Space Age Magazine

Bora and I have been tinkering with the forum style. We're hoping to come up with a good one - distinctive and clear - which we'll then keep permanently. We won't be making any decision on this in the near future, but just want to try a few things out.

The fairly conventional style we've used until now is called prosilver. This evening we're trying out one called CA Orbital, designed by Vjacheslav Trushkin, which has a starry background and a blue planet (Earth, presumably) visible at the top of the screen.

Any feedback on this style would be most welcome. Is the starry background too distracting, for instance, when you are trying to read messages?

How about some spinning galaxies, animated super novas, space travel, space ships, and asteroid fields???

A nice idea but way beyond my current programming skills.

When I preview a post you can't see the text because it's black on black (or the stellar background at least) and have manually changed the text colour to white instead. If you're sticking with the background can you change default text colour?

Hi John, yes it's a pain - I think it is a bug in the forum style, and we're going to try to find a way to fix it. In the meantime, if you can manage without being able to see your posts properly at the preview stage and simply post them anyway, you'll find they automatically appear correctly on the forum. (At least, they look okay if you go back to the forum index and then re-load the relevant thread.)

This style with the pic of the Earth, the stars etc is pretty but seems to have quite a few problems. Another one is that the anti-bot question on the registration page doesn't display, even though the forum still expects new members to answer that question and refuses them forum membership when they don't. For this reason nobody was able to sign up for the forum for about 10 days, until Arising_uk pointed the problem out to me. Now I've switched off the anti-bot question, but consequently we are getting about 15 spam-bots signing up per day and I'm deleting them manually.

Not sure whether it is better to go back to a more conventional forum style, or to stick with this one and hope we can iron out the various little problems.

OK folks - we're having to change back to a more conventional forum style for the time being.

I really like the appearance of the forum style with the stars and the picture of the Earth in the background. I reckon it is much more distinctive, attractive and appropriate than the boring old styles yo see on other forums. However, the style has quite a few bugs.

The worst of these is that it won't display the anti-bot question on the signup form. This means that if the anti-bot question is enabled, people wanting to sign up as forum members can't do so. The forum expects them to enter an answer to the anti-bot question, but they can't see the question and can't see a box in which to enter the answer, so the net effect is to make new signups impossible. On the other hand, if the ant--bot question is switched off, to allow new members to sign up, then around 20 or 30 spambots a day sign up and swamp all areas of the forum with adverts for pharmaceuticals and dodgy websites. Unless I am continually online to delete them, these rapidly make the forum unusable too. Therefore this one bug is crippling the forum by preventing new members from joining.

Therefore we'll now go back to a conventional forum style until such time as we find a way to fix the bug.

As there is very little activity on the forum anyway at the moment, I've gone back to the starry forum style because, despite all its problems, it looks nicer!

Yesterday Bora updated the forum software, and also updated to the most recent version of the forum style we use here (which is called CA Orbital). However, we don't think this will result in any major changes in the appearance or functioning of the forum for the time being.

The old forum style, while very attractive, seems to be unusable because it doesn't enable sufficiently advanced anti-spambot measures. Therefore we are switching to this more basic but functional style for the time being.