A Few Quality of Life Updates

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jesp
why bother
Posts: 483
Joined: Sat Mar 26, 2016 11:35 pm

I’d like to share a few minor quality of life changes to the forum that have been made over the last few weeks.
  • The registration agreement, which is a set of conditions of use you agree to when creating an account, has had the forum rules added to it. So far we have operated under an implicit agreement with each user that they will abide by the forum rules, but felt that going forward having the forum rules in the registration agreement is the best way to ensure prospective new users have a chance to review and agree to the rules. No changes have been made to the rules themselves, and they still apply to all users.
  • We’ve made a small change to the registration form for new users, switching the Captcha to a simple question and answer - think “2 + 2 = 4”, but related to Dan and Phil. As a fun fact, I checked how many registrations were blocked as spam before an account was created for today, and we’re at 62. I’ve also gone in to a little more detail around spam/bot prevention in this post.
  • We have a favicon again, and if you’re like me with too many tabs open at once, this should help you find IDB in a sea of tabs.

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  • You can now hover over the link to a thread on desktop to see a preview of the first post.

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  • The Dan 2.0 forum theme has been tweaked to make it a little more user friendly, including a clickable header to take you back to the main page, and page numbers highlighting which page you’re currently on. Follow the directions in this FAQ post if you’d like to change your forum theme.
  • Our very own lefthandedism has rearranged the emoticons so that they’re ordered in a more user-friendly way, with similar emoticons grouped together - you can see an announcement of this as well as a few new seasonal emoticons in this post right here. We had wanted to find a way to implement a search function but this is, unfortunately, not possible with the forum software.

    We have also removed a small number of emoticons, mostly duplicates or those that were very rarely used.

    To give an idea of the work involved, here’s a snippet of the page we use to manage emoticons -

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    The blue arrows on the right are used to move the emoticon up or down the list, which in turn changes their position in the window used to select them when posting. Since we had, before we removed a few emoticons, a hefty 291 emoticons this was a time-consuming job, and we’re very grateful to lefthandedism for taking it on.
We’re always open to comments and suggestions - if you have anything you’d like to see added to or changed about the forum, or if you have a question for a mod, please do post in this thread or send me a private message. We can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to act on your suggestion, but we’ll do our best.
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