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Working on ACU!


Harakiri Tiger

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I just finished cleaning up the Forum!

 

Thinking up names for the User Rank Titles was easy enough. I just used the ones from another forum of mine with a slight bit of tweaking! They fit in just the way I was hoping they would. Which is good for me, because I was worried at first that they would seem awkward. Streamlined seems to always flow better than specific. I'm sure someone will gripe.

 

All the current User Groups are finished as well. Their permissions are set and I don't think they'll need any tweaking. With that said, I have to admit that I have added no advanced groups for normal members yet. Also, I don't have anything in the way of special features or compensations for donators. SpellCheck just tricked me, by the way. It said that donators is spelled donaters. What an ass. Anyway, I'm thinking I'm just going to use the advanced groups that I've been using on other forums. Their titles are more generic, but they provide less conflict as far as this Raven/Linx thing is concerned. Which is, by the way, a pain in the ass argument.

 

I need to add a few more sub-forums around the board. It's easy enough to think up and add sub-forums to all the non-AC related content, because that's what all of my sites have always specialized in. My problem is thinking up sub-forums for AC content. It's safe to say there'll probably be griping about why the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st generation forums even exist instead of a singlular retro forum. My hopes for those forums is that they'll gain content slowly but surely, mostly because I plan on providing motivation for members to use them. They also provide good discussion locations for Wiki users, especially since each generation has such different mechanics and design templates.

 

The biggest debate, in my mind right now, is whether I should actually add Team Sub-Forums or just provide a form of redirection for IPBFree forums. It's easy enough to add tutorials for creating your own IPBFree forum and customizing its basic features. The advantage is that ACU doesn't have an excess bulk of moderators and relatively useless forums with little content and activity. It also keeps my sub-forum depth, and related permissions settings, smaller and easier to handle. As far as physical space problems go, I have no complaints. The advantages to having the Team Sub-Forums actually located on my forum and not on some IPBFree forum is that if some team grows big enough or popular enough they'll bring activity into ACU itself. It also seems to serve as a successful pastime for people. I suppose people like being in a roll call or something. If I do add team forums, I will add a custom Team field for user profiles so they can show off their teams in their posts as well as profiles. If it promotes rivalry, then it promotes activity. Especially once I get the full Arena system working.

 

Speaking of which, the Arena seems to be easily handleable. Making the custom webpages for the Top 25 Rankers is more than simple enough. Each one gets to display their emblem, image of their AC, AC design, and pilot/AC bio. Of course, these can be customized to contain links to other parts of the website as well. The pages won't be user customizable though. At least I don't plan on it. I may have to change it someday, but I doubt there'll be such extreme tournament activity for a while, at least. Anyway, it's not the custom pages that's slowing down the development of the arena. It's the color scheme and general appearance. I just don't know what to make it look like. I can't seem to make up my mind. I've been having the same problem with the Homepage. What should I make the buttons look like? I don't know. I'll figure something out soon enough I suppose. The actual scripting will probably only take about 5 to 10 minutes.

 

Either way, the Hub, Homepage, and Arena will be finished in due time. They're not really hard, just hard to think up colors for. Though the Hub doens't present any problems with colors at least. I'm thinking orange for the Hub, red for the Arena, and blue for the Homepage. We'll see if that sticks. Haha.

 

I need to clean up the Wiki, Blog, Gallery, Downloads, and Chat. The Chat isn't really a big deal, though. All I need to do is uninstall version 6.0 and install version 5.0. It's just that 6.0 has too many bugs. I can't say I blame them, though. TuFat hired a new coder to do their work for them and the guy is recoding the entire FlashChat program from ground up. So 6.0 is still in a beta, really. We'll see about getting 6.0 after it becomes 6.1. Until then, it seems like people will still have to put up with the underlining and formatting problem in the current version of FlashChat.

 

I need to remember to get Brians "Who's in Chat" modification sometime later on, too. Most people like being able to see who's chatting without having to go to the Chat's index page or actually log into the Chat.

 

There's the Wiki, too. God damn that Wiki. It's an asshole. I really have no idea how I'm going to manage it considering how much work it takes to keep its database in good condition. I may have to uninstall it and re-install it into another SQL database before I open the site to the public. It can cause the whole site to slow down as far as page creation goes. Of course, that's not really a problem right now... There aren't any pages, haha. But eventually!

 

Lastly, I need to add all my skins to ACU and adjust them to fit all the new navigation buttons. That means tweaking for certain. I also need to add a FlashChat link to them and then check how they work with the Portal and other components. I almost forgot! I need to touch up the MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages for ACU. I wonder if anyone's already tried adding ACU as a friend? I also need to make some content on Zazzle for ACU. Revenue is always good for a motivator, so I can't forget about Zazzle!

 

Oh well, seems like there's still a lot of work left. Especially considering everything I didn't talk about. I'll just need to have it all done by this next Saturday. Of course, none of this work compares to the amount I'll have to do once it comes time to start adding content to the site. I'm afraid the 17th through 30th, the weeks I've dedicated to adding content, will be a nightmare.

 

I wish I had Internet at work.

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