As you've noticed by now...

[Ed]

The forum looks a bit different.  There are two reasons for this -

1 - I've installed a forum portal, which is the first page you will see when you visit the forum from now on.  To get into the main part of the forum, all you have to do is press the button between 'home' and 'help' next to the three triangles.  There's a bit more gumph around now, but if it's bugging you, all you have to do to get rid of most of it is click on thos triangle buttons and they'll collapse the fields for you.

2 - I've reset everybody to use the default theme, because some of the old themes no longer work with the upgraded forum and I didn't want to lose anybody   If you would like to change to a lighter theme, all you have to do is press the button marked 'profile' and then click on the heading 'look and layout preferences', which will bring up a list of stuff, the first item being the theme you want to use - click on the word 'change' and a list of themes with thumbnail pictures will appear for you to choose from.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully this new portal will help to integrate the front end of the website with the forum and make it all easier to manage and update regularly

[canadian]

Wow! You HAVE been a busy little bee today. I've been popping in and out and everything has looked different every time!

Will now work on adjusting myself to the newness. Good work, Blunt.

[Ed]

Thanks, Donna.  I'm not sure whether I like the change yet, TBH - I don't like the clutter being on every page of the forum.  I thought the portal would be what it normally is - like a splash page window into the forum from the outside.

Something that was really bugging me was the inability to navigate back to the forum without going to that silly little 'forum' button, so I added back our original buttons from the website and I made the banner image clickable. 

When I get the hang of making pages for the front end, I'll probably get rid of the old html pages, but for those of you with links to some of them from your websites, I'll add redirects to their new equivalents.

Once again - for those of you who don't like change, you can get rid of all of the extras by clicking the triangle buttons, which will close all the boxes, and you can navigate straight to the form by changing your bookmark to http://www.cafedoom.com/forum/index.php?action=forum

Give it a few weeks and if we really can't get along with it, or we really don't like it, I can always get rid od it and try something else

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Nice work, but I think I'll stick with the forum page. 

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Oh wow. They're the same exact page. Oh well. C'est la Vie.

[Ed]

Oh wow. They're the same exact page. Oh well. C'est la Vie.

Yep - that's what's bugging me.  Like I said above, a portal is usually like a splash page - it's something you pass through to get to the forum, not something that's stuck to the forum pages all the time.  Bloody annoying.  I'm going to see if there's any way of altering it to what I want.

In the meantime - you can collapse both the side boxes by pressing the arrow buttons next to the rest of the buttons.  That will leave the forum looking pretty much the same as it was before

Oh yeah - I keep forgetting to say that you can choose the colour of the current board default (Helios Multi) by clicking on the coloured rectangles at the top right of the page.

[Ed]

Ha!  Sussed it - there's a facility to turn off the side bars while in the forum.

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Much better. Thanks, Blunt!