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Site Management => Site Support / Feedback => Topic started by: General Battuta on December 26, 2013, 11:55:58 pm

Title: Forum-specific flair
Post by: General Battuta on December 26, 2013, 11:55:58 pm
Sup yo, is there any way to allow users to select flair that would only appear on a specific subforum? I'm thinking about faction affiliation badges for BP fans who want to be able to draw their rhetoric guns on sight, or WoD character flair, or JaD achievement badges, or what have you.

This would be material that'd only work in 1 specific area of the forum. If not no worries, we don't want to clutter HLP's clean look.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 27, 2013, 01:42:25 am
I have no idea what "flair" would even mean in this context.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Scourge of Ages on December 27, 2013, 02:16:34 am
I'm guessing this sort of stuff  V V

(http://craigslistwalmartmissedconnections.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/stan_flair.jpg)

But... in the form of badges or something tasteful
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: MatthTheGeek on December 27, 2013, 03:53:57 am
That‘s like, not even trying to explain anything :<
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: jg18 on December 27, 2013, 04:24:38 am
Matth, watch this movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/) and be entertained. :)

To be more concrete though, I think Battuta is referring to things like the badge-like icons that appear below user avatars in The Escapist forums (example (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.832450-Nintendo-Confirms-Zelda-3DS-XL-Is-Coming-to-US)).

I guess they could be cool, but I'm concerned about the clutter (I like the clean look of the forums) and maybe about the time it'd take to implement them, especially when there are still things that need to be fixed, like long sigs not displaying correctly on profile pages.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Fury on December 27, 2013, 05:59:08 am
Sounds like Battuta wants something like HLP achievements.

*shudders* Please, no.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Phantom Hoover on December 27, 2013, 06:07:19 am
sounds like he wants users to be able to pick from a limited set of custom badges on each forum
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: General Battuta on December 27, 2013, 08:06:52 am
Yeah or maybe sig stuff, but, again, this is not a suggestion worth any serious amount of labor, I'd just like to know if it's trivially possible right now.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: An4ximandros on December 27, 2013, 09:42:16 am
We would cease to be mere fanatical constructs and actually have individuality in our visual expressionism. It would be improvident.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Goober5000 on December 27, 2013, 07:22:46 pm
Yeah or maybe sig stuff, but, again, this is not a suggestion worth any serious amount of labor, I'd just like to know if it's trivially possible right now.

Nope.  It would require some PHP coding.

Personally, I would prefer to see project-specific theme art, like Setekh did for us back in the days of HLP 1.5.  Example:

(http://staff.hard-light.net/setekh/forumheaders%5B15-12-2001AD%5D.jpg)
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: mjn.mixael on December 27, 2013, 07:38:54 pm
ew no.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: yuezhi on December 27, 2013, 07:42:31 pm
Wow that is flashy, in a bad way.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Mongoose on December 27, 2013, 08:37:50 pm
It's probably from the year 2001 or so.  Cut it some slack. :p
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Goober5000 on December 27, 2013, 09:10:09 pm
Are these any better? :p

(http://staff.hard-light.net/setekh/forumheaders%5B30-12-2001AD%5D.jpg)

(http://staff.hard-light.net/setekh/forumgfx2002.jpg)

(http://staff.hard-light.net/setekh/inf-ge_forumgfx.jpg)
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: mjn.mixael on December 27, 2013, 09:18:58 pm
No. We definitely don't need that kind of loud board customization.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: NGTM-1R on December 27, 2013, 10:09:25 pm
Not in the slightest, alas.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Scotty on December 27, 2013, 10:14:57 pm
I'm fairly certain that's not what Battuta was talking about.  More like a forum specific badge for something like BP that identifies preferred faction.  You could probably make a couple usergroups for it, but I don't know if you could make it appear only in the BP forum, and that'd be a lot of unnecessary work for admins and mods.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: An4ximandros on December 27, 2013, 11:20:44 pm
Are these any better? :p ...
MY EYES! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING! :p

I think something more along the lines of slight customizations.

Example: Bp (:headz:):

Have a Tev, UEF, Gaian, Vasudan, etc. badge that works similarly to the project badges. You could make them occupy the space reserved for avatars (But still keeping the dimensions small, ofc)
Just throwing stuff at the wall.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Droid803 on December 28, 2013, 01:00:10 pm
Well, this is the best example off the top of my head of the idea actually implemented somewhere:
(http://puu.sh/61unS)

On certain subforums of TeamLiquid (iirc, only those for LiveReport threads of events), team badges show up based on user setting that shows which esports team you're cheering for. Small, unobtrusive, occupying an otherwise empty portion of a post.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: General Battuta on December 28, 2013, 01:30:06 pm
That looks great.
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: Black Wolf on December 29, 2013, 11:58:07 pm
I'd vote no, simply because it feels like a slow creep away from HLP's rather nice minimalistic look. Slippery Slope is normally a bad argument, and I doubt that this would end with animated avatars and image sigs for everyone, but, once you get it out of the UEF/GTVA divide that this seems to be meant for in the BP forum, it certainly might get used in unintended ways in other subforums.

If the BP crew want something like this for interested forumites, maybe just encourage people to add their allegiance to the first line of their or two of their sig? If there's some kind of specific colour scheme or whatever it would be distinctive and visible enough to have the same effect within the existing structure of the forum.

As for the coloured subforums, I always used to like them, personally, but perhaps we have slightly outgrown them. :(
Title: Re: Forum-specific flair
Post by: General Battuta on December 30, 2013, 12:07:32 am
I agree on general terms, though I think if anything HLP is pretty garish and needs a trim down. That Team Liquid setup is pretty slick, though.