Scratch

I've renamed the thread as per your suggestion. 

I had a great new year party 

As for the thread, I really believe that if this actually comes to existence, a lot of people will not use it unless it's got the same graphics!
That also includes me...

For smilies graphics, I recommend making new ones, showing the Scratch Cat.
I might do that, and suggest it for the current forum system first. 

I certainly think that the current forum graphics should be kept. However, I can see people having a lot of fun with forum skins. This could be rather easily achieved through either a setting to change the default colour or through skin packs that allow you to change the graphics completely with background images etc. or both. It would be a lot of fun to have shareable, customiseable and optional skin changes for Scratchers. There could be a skin page to support it where people can share skins, love skins etc.

sparks wrote:

I certainly think that the current forum graphics should be kept. However, I can see people having a lot of fun with forum skins. This could be rather easily achieved through either a setting to change the default colour or through skin packs that allow you to change the graphics completely with background images etc. or both. It would be a lot of fun to have shareable, customiseable and optional skin changes for Scratchers. There could be a skin page to support it where people can share skins, love skins etc.

I like this idea but it would require more modding, maybe we could make the skins, post them on a thread where scratchers can request skins

For skins I'm thinking that we would essentially have a downloadable zip containing all the forum graphics. People can then edit those graphics to their taste and upload the result to the skins page, either as public or private. The forum would then have a link to that skin through their settings. This could be done like so:

<img src = "http://www.scratch.mit.edu/forums/skins/$skin/submitButton.png" />

So this way, the forum can set the variable $skin to "default" and the files will be loaded from that directory whilst choosing a new skin for the forum from a settings page will change that. As long as the files keep the same name it will work. There won't be any problems for others either since they cannot affect the layout, just the graphics 

cocolover76 wrote:

MathWizz wrote:

TRocket wrote:

should we report this to get it noticed?
also I think the new forums should use AJAX since it's very slow

Why on earth would you use AJAX? That's client side.

We should use:
●AJAX
●PHP, ASP, or CGI
●HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the such.

And SQL 

Like nXIII said. I would certainly be in favour of using AJAX for posting to the forums so you don't have to wait for the entire page to reload. As an option it may be a nice idea to allow the page to check periodically for new posts and display them via AJAX too...

sparks wrote:

Like nXIII said. I would certainly be in favour of using AJAX for posting to the forums so you don't have to wait for the entire page to reload. As an option it may be a nice idea to allow the page to check periodically for new posts and display them via AJAX too...

Very good idea! Also, I've heard from a friend that there's a plugin for FluxBB out there that allows you to edit posts without reloading the page (a.k.a. AJAX)... that could also be an idea?

I personally think this is in fact going to be an exercise in futility. Think about it again. The Scratch team letting a bunch of kids rewrite a (functional, if not optimal) forum system which could potentially have great security loopholes and would need to connect with the Scratch database. I feel the idea of a better forum system is great, coding it together sounds like fun, but the sheer amount of work outweighs the sliver of chance that the Scratch team will accept it.
If you are in fact crazy over forum upgrades, the recent GreaseMonkey script wave sounds like a much better way to go about it. Instead of 'skins' you can have downloadable GreaseMonkey userscripts that edit the styles, and add cool features on the way. This can let people totally customize their forums, but not force them to. Moreover, this won't need any Scratch team approval as the database won't be edited or used. Google won't change Chrome's interface to suit me (the developer menus I use are mostly nested), nor would it accept a patch from me. But it allows people to make extensions to suit people like me, like dev extensions. Get it?

Hardmath123 wrote:

I personally think this is in fact going to be an exercise in futility. Think about it again. The Scratch team letting a bunch of kids rewrite a (functional, if not optimal) forum system which could potentially have great security loopholes and would need to connect with the Scratch database. I feel the idea of a better forum system is great, coding it together sounds like fun, but the sheer amount of work outweighs the sliver of chance that the Scratch team will accept it.
If you are in fact crazy over forum upgrades, the recent GreaseMonkey script wave sounds like a much better way to go about it. Instead of 'skins' you can have downloadable GreaseMonkey userscripts that edit the styles, and add cool features on the way. This can let people totally customize their forums, but not force them to. Moreover, this won't need any Scratch team approval as the database won't be edited or used. Google won't change Chrome's interface to suit me (the developer menus I use are mostly nested), nor would it accept a patch from me. But it allows people to make extensions to suit people like me, like dev extensions. Get it?

Good point. If we write one from scratch, it would have security problems.

I say we mod phpbb.

Hardmath123 wrote:

I personally think this is in fact going to be an exercise in futility. Think about it again. The Scratch team letting a bunch of kids rewrite a (functional, if not optimal) forum system which could potentially have great security loopholes and would need to connect with the Scratch database. I feel the idea of a better forum system is great, coding it together sounds like fun, but the sheer amount of work outweighs the sliver of chance that the Scratch team will accept it.
If you are in fact crazy over forum upgrades, the recent GreaseMonkey script wave sounds like a much better way to go about it. Instead of 'skins' you can have downloadable GreaseMonkey userscripts that edit the styles, and add cool features on the way. This can let people totally customize their forums, but not force them to. Moreover, this won't need any Scratch team approval as the database won't be edited or used. Google won't change Chrome's interface to suit me (the developer menus I use are mostly nested), nor would it accept a patch from me. But it allows people to make extensions to suit people like me, like dev extensions. Get it?

Actually, they already said they aren't gonna use it on here, because there is a django forum plugin, but they said they would be very thankful if we made a community site and hosted it elsewhere, with it's own db, etc.

Skins: We should have the skins rely all on CSS and use <div class='post'> or something like it to make it simple to create and change the skin colors. I also think the default skin(s) shouldn't have any images so for those who don't have images to replace the default ones can still change the skin to how they want it.

Ajax: Now using this is going to be complicated ( from my programming view ), first of all it will need to ask the server if there are any new posts, but the problem is, that it uses bandwidth to request an update every 60 seconds ( even more in less time ). I agree that Ajax makes it simpler and more efficient for the user, but what about the server and the browser?

Security: That's what "hackers" ( White Hats ) are for.    They find the flaws, we fix them.

To be honest, most security break-ins are from SQL Injection and just simple security flaws of not authenticating the user every time they send a request.

Both of these are easy to fix: Always authenticate the user before loading a page and make sure the request they want is within their level. Always ( well, almost always ) add a MySQL escape to all input from the client so they can't SQL Inject. Though most servers now a days automatically do that for you, but it's a lot safer to do it anyways if we are giving it out for download.

I actually did a little bit of designing yesterday on paper, but it basically has the same look as this forum. I think the corners should be curved instead of a sharp 90 degree turn. But I guess skins will fix that problem. 

Flashgocrazy: We don't have one yet.

Last edited by Magnie (2012-01-02 11:07:44)