What's new on Alien Soup?

Howdy Campers,

Well, the holidays are now over and it's time to hunker down and get moving with enhancing the site again...

Software/Styles
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First, we'll be moving to vBulletin 3.0 RCx which is a fairly significant change.. I may begin this process over the next few days so the site will be a little confusing at first.

Important: We'll be moving our LITE skin to be the temporary default for our vB 3.0 install until our BRAND NEW skin/style is ready. Our new skin will be a bit fancier in the header/footer than our lite version, but one thing will be similiar - the middle portion. We will be keeping the content/meaty portion of the future website quick to load and very lite. Sort of a hybrid between our heavy version and our lite version, but of course with all new colors, graphics, mascots, and hacks/modifications (karma returns!) to make it a great new place to be.

Photo Gallery
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We'll be updating our photo gallery ASAP to a great new version, with quite a few new features since our last update.

Front Page/Portal
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This will also be enhanced a bit with new software, and be getting an arrangement makeover. More soon.

Teamed With Google
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You'll also soon notice a few unobtrusive ads (well, as much as they can be lol) however they are quick text ads, and while we'd appreciate you clicking on them you are not absolutely required to do so. It would just help us out tremendously towards server/software costs, etc. but no pressure.

They are targetted and will usually be relevant to the areas you will visit, so maybe you'll find something interesting now and again. Be aware that you will never actually be forced to purchase/download/read anything on the sites you click on, just visiting is enough to help.

Advertising/Affiliations
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We'll be joining with a few websites to boost each other's traffic levels (you might even see a couple of sites merge), as well as taking out some of our own ads on high-traffic websites in order to increase the popularity of this website. Once the new style is done, that is the #1 priority.

Stay tuned for more great happenings in our fourth year being the friendliest place to be!

Regards,
-Jason

 

karma! :yay:

 

No karmic backlash I hope - looking forward to some more people to meet and torture about folding@home - he he he!

 

no need to worry about karmic backlash if you behave

 

New software now active...

Testing 321...

 

Looking pretty spiffy so far...

 

Nice looking so far... But cant seem to get the quick-reply working like it did before. Of course I'm working with Opera browser here...

 

works great for me, it's much faster than before

 

I like the look and colors and ease of changing the sigs. It will take a little while to get used to all the changes {T delta S}. I am looking forward to gallery and journals when they are up. Great work :tongue:

Plz change the rules in the playpen requiring 10 character answers, and if the 30 second rule is still in effect that could go too - if possible.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I'll tweak a few things further in that direction...

 

Howdy,

There are a few settings I can toy with here.. One requires a click on the 'quick reply' button contained in every message in a thread to activate (set this way right now, default settings) or it can be set to be automatically live and not require any clicks to activate. I am not sure which I prefer personally, so I'll leave it up to everyone so scream at me if you hate it!

 

does it matter which message you click quick reply in? it seems to me that we could end up with a tree structure of thread if we reply to individual posts, you know? is that what the "display modes" do? if so, then you ought to leave it like this. but if it's just going to be linear posts like we've always done then maybe quick reply should be activated automatically

<edit>
just realized that there's a box to check for "quote message in reply" under the quick reply box... if we didn't quick reply to individual messages we couldn't use that, and i think it's a good feature
</edit>

 

Yeah, any message you click on 'quick reply' will pop you down to the quick reply box for a general un-quoted reply like it used to function...

This generally is a shortcut without having to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to reply...

 

Note: Photo Gallery will return in the next 2-3 days. Software will be fully upgraded to 4.6 and have several new features. All previous photos submitted will be carried over.

 

Looking great Alien, new/existing features that are coming back should be good!

 

We sure hope so, we're happy you're pleased human!

 

Can anyone do the karma/reputation, or just mods? I've used this before with the green dots, just wondering...

 

If you think a persons post merits any goodness then you can click on the tick/cross button in the postbit and award them reputation points

 

Correctamundo, Chris.

Yeah, any fully registered member can use it.

 

BTW, I'm loving the way quoted text shows up. MUCH improved over the old setup.