Do something about the spam-bots.
Davidle123 wrote:
The threaded style forum is one of the many unique things about byond, in some occasions its not always best to fit in :)

And being unique doesn't say anything about how good something is. It just means different.

I always found the forums to be kind of tedious to look at. It's like switching modes when you decide to look through one. There are a lot of simple ways the forums could be easier on the eyes. Take it from any forum software made... the standard tabulated setup works. It's easy to read, easy to skim through, and people are simply accustomed to it after it basically being the standard since... probably before BYOND.

There's nothing wrong with BYOND's forum scheme. It works, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be made better, or at least more comfortable for readers.
I suppose but i see the standard forum style all the time, its nice to see a change when i am on byond.
THIS Look's utterly amazing! When will this be released?
This was meant to be released already, atleast that's what Tom said a week ago, thus there is not Update nor even a trace of it.

I guess it will take more time than the expected by us, we've to understand that updating the BYOND Software is not the same or even close to update a game made out of it(BYOND).

Hopefully it will not take that much time though...
There's always un expected delays, i spoke with Tom yesterday and he said it should be sometime this week, but i think we should try not to put a time stamp on it's release it only adds more pressure to Byond when errors may still pop up :O

Maybe this week :P
But that means it'll be released on the end of the world!!!!!!
If I understand the hub changes correctly, each game will have it's own forum and bug tracker. If so, I believe this will be a huge time-saver for developers. This justifies membership due to the cost of hosting your own website/forum/tracker.

Needing to build my own key-based forum/tracker has put me off developing for the past few months. This is a welcomed announcement.

As far as membership changes go, I approve of requiring membership for hub maintenance and advertising. This may solve a lot of issues that are constantly complained about.

However I'm a little lost on the memberships now. It seems membership is only aimed at developers as there is no benefit at all for a user who only plays games(aside from the annoyance things). As I've already stated the price is justified for a developer, so I have no issue there.
However, I can't see players wanting to pay this premium for a list of benefits they won't use.

Perhaps a gold/premium player subscription at a lower price that doesn't include the developer features but still gives the status to unlock game content, remove annoyances, discount on individual game subscriptions(set by the developer?) and whatever else players may want. As there are far more 'players' than developers; what is it that players want and be willing to pay for?
all sounds awesome to me!
Kajika wrote:
If I understand the hub changes correctly, each game will have it's own forum and bug tracker. If so, I believe this will be a huge time-saver for developers. This justifies membership due to the cost of hosting your own website/forum/tracker.

Except you got your own forum with a membership before, and through that could manage bug tracking. There is honestly 0% new content, for extra price, and actually less functionality.

I simply cannot fathom 'Make more expensive' 'Remove functionality'. Why, for the love of christ, are you removing the blog aspect of a membership. It just simply doesn't compute with me. What is it that's a downturn for BYOND? Why must it go?
The blog system was essentially a failed experiment--at the time it was installed, social networking was on the rise, but we found that other sites are simply doing it better than we ever can and it's ridiculous to try to compete on their terms. Meanwhile it was implemented in such a way as to distance it from the forums, which is historically where our best discussion always occurred.

All said though, we're not so much removing blogging as refocusing it so that discussion will happen more on the forums. We realize there are downsides to this and talked about it at length, but overall the idea of concentrating discussion in one area really isn't a bad one. We've been simplifying a lot of aspects of the site that never really worked well and have always given us more upkeep grief than real value.

One example: By losing a lot of the old site boxes, we're able to cut out a lot of queries we don't need, but also we're able to vastly improve how we handle favorites and fans. In the past you could edit your favorite games in numerous places using a multitude of different commands that all had the same result. The same was true of friends. The old boxes for favorite games were a nightmare of code; the template we used for the core box ended up a jury-rigged mess even before our previous update, because it was trying to do too much. That template was used not only for showing favorite games on a blog, but prior to our last update also did the games page, and various hub search results; getting that to show the right info in each of the 500 different scenarios it might be called was brutal. Remember we've been over a million different ways to organize: We sorted by published vs. unpublished, we had all those checkboxes for different ways to refine the search, we had available vs. unavailable, and as of our last update the new concept of "listing status" went into the mix. Keeping up that template alone was an enormous headache, to say nothing of a million others.

Another example: Blog calendar. This was implemented wrong form the get-go, doing all its content generation in code instead of templates, and the queries that ran it were badly outdated. There is a calendar in the new event forum, but it's done properly in a way where it can be reused. If we ever want to bring back a blog calendar, we can do so more easily.

Stylesheets: I'll be kinda sad to see these go, although we've discussed the idea of potentially allowing for some simplified style changes down the road. We had to implement a special parser for stylesheets to avoid abuse, and that still wasn't sufficient in some cases. In any event, the way posts get displayed is changing so much that existing CSS would be badly broken by the change. The old slugline format is gone, and the old comment template is going away (and good riddance, because it too was difficult to maintain).

On the whole we're making changes we really should have made in our very first site revamp, but converting all the old CGI code was quite difficult enough. The last revamp really brought us closer to where we needed to be for hub organization, which was its primary benefit. The new one will streamline everything as much as it can.
I still miss the 3.5 Byond site... It was much simpler and made alot more sense... Bahh why cant you allow different Site Skins... so I can relive the good ole days?
Kaigne wrote:
Will the browser element in the skin file be able to port over to flash?

You'll have the basic 3.5 interface, which had a single browser control. So, I assume that's what you'll have.
Complex Robot wrote:
Kaigne wrote:
Will the browser element in the skin file be able to port over to flash?

You'll have the basic 3.5 interface, which had a single browser control. So, I assume that's what you'll have.

Although I haven't worked with Flash recently, I know it didn't support embedding a browser before, and a quick Google search suggests it still doesn't. It does appear that there are a few third-party HTML parsers, but I would expect those to be very limited.
DarkCampainger wrote:
Complex Robot wrote:
Kaigne wrote:
Will the browser element in the skin file be able to port over to flash?

You'll have the basic 3.5 interface, which had a single browser control. So, I assume that's what you'll have.

Although I haven't worked with Flash recently, I know it didn't support embedding a browser before, and a quick Google search suggests it still doesn't. It does appear that there are a few third-party HTML parsers, but I would expect those to be very limited.

There's no talk of an embedded browser in the actual Flash application. However, I believe it will run alongside a browser (i.e. embedded in a webpage) that will allow for a simple browser and output control.
I assume the stand-alone version of the Flash client will have some sort of browser that it runs with.
Complex Robot wrote:
There's no talk of an embedded browser in the actual Flash application. However, I believe it will run alongside a browser (i.e. embedded in a webpage) that will allow for a simple browser and output control.
I assume the stand-alone version of the Flash client will have some sort of browser that it runs with.

Well, part of the discussion of the advantages of the Flash client was the possibility of publishing games to other game portals. Allowing (or requiring) the Flash client to alter the page it's embedded in would make it incompatible with such sites. Also, the screenshot we've gotten so far suggests it's a standalone SWF.
DarkCampainger wrote:
Complex Robot wrote:
There's no talk of an embedded browser in the actual Flash application. However, I believe it will run alongside a browser (i.e. embedded in a webpage) that will allow for a simple browser and output control.
I assume the stand-alone version of the Flash client will have some sort of browser that it runs with.

Well, part of the discussion of the advantages of the Flash client was the possibility of publishing games to other game portals. Allowing (or requiring) the Flash client to alter the page it's embedded in would make it incompatible with such sites. Also, the screenshot we've gotten so far suggests it's a standalone SWF.

Wow. Never saw that screenshot.
No browser then. Live with it.
Eeeenteresting... now If we can only be able to submit said games as stand alone .SWF files in Newgrouds then My life would be complete.... *Beng able to crush most standalone flash games with a Byond game: Priceless*
Ss4gogeta0 wrote:
Eeeenteresting... now If we can only be able to submit said games as stand alone .SWF files in Newgrouds then My life would be complete.... *Beng able to crush most standalone flash games with a Byond game: Priceless*

Agreed.
Ss4gogeta0 wrote:
Eeeenteresting... now If we can only be able to submit said games as stand alone .SWF files in Newgrouds then My life would be complete.... *Beng able to crush most standalone flash games with a Byond game: Priceless*

DC said the Flash client itself is a standalone .swf; the game is not. The game has to run on a Dream Daemon or Dream Seeker server just like it always did. The .swf is basically a Flash version of Dream Seeker with a slightly different feature set.
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