Board and front page layout updates

[DJ Omnimaga]

Some of you might have recently noticed that the board stats started appearing on the front page and that some new sub-forums were recently added. Not only the old Starcraft sub-forum that we had in 2006 is back, but there is now also a new sub-forum that leads to the old board caches from http://www.archive.org and many of the original 56401 posts. A small bug in SMF sub-forum code allows HTML to be used inside topic titles, thus, allowing us to use redirect boards that were normally only available starting on SMF 2.x. Since it is also possible in forum descriptions, this allowed us to add a fake sub-forum that leads to the Webarchive and even display the total stats from the old boards (altough the topic count is slightly lower than it was).

To reflect this change, with the help of some forum members, the board stats layouts were slightly modified in a way that we can now display both the current board stats but also the total posting stats since May 12th 2005, date of the opening of the old board. So basically this is where the 77000+ total post count comes from.

The Starcraft board was added due to the growing interest in Starcraft on the forums and to make it easier to plan games (and help) if our members wanted to play together.

Besides all these additions, a new download section was opened: ROM Hacks. I guess it was a given since eventually actual ROM hacks would get released. Talking about ROM hacks, the sub-forum of the same theme was renamed to ROM Hacking & Console/Handled Homebrew, as it was kinda confusing to people who wants to produce console stuff but that aren't necessarly pirate games.

As other updates, the community featured projects are also listed on the front page, like our team projects now. Also, the file archive downloads and articles statistics now shows up on the board statistics page, right below the posting stats.

Hopefully some other new stuff might come soon.

Enjoy!

[Eeems]

Hmm, adding a web development forum soon might be good...there are a few more projects, and my XUL project kind of is.

Looks good btw!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah, I might do this at one point

Eventually, though, I may need to put many off-topic subforums in sub-categories, though, except maybe music, comp projects and rom hacking/homebrew, because it's gonna eventually get a bit too huge

[Galandros]

Glad you put the script working.

The web development sub-forum should be next, unless there is something else.

[DJ Omnimaga]

So far what I thought is web development, which would regroup all topics about help and projects. I also had in mind to add an anime subforum because at least 5 people on IRC are hardcore anime fans, but the issue is that I am not sure if these people are all forum fans, noticing they are mostly active in the channel and barely on the forums, so maybe such sub-forum might be useless.

There are chances that some of these forums are put into parent subforums as child forums, since the off-topic section is getting pretty huge compared to the others.

EDIT: I also added featured projects (such as E:SoR and Axe) on front page navigation, right below our projects

[Galandros]

I would enjoy a anime subforum and participate.

I have seen only a few but I don't know what to see next. Sometimes a friend recommend some animes and I watch them in holidays and during summer.

[Geekboy1011]

i would enjoy a anime sub-forum as well as i am new to anime and its great to see and here what is good / f*cked up /or other wise indifferent b4 watching it

[ztrumpet]

This looks really nice!  I like the Archives!  Great job getting those back on Omnimaga.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Actually they've been here in forever. It just didn't have all my games until maybe 2009. It's also still missing some RPGs that I have in a folder I need to test eventually.

Unless you mean the old board archive subforum? Unfortunately for now we still have to rely on Webarchive though for this

[ztrumpet]

I meant the Old Board Archive.  I still really like the Downloads Section too!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Hopefully, maybe Invisionfree will eventually get at my board restoration request. The restorations supposedly resumed in December (they were not being processed for half of 2005, half of 2006 and through entire year 2007-08 and the 11 first months of 2009. It has been 2 years since the old board request was sent >.>

However, I am unsure at which rate they're going, since only one person is doing this hectic job, maybe several people renewed their request like I did and maybe it could have been missed. No matter what I must have been put in a long queue

[Galandros]

The Eeems ASM Dev Set also fitted in an Assembly Subforum.

I have to release my SPASM macros. It would be nice that subforum for when the time comes.

[Eeems]

Well, my asm dev set (the first one) does, but the XUL one that I'm making kind of does, but it also fits in web development (xul is a web language)