New Sidebar Layout

[DAVIDE]

Twitter like layouts are a waste of time and just awful to look at. The common average modder\player of mods here, who is interested exclusively in modding sections\mods, does not care (i put it kindly) to read news or threads about politics or publications made by 10 years old kids at all. The common average modder\player of mods will keep doing and attending what he was doing and attending before. Exclusively modding sections\mods.

If you want to keep sidebars, at least make them hideable. Now there is, now there is not, by pressing a button or moving the cursor on them. Or better, create a script in which you can enable sidebars from user settings so one can decide by preference to see them or not

[Sebidee]

The text on the sidebar (except for the poll) is perfect now.

[GrnEyedDvl]

1280x800

Care to take a screen shot for me?

Twitter like layouts are a waste of time and just awful to look at. The common average modder\player of mods here, who is interested exclusively in modding sections\mods, does not care (i put it kindly) to read news or threads about politics or publications made by 10 years old kids at all. The common average modder\player of mods will keep doing and attending what he was doing and attending before. Exclusively modding sections\mods.

That's your opinion, and you are entitled to it. But the simple facts are that the political section is by FAR bigger than any modding section on this site. Bigger than most of them combined actually. And most of the people participating in that section are also here for games and mods, which is why they came here in the first place. There is lots more to TWC than just mods, and most people do use other parts of the site. You happen not to, which is ok. But statistically your opinion that the "average modder/player" doesn't have any interest outside the mod forums is just plain wrong.

If you want to keep sidebars, at least make them hideable. Now there is, now there is not, by pressing a button or moving the cursor on them. Or better, create a script in which you can enable sidebars from user settings so one can decide by preference to see them or not

This has been addressed already. Read the entire thread to see it.

The text on the sidebar (except for the poll) is perfect now.

The poll one is giving me fits for some reason. It looks good on everything except Blackout.

[Veteraan]

Time to get some sleep, but in case you haven't yet noticed I would like to point out that my "my account" page looks a bit strange now. Rep rings partially covering text and folder icons doing something similar. Resolution = 1920*1200
I'm sure you get it all sorted out though.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Time to get some sleep, but in case you haven't yet noticed I would like to point out that my "my account" page looks a bit strange now. Rep rings partially covering text and folder icons doing something similar. Resolution = 1920*1200
I'm sure you get it all sorted out though.

Havent looked at that page yet. I guess that is next on the list.

[irishron]

Search isn't bad.

Found Reduced City Textures for M2 and Medieval XL. Both are old.

[GrnEyedDvl]

Time to get some sleep, but in case you haven't yet noticed I would like to point out that my "my account" page looks a bit strange now. Rep rings partially covering text and folder icons doing something similar. Resolution = 1920*1200
I'm sure you get it all sorted out though.

I cant see what you mean here, and I don't think I have changed anything that would have an impact on that. Which theme and resolution?

Search isn't bad.

Found Reduced City Textures for M2 and Medieval XL. Both are old.

The only real downside to the way this thing works is that it can only search "visible" forums, forums that Guests can see. So for a staff member searching for something inside a staff forum its pretty useless. I just changed it to show the top 10 searches instead of the top 5, we will see how much extra space that takes up. That's built on an hourly cache I think, so in an hour we should see.

[G-Megas-Doux]

For me the news bar should be much narrower it feels really odd having it there. Is it possible to set it to be disabled in an individual's profile or make it customisable? I personally find it distracts me from what I am doing and don't intend to use it. However I do appreciate that other people might prefer it. Either way thanks for the work in implementing it.

[DAVIDE]

Why then you dont keep two different layouts at the sime time? the main page will use sidebars ok, the modding areas will remain as they were before your modification. You are happy because you wanted sidebars, modders are happy because their posts are not messed up.

I have seen communities around, having like ten different "theme layouts" (if i can call it this way) for ten different areas of the same forum. VBulletin look kinda powerful and elastic for such things i think

[daelin4]

Three questions: can you make it so that it can be removed entirely?

Second question: if not, is there a way to choose what can be displayed? I am interested in latest replies to threads I have participated in, and not things like political topics I have neither interest or seen before

Third: I recommend ways to collapse some of the sections, ie the search bar (entirely redundant), the sections of threads, etc.

Also I would agree with the feeling that it feels Facebook-y, because it's trying to show me things I don't want to see regardless of consent and any way to modify or customize it to preference.

The idea itself is nice, I just prefer if it's a shortcut to things I am interested in and not shortcuts to pretty much everything.

[Sebidee]

This might be a little random but what do the ads pay for? I'm not having a go at anyone I'm just curious.

[GrnEyedDvl]

This might be a little random but what do the ads pay for? I'm not having a go at anyone I'm just curious.

Not sure what you mean here.

The ads cover the costs of the site, which are substantial. Our bandwidth bill last month was just under $1,000 and our CloudFlare bill is $200 a month. TWC is currently running on 3 servers, a 16 core server for the database, a 64 core server for the website, and a 4 core server for backups and the Vault. We have our own dedicated rack space in a data center (full 48U rack) along with a Cisco 32 port gigabit switch with VLAN ($900) and a bunch of other stuff like patch panels and KVM, etc etc.

TWC is FAR too large to host on a shared website that you see advertised for $5 a month all over the place. Several years ago we were renting a server from a place in Texas for about $400 a month and that was just a quad core with 4 gigs of RAM. So we ended up buying our own hardware.

The total annual cost of TWC last year was about $15,000 including bandwidth and software upgrades and everything else it takes to run this site.

[G-Megas-Doux]

Ok so this is there to pay for the site's servers. Could there be a feature like in tribal wars where if you pay a "subscription" to the site you don't have to see any adds ever once you have logged in?

[Melooo182]

chrome screen 100%


chrome screen scaled to 90%


yeah windows on a macbook xD
1280x800px just reminding

I still think area for avatars and bagdes etc can be reduced some ~20%

[GrnEyedDvl]

Ok so this is there to pay for the site's servers. Could there be a feature like in tribal wars where if you pay a "subscription" to the site you don't have to see any adds ever once you have logged in?

I could probably set that up but I have always been against having a paid service on the site.

yeah windows on a macbook xD
1280x800px just reminding

That actually doesn't look too bad.

[G-Megas-Doux]

[QUOTE=GrnEyedDvl;14094576]I could probably set that up but I have always been against having a paid service on the site.
QUOTE]

I get that. I don't like pay walls either. Just really not keen on adverts everywhere. I guess that asking for donations was a struggle as well as people were less likely to give. I will try to get used to it but I would prefer if it were 10-20% smaller in width.

[Sebidee]

I get that. I don't like pay walls either. Just really not keen on adverts everywhere. I guess that asking for donations was a struggle as well as people were less likely to give. I will try to get used to it but I would prefer if it were 10-20% smaller in width.

You know, there are ways of not having ads. (Although I do not endorse them in ANY way shape or form)

[GrnEyedDvl]

I get that. I don't like pay walls either.

In my opinion once you start doing that then you tend to focus on that and lose site of the original goals of the site.

Just really not keen on adverts everywhere. I guess that asking for donations was a struggle as well as people were less likely to give.

The number of ads hasn't changed, just where they are placed.

I will try to get used to it but I would prefer if it were 10-20% smaller in width.

I can make it narrower and use skyscrapers instead of square ads, but then I think the amount of info you can put in the rest of the sidebar suffers. For instance, you wouldn't be able to read the entire Poll question, or it would be broken up into different lines which may or may not look right depending on what word was the last on the first line.

[Kull]

I can make it narrower and use skyscrapers instead of square ads, but then I think the amount of info you can put in the rest of the sidebar suffers. For instance, you wouldn't be able to read the entire Poll question, or it would be broken up into different lines which may or may not look right depending on what word was the last on the first line.

But sidebars aren't why we are here. I get it, seriously, I do. You have an expensive site, and this is a way to better handle the ads, probaly get more clicks, and force the modding troglodytes to see that a lot more is going on in TWC than what we see in our own little worlds.

But even with all of that, if there's a way to minimize the size of the sidebar without degrading it's overall purpose (informational, nothing more), than you should DO that. You don't make the sidebar look nicer at the expense of actual forum content.

And we still haven't received a response on the requests to make the sidebar applicable to forums and not threads. Is that impossible, defeats the advertising function, or something else?

[alex86]

There should be some min-width applied here I think to prevent this sort of thing in small windows.