Site Relaunch

The doctors are in, and we have finished the new redesign for the main website! In addition to the redesign, the tracker also received a make-over as a result.

In addition to that, the forum has received several bug fixes that previously inconvenienced users, and Gravatar integration taking precedence over on-site avatars. The shift to Gravatar is for compatibility and preparation steps of integrating the tracker and forum together for a unified login system that will arrive in the near future.

So how do you use it? Register here with the e-mail you registered with on the forum to upload custom avatars.
If you need to recover your old avatar for any reason, contact me and I'll recover it for you.

Some other notable fixes and improvements are as follows:

• Searching has been improved. This also includes member list searching.
• Forum reading marks are now operational and working as intended.
• Poll revoting

In addition, you can now submit news and other announcements in the News Submission section of the forum for display on the main page and forum portal.

Big thanks to Infurnus, Esselfortium, and Medicris for some assets and aid on the design, and HeX9109 for some of the most helpful feedback we received while working on it!

Is there any way to make the forum avatar take precedence? My old one crawled, and IIRC Gravatar doesn't let you do that.

Not feasible at the moment as far as I can tell. I'm aware that there are some places which still display original forum avatars (As an oversight, just found this out about an hour or so ago) though.

Okay; are animated avatars planned ever to return? I'll miss them, but on the whole it might even be more gain than loss.

If you used an external URL, it's still saved in the User Control Panel in the Change Avatar section. (Hmm.. there seems to be a typo there)

The forum previously used 150x150 avatar sizes, but currently Gravatar seems to be limiting them to 80x80 and re-sizing them accordingly. This turns animating images into static images, not sure if we'll be able to get Gravatar to cooperate properly on that end.
EDIT: Gravatar doesn't allow animating images! Will look into an alternative override for getting them working on the forums. (No guarantees for getting animating avatars working on the tracker) Also, avatars are 125x125 now, and Gravatar supports up to 200x200.
Edited the usercp_avatar template to link to Gravatar and add extra info.

In the meantime, our forum still remembers the previous avatars, and like Wartorn said, they can be retrieved.



A tip for GMail users:
If you want to use a different Gravatar for Zandronum or any website really, you can add a "new" email address by using your own email and adding to it like this:
Regular email: example@gmail.com
Added email: example+zandronum@gmail.com
GMail supports a simple filter system so you don't have to give out your "real" email, and can see where mail is sent from in the event that some company ends up spamming you. More info here.

You can then have "2" emails(or more!) and thus choose different Gravatar avatars for whatever different websites you use Gravatar on. Just remember to change the email address to match on the websites themselves!
(I'm assuming most people that have never heard of it obviously will only use it here or such, but food for though)

(09-21-2012 03:34 PM)Qent Wrote:  Okay; are animated avatars planned ever to return? I'll miss them, but on the whole it might even be more gain than loss.

Not a question I can answer on a technical level, but the best guess I can give you is "probably not".

Welp so much for that random avatar I wanted

Ergh. Gravatar.

Well, all right.

The main site definitely looks cool! Props.

this gravatar is sad news

(09-21-2012 03:34 PM)Qent Wrote:  Okay; are animated avatars planned ever to return? I'll miss them, but on the whole it might even be more gain than loss.

ADSAHSJFKHASJKDHASLJDHDjh
nooo my animatered avatar
Would have rather had libravatar

(09-21-2012 01:32 PM)Wartorn Wrote:  In addition to that, the forum has received several bug fixes that previously inconvenienced users, and Gravatar integration taking precedence over on-site avatars. The shift to Gravatar is for compatibility and preparation steps of integrating the tracker and forum together for a unified login system that will arrive in the near future.

so now random avatars can never happen again, which means my matrix.py script becomes basically useless

:|

Pretty sexy site

I think the first post covers why we switched to gravatar. The tracker software uses it, so to have a unified accounts system the forums need to use it as well.

Personally I say good riddance to animated avatars! :P (Also random avatars defeat the purpose of an avatar anyways.)

(09-21-2012 01:32 PM)Wartorn Wrote:  Some other notable fixes and improvements are as follows:

• Searching has been improved. This also includes member list searching.
• Forum reading marks are now operational and working as intended.
• Poll revoting

Not quite. I didn't touch poll revoting nor member list searching (although I did report the latter upstream).

(09-21-2012 03:40 PM)infurnus Wrote:  If you used an external URL, it's still saved in the User Control Panel in the Change Avatar section. (Hmm.. there seems to be a typo there)

Will fix the typo when I get home.

(09-21-2012 03:40 PM)infurnus Wrote:  The forum previously used 150x150 avatar sizes, but currently Gravatar seems to be limiting them to 80x80 and resizing them down accordingly. This turns animating images into static images, not sure if we'll be able to get Gravatar to cooperate properly on that end.

I can increase the size when I get home as well.

(09-21-2012 10:26 PM)Blzut3 Wrote:  I think the first post covers why we switched to gravatar. The tracker software uses it, so to have a unified accounts system the forums need to use it as well.

You can't switch the Tracker Software to Libravatar?

(09-21-2012 10:26 PM)Blzut3 Wrote:  Personally I say good riddance to animated avatars! :P

Well, personally I think that's rude.
I had the best avatar, it only animated when you opened the page...
Also, eww, Gravatar ruins my copyrighted images with anti-aliasing!

(09-21-2012 10:29 PM)Llewellyn Wrote:  

(09-21-2012 10:26 PM)Blzut3 Wrote:  I think the first post covers why we switched to gravatar. The tracker software uses it, so to have a unified accounts system the forums need to use it as well.

You can't switch the Tracker Software to Libravatar?

(09-21-2012 10:26 PM)Blzut3 Wrote:  Personally I say good riddance to animated avatars! :P

Well, personally I think that's rude.
I had the best avatar, it only animated when you opened the page...
Also, eww, Gravatar ruins my copyrighted images with anti-aliasing!

Wow. I have to agree with Llewellyn. That IS rude.

I had agreed to gravatar not knowing of it's restrictions. I had used an animated avatar, and it wasn't annoying or flashy.

(09-21-2012 10:26 PM)Blzut3 Wrote:  Personally I say good riddance to animated avatars! :P

This isn't about "personal" issues with animated avatars, and I'm quite disappointed you didn't warn us about this before hand, unless you told Wartorn. Most people around here enjoy animated avatars and the freedom to use pretty much what they want. Also, you need an account there to use an avatar here?

What the hell is this?
I'm against this now that I know the cold truth about gravatar.

Unfortunately I wasn't around when this choice was made (totally my bad) but I think this is a pain in the ass. I'm not going to register on a new site just to use an avatar. There needs to be some alternative- this is an unrealistic expectation that hundreds of users would be willing to register.

(09-21-2012 10:53 PM)Metal Wrote:  Wow. I have to agree with Llewellyn. That IS rude.

So I can't talk about my opinion even when prefixing it with a word that obviously states that it's an opinion? I don't expect anyone to agree with me. I merely stated that I don't care for animated avatars. Last I checked, it's not rude to disagree.

I'm a nerd, if there's some social thing I'm missing please tell me what it is.

(09-21-2012 10:53 PM)Metal Wrote:  This isn't about "personal" issues with animated avatars, and I'm quite disappointed you didn't warn us about this before hand, unless you told Wartorn. Most people around here enjoy animated avatars and the freedom to use pretty much what they want. Also, you need an account there to use and avatar here?

What the hell is this?
I'm against this now that I know the cold truth about gravatar.

So since libravatar seems to be a solution is this what you guys want to do? I would like to hear more opinions on the matter. I would rather not change the tracker code (right now it's a vanilla installation), but if most of the users here would prefer that it's not a huge problem.

Also, I expected the staff to know what gravatar is since it was already in use on the tracker since Skulltag started using Mantis.

Does Libravatar support animated GIFs? I haven't heard of it before. It would require yet another account, but maybe it's the best compromise.

If Libravatar would require changes to the tracker anyway, what is the possibility of switching the tracker to use the old forum avatars, rather than either Libravatar or Gravatar?

Although I could never get .gif avatar's working here anyway this gravatar deal does seem a bit unnecessary, though I'm not too fussed. The main site looks very nice.