Since people keep telling me that the forum style or visuals or icons or general appearance is sucky / lame / dull / boring / whatever, but there seems to be a generally wrong understanding about what we have and why we have it and what you can do about it, I decided to make a post to clear up some apparently very common misconceptions and answer some common questions.
1. The forum does not look like this because I think it is the uttermost bestest a forum can look and love it so much. It looks like this because nobody ever bothered to suggest something better. (It's not like I didnt ask!)
2. The current forum look is not something I threw together in a couple of minutes and looks crappy because I never cared to make it look good instead. It took me weeks and tons of fine-tuning to get it to this but I simply suck at coming up with something that looks good.
It looks like this because this is the best I could come up with and because I was the only one who cared enough to do anything about it.
3. I can not make it look better. No matter how much you think it sucks and tell me I should make it look better. Not because I dont know how to do the code or because I dont want to waste the time for it, but because I dont know what "better" is.
If you want it to look better you have to come up with something yourself.
Q: Cant we have a more super duper fancy look?
A: Sure. Suggest one.
Q: Can we have super fancy animated flashy stuff all over the place and the actual posts embedded in graphic-intense content and community stuff like blogs and journals and favoriting someone's forum posts and seeing how popular people are?
A: No.
Q: Why are the forum and topic icons so lame old-fashioned pixel work?
A: Because noone but me wanted to do them and pixel work is all I can do.
If you want them to look more smooth and 3D-ish with a touch of SimCity logo along the lines of
e.g. you are very welcome to provide a set of those.Q: Why are the icons macro-abused cities?
A: Because someone joked about it and I thought it was fun and we are a very macro-oriented bunch. No, it doesnt have to be cumdribbling cities. It just turned out that way and some seemed to like it or most were too lazy to say they didnt and nobody ever came up with something better.
Q: Why arent the icons little paws, that would be so cool and on-topic and innovative!
A: Because every forum that has ever seen a fur has paws as icons, even back then already, so I thought its lame, plus I did a set of stomp-themed reptile pawprints but noone liked them. (I didnt like them so much either.)
And also:
It is not "my business" to do the forum look and style stuff.
Just because I happened to do it back then so we have something at all doesnt mean I am responsible for it looking that way and for coming up with all changes for it for all times.
It's just as much yours, the one who reads this forum and cares, business as it is mine.
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