Suggestion Box V4

[Omac]

Would it be possible to add a way to save draft pms for later? I know the blogs have this functionality up to 15 blogs. This is a low priority request. I'm not sure how helpful it would be other then an added convince, but it could still be cool to have.

[John]

Not unless there is a modification for it. Unfortunately it's not an option that is built in.

I will mention that you have a notepad on the site in your settings. Could always draft PMs there.

[Omac]

Oh, okay that works!

[Crazywolf]

I have a suggestion to drive site activity. It's based off something Dnafein said in the other thread though not quite the same.

My suggestion is create a roleplay etiquette guide.

I realize that many gms already put etiquette rules in their roleplay ooc but if there was an actual official etiquette guide for the forum as a whole then maybe it would help a bit.

[Bee Bear]

Better all round accessibility and design would be very good for attracting and keeping new members.

Areas that can be improved upon? The skins/themes. Firstly, there are a lot of them, which isn't necessarily a good thing considering that most of them are out of date and poorly coded in terms of ease of use. Going through and updating them with current links, banners, etc isn't practical considering there are so many. And remember that the more skins you offer, the longer the site takes to load.

Another thing is that as far as I can tell, the only truly responsive theme you have is the one specifically made for mobile. In this day and age that's a huge turn off for most users, both mobile and otherwise. Because it's missing so many features the full theme has to offer, you'll get very few people using it. Also remember that there are those who cannot use dark themes and those who cannot use light themes.

Offering a light, dark and mixed theme is all you need (provided they're responsive). The roleplaying community as a whole is becoming more conscious of appearance and ease of use. Modernizing RPA's look and streamlining some things will go a long way towards keeping up with those trends and staying relevant.

[G]

Great suggestions guys - the mobile-friendly point especially! Thanks

[Crazywolf]

Actually the current look of the site is something I quite like though maybe its just because I'm part of an older generation that prefers the old style of design. I also like that there is an option to have a narrow skin. if all the themes were simply ones responsive to screen size as being suggested i'd find that a bit of a downer.

edit: also I remember on previous surveys there were a lot of people who liked viewing the forum in different colors beside the default. if there's a few skins that want updating then fair enough but going from a dozen choices down to just 3 for the want of someone doing a few updates seems a bit drastic.

[Bee Bear]

A properly coded responsive skin isn't wide AF. Responsive simply means that if your screen is narrow, it'll adjust to fit. And if it's VERY narrow, certain elements of the skin will shift and display differently in order to accommodate that. For example, the sidebar will move from the right to the top or bottom of the page in order to save room. And on wider skins, the body of the forum is made to take up only a set percentage of the screen (say 80%) and not go above a certain pixel width (generally around 1000px to 1300px depending on the coder).

And again, a lot of choices in colour and design is great but it does cause a huge amount of database lag to load them all. It's function vs form, really.

[John]

The skins we're all coded using the vbulletin software. With that software, you can have a fixed or fluid skin. Fixed is like the RPA orange and gray skin which will not fill the whole screen giving the forum the approximate width of a page in a paperback book.

Fluid is wider and will fill your whole screen. Not sure off the top of my head which ones are.

As for everything else, all colours are inputted as style variables. No actual coding is done. And because the forum uses vbulletin, to code a skin from scratch would not be easy as vbulletin uses it's own language for most things once you get passed the xml stuff.

[Bee Bear]

I'm not super familiar with vbulletin coding but from what I see, some things you should be able to change using pure css in the Style Builder. Clever CSS is all you really need to make something responsive. Access to the HTML (templates) would be handy but not a prerequisite.

By editing a standard free skin this way, not starting from scratch, you can still make something responsive.