ballp.it Changelog

[Lemon]

So if you've made a post yet, you've seen that there was a dropdown for "Message Icon", where you could make your post a piece-of-paper-post, a light-bulb-post, or what have you. You've also probably noticed that there were a lot of goddamn paper posts because everyone just ignored that crap, and well they should.

Boots suggested I replace all the message icons with icons from JustRage, so I did a quick "Time That Would Take Me To Do vs. Time That Would Be Funny For" calculation and rejected it. Message icons have been yanked.
There's still the "normal topic/hot topic/locked topic" icons, because those are useful, but at some point I want them to look more consistent with the earlier icons.
 

[Lemon]

Oh, and you can reply to announcements now.

[Lemon]

Sweet! Okay, ignore the broken image link. I'll have these topic images changed in a minute here.

[Lemon]

Ahhh, there we go. That's much better UX.

You've probably noticed the change, but I just redid topic icons to fit with the ballp.it look and feel. This is going to be an ongoing process of going through and remove every icon that's got distracting colors in it. Next up is gonna be the thumbs up/thumbs down thing I repurposed from thefpl.us and those unsightly contact icons.

INCIDENTALLY, if anyone's got a copy of illustrator and wants to lend a hand, I would love to get single color icons for the +1/-1 thing. Currently it's set to "dap" and "punch", so we could play with [fist and fist] & [fist and face], but I'm perfectly content with any other duality you might want to try out. Maybe [handjob] & [groin kick] or [beer] and [poison]? Whatever looks best. The big stipulation is that it has to be single color (black on transparent), and it has to look right at small sizes (26x26, probably).

Let me know, otherwise I'll try to dig something up.

(Oh and the image assets for the topic icons were created by VisualPharm, who make very nice icons indeed.)

[Lemon]

Thumbs Up/Down icons changed (temporary, until something better comes along).

And there are now 20 hidden emoticons.

[montrith]

Can we rename this section of the forum "Lemon playing by himself"?

[Lemon]

We're a lot closer to a cohesive look tonite. It should be no secret that I'm completely aping (or stealing, depending on how you define things) a number of aspects of Google's design scheme. Specifically the color palette. Going forward, the icons are supposed to be...

• Action
• Information
• Navigation

Or at least that's the idea. There's plenty of stuff left to do, but I think the left and right sides of the thread view are a lot less cluttered and hopefully are getting out of the way of post readin'

(Also I've renamed this thread.)

[Emperor Jack Chick]

I feel this is more of a changeblog than a changelog. Thanks!

[Lemon]

A smattering of small changes made. Nothing that's particularly attention grabbing, but just a little more consistency across the board.

I spent about 40 minutes today trying to figure out how to convey the command "Mark As Unread" graphically. Most efforts use an envelope, which is crap. So far my best solution is "Eye With Cataracts", which I think gets the point across. But, I don't have the whole set ready, so it's gonna wait.

[Lemon]

Shit I did today

• Google monster cockytics
• New icons for Forum Stats, Users Online & Expand/Collapse (front page)
• Entire Quick Reply section removed.
• General background color of site changed from #fff (full white) to #f9f9f9 (what we call a "hussy white")
• New icon for recent posts
• Fixed indicator icon on top of polls page.
• ballp.it no longer will add the "Re:" prefix to every post reply you write. All posts written before their change will retain their "Re:" prefix, as a reminder to us all about what a stupid convention that is.
• Author block, (that is, that shit over to the left of what I'm writing) now contains a Steam icon for those people who've entered a Steam ID. Curiously, this was the most laborious change of the night, and also the most overlookable, so please pay a second's attention to those 16 pixels or I'll start thinking I wasted my time on that.

And now, for a secret: There's an emote that looks like a Paula Deen recipe.

[RedMinjo]

These changes do not look like [poopoo].

[Mimetic]

<pedant>There are 256 pixels there, actually.</pedant>

[Lemon]

Here's what I did over the weekend

• Board Icons (home page) redone.
• Board glossary removed for guests. Replaced with registration indication
• Post Actions (quote/tattle) have been condensed into a single horizontal line of actions. I'm much happier with that look.
• Thread Actions (New Topic/Notify/et al) on top and bottom of thread view have been changed to red (action) color. I'm thinking about turning these into graphical icons, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do that or not.
• Form buttons (input[type="button"]) changed color
• Wrote an overdue post on The Prime Directive. Eventually that needs to be added to the Register & Help pages.
• Changed the expand/collapse icon in postview to the ballpit standard ()
• Slight overhaul of the search page. Nothing particularly interesting,just removing useless crap
• Left Info section of Profile view much closer matches the threaded view
• Users can no longer tattle on their own posts
• A few secret emotes added to bring the list up to 37. This will be good news if you ever need to conjure up someone who is none too keen on the gays.

[Lemon]

At this point, you've probably noticed the new ballp.it logo, which I think is quite lovely. It was drawn by KingKalamari, who probably deserves a piece of your affection so we don't have to stare at that other header anymore. While we're at it, the favicon.ico has been changed. If you're still seeing an F+ logo, that'll change eventually.

The only other thing worth mentioning at the moment is that I changed the styling for featured (multibulbed) post. That gradient wasn't working for me, so I replaced the topline with a string of stars. Also, I've lowered the threshold for multibulb posts to 3+. That might get raised later on, but for now there's some frugality inre: bulbs.

[Lemon]

YouTube videos can now be added to posts. FTP links capability has been removed, since that button made no sense at all.