though.

I look forward to seeing the ultimate end result of the upgrade.

Holy Moly!

Well the colors are right for St. Patrick's Day, so I thought for a second this was just a new color scheme for that reason. Then I noticed the other changes.

However, I have confidence that GW will soon get us back to something more familiar-feeling.

BladeCollector wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2017 11:53 am I dont mind the color scheme... but i miss the "new posts" button right on the top tool bar

If you click on the 'Quick Links', BC, there's a 'New Posts' button there.

As the novelty of the green-black forums wore off rather quickly, I have changed styles temporarily until we can come up with a better compromise. It's not optimal, but it is a relief. We're slowly putting things back together so bear with us.

If people want, I can put the green back on Friday for St. Patty's?

Good Lord....I think I've stumbled into the land of the Pale People!
Let meeeeee oooooouuuut!!!

The green was neat for a minute.. but I kind of like the calm look of this one haha. That green was quite blinding!

I almost fell into my monitor. I was bracing myself against the onslaught of the toxic green as the site loaded, and when the pale white version loaded, I actually bobbed forward.

It's improving bit by bit. I've darkened the font colour of some of the user groups so they are more easily seen against this background. The big bonus here is that this style will actually display in widescreen. The previous green one was very narrow. I'm sorry but I don't go to my computer so I can stare into a phone-like display.

Do people prefer a dark background with light characters, or something like what we have now, light background with dark characters?

Deimos, why do I get the feeling you will be displeased with any choice we make?

I personally like the dark background with white or light text ala the old forum. There's a comfort in things when you've logged into the same place for nine years and see the same thing.

Striders_Heir wrote: Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:17 pm I personally like the dark background with white or light text ala the old forum. There's a comfort in things when you've logged into the same place for nine years and see the same thing.

I know where you're coming from as I feel the same way. Sadly, the old style we were using before the update is not available. We'll keep looking for dark background ones but I'm trying to avoid that green one at all costs.

My current pet peeve is that our usernames and avatars now appear on the right side of the posts. I just don't understand why people feel the need to change things that don't need changing.

FWIW I also prefer dark background/light letters, and avatars on the left.

We're not locked down with colors in any style, so don't stress too hard about that. I can go in and tweak the code as needed to fiddle with that. I may have some time this weekend to do so, but I can't guarantee it.

Placement of avatars and the like get a little hairier, but not out of the realm of possibility (he says before looking at the code at all...). The real problem here becomes maintaining it when future updates to the boards or styles occur. What takes seconds would then take hours. Coloring is one thing, placement can be quite another.

From what I've gathered in my travels since our update, there is a scramble to update old styles that are no longer supported. We were, admittedly, blind-sided by this particular hiccup. But when a new version rolls out, it generally a good idea for security purposes, if nothing else, to take it.

Valkrist wrote: Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:05 pm...Deimos, why do I get the feeling you will be displeased with any choice we make?

Val, that is unfair. I liked the Blue/Grey one just fine.
Even the green one was OK... you just needed to turn down the volume a bit.
I'll went to that website where the examples are and there were at least a dozen that I would be OK with.

This one? Sorry, NO. It feels like being in a sanitarium....'way, 'WAY too much white.
Or like Dave Bowman (2001 A space Odyssey-book, not movie) felt when his pod exited a Stargate into a "negatively colored" universe ....creepy and totally alien.
I really do not like it at all.

I very much prefer a dark background with light letters.

Sorry, I said that out of frustration because I myself am not pleased either with any of the choices so far. This one seemed like a decent enough compromise for now, but perhaps not. The old style has not been updated to this new version of the software, so that is the reason we can't bring it back. Our hands are tied until more of these styles are made available, and GW has the time to upload them. That's why you're not seeing something more pleasing to the eye for now. I decided on this one versus the green one because of the aspect ratio problem of the latter. I apologize but it will be staying a little longer. Perhaps we should hand out sunglasses to our members.

As for this looking like a sanitarium, we'll... we kind of are a bunch of mildly insane people when you consider our hobby.

I don't mind dark background/light font like what we had before nor do I mind the one that we have right this moment. I think it has a "clean" look.

Back by popular demand:

Also got some new ones to cheer people up over our crappy (temporary) new forum look:

And a few more:

come down evry one ,
backgrund (black) whrithing whit (orangse).this to collers never fail.

answers and replays ,maby in a eagwhite coller.just a surgenting.
whot do you thingk.

Unfortunately we don't get to pick the colours; we are subject to whichever forum styles have been uploaded to the phpBB website for our version of the software. Right now, the choices are very slim and not visually appealing to most. The waiting game continues.

I do hope this is a significant improvement...

Much better

Love the look, but the functionality (at least on my phone) is completely alien. This is going to take a lot of exploring and getting used to. At least we are out of the Sanitarium. The meal service sucked.

Valkrist wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2017 4:50 pm Love the look, but the functionality (at least on my phone) is completely alien. This is going to take a lot of exploring and getting used to. At least we are out of the Sanitarium. The meal service sucked.

You can take us out of the appearance of being in a sanitarium but (as you observed) we, all of us here, are still not a little crazy.

Holy Moly!

On my computer now, so I can see the differences more clearly. Sadly, the forum is not widescreen again, and our user info and titles are missing from our avatars, who seem to be getting smaller and smaller.

Edit: Ok, fixed those problems somewhat. Still small avatars and fonts though.

Since this most recent update, I'm having to login on my phone almost every time I come to the site. It's not remembering my login.

Olorin wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2017 1:14 am Since this most recent update, I'm having to login on my phone almost every time I come to the site. It's not remembering my login.

Odd, that's not happening to me at all.

It's happening to me.

Hmmm. I haven't had a problem having to re-login on the phone.

I honestly don't use my phone to log in here very often, so I don't know if there's been a real difference. I'll look into if the latest update changed mobile login/saved passwords...If anything, I've noticed it sticking more for me on computers, though. Previously it would randomly log me off sometimes, but now it's been pretty good about keeping me logged in.

In my case, it was probably because I was forgetting to tick the "remember me" box. However, even before the recent upgrade, I had the problem periodically, even with the box ticked.

I always click the remember me box. I still get kicked out just about every other time I come on here.

jnicktem wrote: Mon Mar 27, 2017 2:32 pm I always click the remember me box. I still get kicked out just about every other time I come on here.

Same here, except isn't every other time, it's every time. :-p

Make sure your mobile settings on your phone web browser aren't countering your "remember me" settings here. I was having this issue as at one time i had my explorer settings set to "never remember passwords" which canceled out the "remember me" box.

I am on several forums on my phone- this is the only site that makes me log on this often.

I'm sorry you're having such trouble, Nick (and everyone else.) This is a common annoyance with fickle browsers, caches, and cookies. Seems to come and go in cycles. When we first changed over our forum from the old vbulletin software, it kept doing that for me as well. Then it stopped. Then it started again when we did an update (not this one.) Just seems that every time the settings change somewhere, a random group of people are affected by this. I know this is no help, but it's the fact that it doesn't affect everyone that points to it being an issue with phone/computer/browser settings, rather than something to do with the site itself.

Hey folks,

I'll be bringing down the boards at some point tomorrow morning (5:00 AM-10:00 AM EST) to do an update. Shouldn't take too long. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up so they don't panic if they visit and find the site unreachable!

Thanks for the heads up GW....wish my computer would let me know before it decides to dump :-p ...

Update fought me a bit and there's some lingering stuff to resolve, but we're back up and running.

Thanks everyone!

Very nice additions, GW.
Thanks for your efforts.