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Whoever did the new banner thanks. I love having shots of guys in good gear! Makes us look like hardcores.

Just wondering what the city names are supposed to do?

That was our resident Admin Beach_Boy!

Great job! Nice to have some MIA hitting it up. And the variety of camo's and gear! Plus oh so sexy Chinese!

Yeah, it really does make us look very professional. Exactly what we are aiming at. Hopefully we can continue to aim for this level of quality in the images and games we produce.

As for the names. City names are supposed to look pretty. Until we eventually get our own forum software, our banner only links back to our main page.

-Doug

Yah guess I should have picked something different than arrows for the city names. I didn't even think about that until you said that... oh well, I figured it would be a good idea to have the names of the cities/towns on our banner just so people recognize us as all of Northern BC, and not just Prince George. I might do some other fine tuning as I just threw it up because the supper line was monsterous.

I'm pretty familair with forum php, I think you can enter a clickable html banner, instead of puttting it in the picture box enter it in the styles sheet.

is this the start of our third year? Oh the good times we've had

You forgot some...





And here's probably my favorite group picture ever...

Old school photos, urrrghhh. The good 'ol times, I still miss the Boneyard

Knightwarrier wrote:

I'm pretty familair with forum php, I think you can enter a clickable html banner, instead of puttting it in the picture box enter it in the styles sheet.

What Dave is asking about is making the names on the picture clickable and them doing something (which is a great idea). This means that we would have to add an image map or make it into an interactive format (flash). Neither is possible with the current forum phpbb, it only allows a form submitted image, no altering to the php file. Eventually (a very long time) we will bother to get a hosted site that lets us actually access the base php files and host our own files (instead of this faulty piggy backing).

the founder of the Calgary site offered us a free hosting. I turned it down for now becuase I am pretty happy with this and it has never gone down for more than a few hours.

is there a section where you can acces the "Skinning & Wrappers > Board Wrappers" where the arrow is on the pic, enter your (<% Board Header % >" it will put the html above the banner and putting it below will of course put it below the banner. Once you have created a clickable Banner you are happy with just leave the current "Main Pic Logo" Blank.

if not the forum host I use is also free and easy to use.

Knightwarrier wrote:

is there a section where you can acces the "Skinning & Wrappers > Board Wrappers" where the arrow is on the pic, enter your ([url=http://img213.imageshack.us/my.ph%29%20etc%20info.%20If%20you%20enter%20it%20b4%20the%20]<% Board Header % >" it will put the html above the banner and putting it below will of course put it below the banner. Once you have created a clickable Banner you are happy with just leave the current "Main Pic Logo" Blank.

No, unfortunately our board phpbb is relatively antiquated compared to some of the other hosts (urgh, that shows soo much more control! just the fact that you can edit basic structure). Now, they do update every so often. As Dave sez, at least this one has worked for 2 years running with no real hiccups, that is more than I can say for most club boards that I have came across in Airsoft. I guess if it ain't broke, don't make a mess.

It would be interesting to put together a collage of photos from as the club developed. For example, Horton's gradual decent into madness.

(man, Horton is such a geardo! Flecktarn, Desert, Contractor, Cadpat, Woodlands, Whites, and the list goes on!)

-Doug

well your forum at least should support .gif files so you can do an animated banner, rotate pics of members etc.

www.invisionfree.com is the forum host, i've been using them for 4 years now and never had a hiccup.

Knightwarrier wrote:

well your forum at least should support .gif files so you can do an animated banner, rotate pics of members etc.

One of the most important things to remember when designing a webpage is not to have large files. Gif's, especially animated ones are huge, bloated, and add little to content. Many of the users on this page are dial-up. Even with highspeed, page load times will be slow when they have to download 600k+ of page content. That is why flash has step up to the plate for most websites. Unfortunately, it requires access to the base code to implement, thus, all we have are .jpg or gif submission for the title. (current title is a .gif @ 100k, each frame would be adding, depending on replacement format, 40-100k.)

GIF format: 109k


JPEG format: 50k


Very little difference, maybe slight artifacting.


-Doug

if you use adobe image ready to create animated files you can choose to save in gif format or swf. Even files for banners can be hosed elsewhere such as imageshack. as for ppl with dialup, the images would only have to be downloaded once, it is stored in thier cache and is refreshed from there so it doesn't have to be download every time the page is refreshed.

Knightwarrier wrote:

if you use adobe image ready to create animated files you can choose to save in gif format or swf. Even files for banners can be hosed elsewhere such as imageshack. as for ppl with dialup, the images would only have to be downloaded once, it is stored in thier cache and is refreshed from there so it doesn't have to be download every time the page is refreshed.

We are hosting from imageshack, photobucket, and servimg. Cache is only slightly effective due to the fact that content is always changing here and what every the user limits their cache size to. Since we are limited to only jpg and gif for our banner, that is why we are using what we have. For example, your sig is over 200k, though it is fine in moderation, if everyone have one that large, it would be over 1mb or more to load a page.

Mind you, anyone is welcomed to submit Banners for the site, as you can see, we tend to cycle through content quickly to keep this forum fresh. You are welcome to submit banners, buttons, etc. (our current post and reply buttons are ancient).

-Doug

Banner size is 900x200? plus I have a big archive of military buttons and military emoticons.

Banner dimensions are anything goes. Post some buttons too and lets see it they fit the general theme here. Like I said, the current post and reply buttons have to go, might as well let someone else do them up.

-Doug

bah, all this talk of the buttons, nvm: