Suggestions

[Tellis]

Er, can I bring up the topic of the main site upper banner again? I actually get a bit anxious 'cause of how cramped the big bar following the scrolling page is.

I know you guys implemented a fix of sorts depending on the height but I'm at 1280x1024 and it's still real bad for me. If the larger part of the top bar were fixed, it would clear up room for another row of visible icons and I think that'd make a world of difference, especially with how it's been reduced to four icons per row with the new size...

[Petie]

When we heard no further comments after our last fix, we assumed all was well. We're currently working on a plan to cut the size of the header just about on half once you scroll down, which should help quite a bit but in the mean time, can you post a screenshot of your entire browser window? I know "cramped" is a subjective term but I'm curious as to what you're seeing because 1280x1024 should be more than enough to accommodate even the current header for the most part. Like I said, it's subjective so I'm. It saying you're wrong, I'm just curious exactly what you're seeing.

[Tellis]

Screenshot

Spoiler

I don't know if that looks bad to you but it does to me. Like, regardless of resolution, II don't think an unfixed banner like that should be any greater than like 50 pixels. With just the banner that's on the forums, I can easily ignore it as I scroll down a page, but click it when I need to. With a big old banner like that, it's CONSTANTLY picked up in my peripheral vision making it a nuisance to look at while I'm trying to scan a page for a specific icon or sheet name (especially with the big icons taking up more page real estate than the old icons that were stacked pretty close to each other) and it starts to build up a feeling of "I just wish I could make it go away somehow."

[Petie]

Fair enough, and thanks for the screenshot. Like I said, we're working on making it smaller and the current plan is to have it shrink once you scroll down though we haven't finalized everything just yet. In the mean time, I've gone ahead and increased the minimum height required for it to stick to 900px which means it should now scroll off screen for you.

Personally, I like it fixed at the top and, on larger resolutions, don't think it's problematic at all (such as yours) but I can absolutely see why you feel the way you do. I'll update here once we've reached a more permanent solution.

[Tellis]

Well, it works but only if I turn on my bookmarks toolbar, which I assume is just tipping it over the edge of the 900x limit. Not a total fix for me but yeah, I like it much better even if I have to give up the tiny bookmark space to trigger it, heh.

[Jermungandr]

Just a small random idea ...

I was looking at the table of information that appears over a sprite sheet when you open that sheet's page. Included is the name of the person who uploaded the file. I got to thinking that maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea for regular submitters if next to their name it also provided a website link for that person, assuming they have one?

The reason this comes to mind is because the majority of my sheets on the site still reference drshnaps.com as my home page, which clearly does not exist any more. I thought maybe it would be more convenient if the infobox just provided a link which the user could update whenever something changed. They could just update it in their profile and it would apply to said link all across the site.

Of course this is really only an issue for custom sprites for the most part. Stuff you should actually expect to get credited for.

[Petie]

I'm not unappreciative of the idea but it won't work for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, how do you intend to update this web address? The obvious solution seems to be a profile field on the forum side but there's a problem there - submitter names are not tied to user accounts. This is how it's always been and trying to change it for the new system wouldn't really have been possible. Sure, I'm now logging the user ID of the person who submits a sheet but it's still not tied to the displayed submitter in any way. As it stands, no one "owns" a submitter name. I could, for instance, submit a sheet as Drshnaps right now. I wouldn't, because there's no reason to, but that disconnect makes it impossible to link any user-editable field with a submitter name (i.e. why we don't auto-link your resource profile pages to your forum profile).

Now, with that out of the way, there's also the issue of necessity. Generally, domains don't change frequently enough to justify the creation of a feature that won't even entirely solve the problem. I feel like the far simpler solution would be to simply redirect your old domain to your new one, which you can then update from a single location and ensure that everyone who finds your sheets can also find your site. This method also deals with the fact that not everyone will see the website link and many will still try to go straight for the site on the sheet.

If you have anything further to add to this, I'm all ears, but as far as I see it now, this isn't something that can happen.

[Jermungandr]

Well, I suspected it wasn't feasible but figured it didn't hurt to throw it out there.

[E-Man]

I don't recall if this was ever touched upon, but it's about attachments. You see, now that the forum encourages the use of them, they make for a great alternative for displaying images as opposed to an image hosting site. The only downside I found is what non-members are seeing. You see, when I shown my dad's French friends some artwork in one of the threads on this web site (I logged out at this time to prevent them from accessing my account), the images I placed did not show up for them. Is that supposed to happen for guests?

With that said, this gives me a bit of a reason to use Photobucket again, so that my images will show to anyone with or without an account; however, are you willing to change it to make sure that even guests could view attachment images?

[Vipershark]

I don't recall if this was ever touched upon, but it's about attachments. You see, now that the forum encourages the use of them, they make for a great alternative for displaying images as opposed to an image hosting site. The only downside I found is what non-members are seeing. You see, when I shown my dad's French friends some artwork in one of the threads on this web site (I logged out at this time to prevent them from accessing my account), the images I placed did not show up for them. Is that supposed to happen for guests?

With that said, this gives me a bit of a reason to use Photobucket again, so that my images will show to anyone with or without an account; however, are you willing to change it to make sure that even guests could view attachment images?

Fixed.
Guests can now view attachments.

[puggsoy]

Remember how link colours were changed for the Spriters/Models/Textures/Sounds Resource themes? When replying to a topic, the posts below still have the old colour (from the VGR theme). Not a huge thing but probably worth fixing.

[Vipershark]

I checked on that and found why it happens but I'm not sure if it's something that I can fix.

Basically the reason why the color change works in posts is because posts are considered a different "category" than the rest of the content on their respective pages. As such, all I really had to do was change the link color for the post "category" to what it is now.
In other words, the link color in posts used to be the same color as all of the other links on the forum (the navigation at the top, links on the main index, etc) which is black so to fix it I simply changed the link color for the post "category" which overrode the regular link color. Posts in the previous posts area under the reply form have no such "category" like the regular posts do and are considered just part of the page itself, so they use the general link color that everything else on the page is meant to use. If I change the color there, it will change the color of the links in the navigation and on the main index as well since they all fall under the same general color property.

I know a fix is definitely possible (and it's probably as simple as putting previous posts into their own "category" as well) but I don't really want to muck around with creating new "categories" for stuff and risk screwing things up.
(In before Petie and Kosheh laugh at how easy of a fix it is and do it in like 10 seconds)

[Neweegee]

Not sure if it's possible to fix, but it would be nice if the search function on the resources had things in an order based on relevance instead of being alphabetical. It gets really bad sometimes when you search for something with more than 1 word.

[Petie]

Use quotes. The search function on the site supports all search modifiers (plus, minus, quotes). I can look into sorting by relevance but really, since most of the sheets are relatively few words, relevance ranking won't be all too effective anyway.

Edit:
As a point of reference, take a look at the differences between the following:

Super Mario Bros vs. "Super Mario Bros" (unquoted vs. quoted)
Super Mario vs. Super -Mario vs. Super +Mario vs. +Super +Mario (Super or Mario vs. Super without Mario vs. Mario and, optionally, Super vs. Super and Mario)

I hope this adequately explains how search modifiers can affect your queries but if you have any questions, let me know and I'll put together a proper thread (something that I probably should do regardless, come to think of it).

[Dazz]

Another thing to make note on is that, with the updated icons, you'll be able to use ctrl+f on the page too. While this might not seem like much, it can help when you made a non-quoted search and want to find both terms together still.

This won't work if the sheet is using the old icon style though, so just a heads up. More something to note for the future.