General Rules (Please read this first!)

[Sphilia]

Well, it's kinda weird seeing everyone signature placed in center...But if that's Admins decision, I will gladly followed it.

[Utsuho Lazy]

Well, it's kinda weird seeing everyone signature placed in center...But if that's Admins decision, I will gladly followed it.

That varies depending on your theme. I'm currently using the default theme, and signatures are forced to place on left instead.

[L-Voss]

Well, it's kinda weird seeing everyone signature placed in center...But if that's Admins decision, I will gladly followed it.

That varies depending on your theme. I'm currently using the default theme, and signatures are forced to place on left instead.

You don't say? I'm also using the default one, but signatures are still in center for me.

[Utsuho Lazy]

You don't say? I'm also using the default one, but signatures are still in center for me.

I guess my internet is borked then

[L-Voss]

You don't say? I'm also using the default one, but signatures are still in center for me.

I guess my internet is borked then

Or you simply use a different browser. I use the newest Firefox.

[奈落天魔]

You don't say? I'm also using the default one, but signatures are still in center for me. :^^;:

I guess my internet is borked then :o

Or you simply use a different browser. :^^;: I use the newest Firefox.

Same here.

[Deciare]

I know someone who is using the newest version of Firefox and still sees signatures squished to the left side. I think it may be a ISP-side transparent caching proxy thing... But oddly, it works properly in another browser. Anyway. Hopefully, everyone's cache will catch up in a few days?

*Is using Sacred2dark*

I don't like how the signatures are auto-centered. Mine looks awkward being moved towards the center the way it is for example. I think that every theme should treat sigs the same and keep them the way that they were.

Okay, it seems we need a more dynamic solution to the problem. I wonder if there's a way to get signature centring working based on whether the user had chosen to centre any aspect of their signature...

[wizzardx]

Okay, it seems we need a more dynamic solution to the problem. I wonder if there's a way to get signature centring working based on whether the user had chosen to centre any aspect of their signature...

1. That sound like a horrible hack D: (what if only part of the sig is meant to be centered?)

2. Possibly not, since signature div's alignment has already been set, by the time the user's sig, with the alignment tags is rendered. I don't think that even CSS is that clever ^^; (But then again, I don't know that much about web dev so I could well be mistaken). The only ways I can think of involve some awful hacks in the forum PHP to check the sigs, and give them specific alignments, ignoring the CSS file (or using a different kind of div class/id/etc, depending on wanted alignment) D:.

Btw, is horizontal horizontal space of images even an issue? I would think that the main problem is vertical, having to scroll a lot to find actual message text and so on.

Maybe you can just make a vertical restriction rather than a horizontal one?

[L-Voss]

I know someone who is using the newest version of Firefox and still sees signatures squished to the left side. I think it may be a ISP-side transparent caching proxy thing... But oddly, it works properly in another browser. Anyway. Hopefully, everyone's cache will catch up in a few days?

I think clearing the 'history' in the browser should help... not sure about that, though.

[Linearis]

...gah...I'm not liking how the signatures are bamfed in another direction... x.x And the align=left doesn't change a thing. T.T'' Grahh...

[Deciare]

1. That sound like a horrible hack D: (what if only part of the sig is meant to be centered?)

I am thinking of prioritising the alignment of the signature bounding box in the following manner:

1. If any element in the signature is explicitly centred (with the [align] BBcode), then the signature bounding box itself is centred; other elements can freely be aligned to the leftmost or rightmost side of the region within the bounding box.
2. If the above condition is not met, then if any element in the signature is explicitly left-aligned, the bounding box itself is left-aligned; other elements can be aligned to the rightmost side of the region within the bounding box.
3. If the above condition is not met, then if any element in the signature is explicitly right-aligned, the bounding box itself is right-aligned; other elements can be aligned to the leftmost side of the region within the bounding box.
4. If none of the above conditions are met, then the bounding box's alignment is inherited from the parent element. (Which will mean left-aligned for most people, unless their theme or OS-specific bidirectional text rendering configuration states otherwise.)

2. Possibly not, since signature div's alignment has already been set, by the time the user's sig, with the alignment tags is rendered. I don't think that even CSS is that clever ^^; (But then again, I don't know that much about web dev so I could well be mistaken). The only ways I can think of involve some awful hacks in the forum PHP to check the sigs, and give them specific alignments, ignoring the CSS file (or using a different kind of div class/id/etc, depending on wanted alignment) D:.

Checking each signature's content is indeed what I intend to do. As noted above, users will be able to decide how they want their own signatures to be aligned with BBcode. In my early testing, this solution is actually cleaner than having to edit each theme separately to make it conform to a specific bounding box size; once implemented, the size will be adjustable across all themes with a single change to a setting in the ACP.

Btw, is horizontal horizontal space of images even an issue? I would think that the main problem is vertical, having to scroll a lot to find actual message text and so on.

It will be possible to set a height limit without imposing a width limit, and vice versa. If the width limit is not set, then alignment is always set to "inherit", which does not conflict with any of the phpBB themes I have seen.


Edit: Done for prosilver and sacred2dark. As usual, the rest of the themes will follow later.

Editmore: Done for all themes!

[奈落天魔]

Everything is back to being defaultly aligned to the left. Thank you Deci! ^_^

*hug*

[Utsuho Lazy]

Wish I could see any differences >_>''

[Deciare]

Wish I could see any differences >_>''

You can. On this page, for example, wizzard's signature is properly centred while no everyone else's is left-aligned by default.

It's a good thing that you aren't noticing the difference right away, too. This change is intended to be as transparent as possible with respect to the behaviour we had before signature sizes were bound.

[wizzardx]

I am thinking of prioritising the alignment of the signature bounding box in the following manner [...]

Complicated x.x

Thanks for your work though... ^^.

However.. wouldn't have simply removing the horizontal limit have been simpler? So that things can align horizontally like they used to, but the height is still limited. (As a non-web developer, I have no idea if this would work or not)

For instance, now my sig's image floats in the middle, but according to the bbcode in my sig, only the text is meant to be centered. Not too bad, but it does look slightly weird ^^; Users who want to use custom alignments will now have weird things happening in their sigs >_>.

And also now, the sigs look different in post preview (this was mentioned in another thread too), probably because you edited the page viewing code, but not the post preview code. I have a feeling it may crop up in a few other places too >_>.

Sorry if this sounds like criticism. But I am kind of worried about the forum software becoming unstable, and also with possible issues installing mods or upgrading the forum software.

Maybe what you can do (if you haven't already), is see how mods which perform a similar function work, and then hack one of them to do this, and then install it. Or possibly check where settings like [don't show sigs] are used in the code, to see where hacks should be made, if they need to be.

[Deciare]

However.. wouldn't have simply removing the horizontal limit have been simpler? So that things can align horizontally like they used to, but the height is still limited. (As a non-web developer, I have no idea if this would work or not)

Yeah, it'd be simpler that way, but you know... With an obvious solution already in mind, I get curious as to whether it's actually possible to do, and it was. So if for nothing else, I learnt something.

For instance, now my sig's image floats in the middle, but according to the bbcode in my sig, only the text is meant to be centered. Not too bad, but it does look slightly weird ^^; Users who want to use custom alignments will now have weird things happening in their sigs >_>.

I wonder if extreme left/centre/right-aligned elements in the same signature would be specifically desirable in all cases, though. Let's hypothesise that you were working with a display resolution of 1920x1200 or something even wider. If your signature's image banner was left-aligned then, and the text was centred, chances are that there'd be a considerable chunk of blank space between your image banner and your text, making your text appear to be floating in the middle of nowhere.

Now imagine a sort of setup where, for aesthetic reasons,

text is

meant to flow

like this

as waves

in my stream

of consciousness

Wouldn't that look better if all of that was bound to a specific width so that the elements flowed more smoothly into each other?

Another point of concern was that, in a horizontally unbounded signature, many elements could be positioned side-by-side without exceeding the height limit of the bounding box, but if someone with a smaller window or lower display resolution were to view the same signature, significant parts of it may be cropped off or otherwise appear laid out improperly.

So there's less literal freedom with a horizontally-bounded box, but I wonder if making the viewable size of the signature predictable has its own benefits. It's probable that everyone will see your signature the same way irrespective of variables in their working environment that you can't predict.

And also now, the sigs look different in post preview (this was mentioned in another thread too), probably because you edited the page viewing code, but not the post preview code. I have a feeling it may crop up in a few other places too >_>.

Yeah, in PMs as well. Since those exist in separate regions of the code and are way less common use cases than forum posts, I didn't feel very motivated to do it right away... I guess I should fix previews, at least, sometime.

Edit: Signature previews in the UCP are now consistent with signatures displayed in posts.

Sorry if this sounds like criticism. But I am kind of worried about the forum software becoming unstable, and also with possible issues installing mods or upgrading the forum software.

That's a reasonable concern, but since the third-party mods I have installed are of much greater complexity and manipulate the database (whereas this signature thing only reads from configuration variables that have already been sanitised by the phpBB backend) I think we may have more to worry about from those. You can examine the source code for yourself by recursively grepping for "MOD: Signature Dimensions Bounding Box". The only code I wrote that wasn't already facilitated by the phpBB configuration or templating system is in includes/functions_sigboundingbox.php .

Or possibly check where settings like [don't show sigs] are used in the code, to see where hacks should be made, if they need to be.

It's a combination of settings defined in includes/acp/acp_board.php (which I used), user-defined settings (which I didn't need), and using template variables in styles/*/template/viewtopic_body.html (which I used). Really, it's a pretty standard solution where most of the creativity is in concept rather than implementation.

[Deciare]

Edit: A further update to fanart posting guidelines:

When posting fanart drawn by other artists, please link to the page that displays that art instead of inserting the images directly into your post. Even if you don't know the address of the page that displays that image (i.e. it was from Photobucket), consider using [url] tags instead of [img] tags. This is to avoid trouble from artists who don't want their work to be displayed on other people's sites without permission.

[Utsuho Lazy]

I've added two rules (under Disclaimers section) regarding our policies on posting download links of copyrighted materials, in particular AT-related materials.

Also, could someone please update the "Explanations of each forum" section? I'm too Lazy to do that.

[L-Voss]

Also, could someone please update the "Explanations of each forum" section? I'm too Lazy to do that.

Added descriptions for Axis Courtyard and Wackyhabara. Do you think we need to explain the subforums as well?

[Utsuho Lazy]

Added descriptions for Axis Courtyard and Wackyhabara. Do you think we need to explain the subforums as well?

Thank you

I don't think we'd need to, as the descriptions on those forums explain themselves well enough.