Legion of Angels - Review

[legionofangels]

Well since our forums customization is complete minus maybe a shoutbox I thought I would ask for a review if any member or reviewer has time.

Criterion

1. Specify exactly what you are looking for in a review.

Suggestions on forum layout, opinions on design, suggestions for improvement. In short, pros/cons, what can I do to make it better?

2. Include URL (clickable link) that you would like to have reviewed.

http://www.legionofangels.net/forum/index.php

3. Provide a 1 sentence description of site to review (max 100 words).

Legion of Angels is a Christian Support Forum, focusing on support & Christianity, but also covering the typical broad range of topics found on most boards.

4. If you require a review of a particular style, you may link to that style. FYI: Members have a tendency to promote their services and/or products when linking to a style .. please do not do this as your post will be removed.

I don't know if there is a particular style to suggest a specific review on, I use Dark Sky - (FireFox Only) but I don't know if that is the best graphically designed one. If you'd like to view all the styles that we did...granted with a bit of help on 1 or 2 skins where coding got confusing, you can find all the styles in this thread:

http://www.legionofangels.net/forum/...read.php?t=841

Or you can change them manually with the style chooser.

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Thank you to anyone who gives our website a review, I appreciate any and all comments/critique.

Legion of Angels.

[wolf32]

I really like how you give your users so many different skins to choose from, and all your logos are amazing. I don't really get why you have the avatar of the user Omega under the logo.

Your forum descriptions are kind of long for my taste, but I guess that gives users a better understanding of what each forum's topic is about.

Very Nice

[legionofangels]

Originally Posted by wolf32

I really like how you give your users so many different skins to choose from, and all your logos are amazing. I don't really get why you have the avatar of the user Omega under the logo.

Thanks for the comments.

I have been wondering that too about the forum descriptions whether I should briefly cover a topic list, or whether I should have them be..."talkative descriptions" like they are now. I didn't know the best way to do it, I asked my staff and they liked the talkative better, but if a concensus disagrees I will gladly relook at that.

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In regards to the Omega avatar that whole space of sky there is for a Flash Staff Display Bar, that showcases all the staff that are presently online. Only Omega is online right now, but when other staff members are online there are more avatars up there. As shown in the link below:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...66/Sac-Sky.gif

That is what it looks like when all the staff members are online. In the above link showing the different styles in one thread, there are screenshots with various numbers of staff online, dun matter the bar auto centers dependant upon how many are online.

If I'm confusing anyone, sorry and I can demonstrate it by logging some accounts on, but u prolly know what I'm saying.

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Thanks again Wolf.

LoA

[ssslippy]

Your backgrounds are designed only for one screensize, im on a wide screen and they repeat. You would be better off setting a background color and turning off background repeat.

[legionofangels]

Originally Posted by ssslippy

Your backgrounds are designed only for one screensize, im on a wide screen and they repeat. You would be better off setting a background color and turning off background repeat.

Actually they are designed to accomodate the 3 most popular screen size resolutions by statistics of what are the 3 most popular.

I have multiple pc's, and one is a wider screen ratio of something like 1200 x ?, I'm not turning it on to find it. You must be using 1600 x 1200 or something like that, which is still not very common based upon information we found on the net of studies of the most popular sizes.

There was originally a problem with stretching the BG image, so we went into working with the 3 most popular sizes and found that it currently would work for those 3. But wider resolutions would incur tiling. Or the highest resolution would look the best with a stretching BG, while smaller ones would look too dwarfed.

At first I was thinking...that won't work of what you said of a background color, but then I thought about the front page and I think we are thinking the same thing. Where the background is there, but for wider resolutions we add a background color?

If you look at our main page you'll see that it has the page, and then a navy blue border for wider resolution monitors. I think that is what you are saying, and that is what I'm thinking would be a good move to eliminate tiling.

If you are thinking get rid of the image BG altogether, that would defeat the purpose of making a translucent or semi-translucent set of skins, and we would not be better off going that route.

I think I got ya though, thanks for the advice.

LoA

[Tact7626]

hi peeps. thanks for your comments on the site.

i would very much love to accomodate the highest reses possible. but i've hit that brick wall many times and if anyone here can provide the solution, i'd be in your debt.

the problem starts with us NEEDING a fixed bg. one that does not move when the forum is scrolled.

secondly. sure i can stop tiling in all directions, and even add a colored bg to the back. but does that look any better? idk. up to you i guess.

the other option is making the largest bg ever. but then it doens't look good on smaller screens cause now all they can see is like a fraction of the bg and what were trying to show to everyone is a sky. not part of the sky.

i've tried stretchable bg's. the kind that can take up the whole screen regardless of res. but it was really hard to implement on a forum for me. and when i thought i had it, it dind't work.

so yah. if you guys can do what we need. go ahead and suggest away.