NineChime forum

Type your reply to a thread without replacing the currently viewed page in order to do your typing; or allow for the other comments to still be seen when typing your reply.

Yeah, I've been lazy about adding fixing that.

As mentioned elsewhere, the layout desired would have left justified pictures

The thing that ticks me off, is that there's no way to wrap headers, so the member's name might be justified to the right of the picture and the comment is justified to the left.  I've always hated that about OekakiBBS.  It's easy to make good layouts for forum software because there are no images.  Oekaki layouts are very difficult, and HTML has almost no justification rules unless you resort to (ugh) tables.

The switching horizontal/vertical layout is the best compromise I could come up with, especially since every picture may be a different size.  To be honest, I also personally find newspaper layout cleaner and easier to use than magazine layout.  Of course, it's easier for me to code, too.  I avoid Javascript and DOM whenever possible. 

The "public" setting available when uploading a picture.

Oops.  That was an oversight.

In reguards to creative related things to add, of course there could be an mp3 player, wav player, or something like modplug's old tracker plug in http://modplug.com/

MP3 and WAV players are easy.  Modern web browsers know how to handle those formats.

You have no idea how much I'd love MOD and XM support, maybe VST.  Unfortunately, modplug (which I use almost daily), has been discontinued as a browser plugin.  I don't know why there's so little interest in MODs these days, and why development of new formats has effectively stopped.

Suggestion:
The "public" setting available when uploading a picture.

If there is a bumping feature I think the bumped pictures should retain original file name.

Wacintaki does this as of version 1.3 (finally), as will my next oekaki.  Wax Poteto is a bit hopeless in this regard.

As mentioned elsewhere, the file name should have place holding zeros at the beginning for file names that don't use all the digits yet

Definately.  Version control will also be implemented, though I don't know if it will be as robust as seen on 2draw.net.  I prefer minimalist software designed for homepages, not large communities, so don't expect too many version control features.

I suppose "safety saves" would not up the save number, but I don't really care if that part uped the number or not.  I would guess most of your users would desire safety saves to not up the number.

Safety saves aren't meant to show up on the board, so I don't think the numbers really mean anything.  A hash name would suffice until the picture is posted and would then be renamed.

Allow for images to be posted as replies.

I'm not sure about this.  It clutters things a lot, and oekaki doesn't really follow forum design principles.

I plan to use real BBCode, though, so people could use the [ img] tag in their replies, if enabled.

allow threads to be started with no image.

I'm not too keen on this, as it didn't seem to work very well on the old OekakiBBS boards (people kept flooding).  Again, oekaki isn't a forum.

Any other opinions?

What would be nice is the ability to post things other than just images, such as sound clips.  I'm looking around for other cool applets that might be worthy to include in an oekaki board.  You know, creativity applets.

This one isn't something I could include, but something along those lines would be a lot of fun.

I would like the inclusion of a "paint chat" program

As with all chat systems, it required a server-side background task, which many servers do not support.  The most I can do it reserve a menu link pointing to an external site.  No level of integration is practical.

I would like the app to already fit the window when I first open it.

I tried doing that, but using DOM to resize applet containers crashes some browsers, particularly Safari.  Macs DO NOT like to resize Java applets once they have started running.  There is no standards-compliant way to get the screen size, either.

Wacintaki has sorting based on drawing order, and based on comments.  I would like a selection that would order them based on both.

Changing sort criteria is easy.  Managing screen real estate is not. 

I'm trying to get stuff drawn on paper before doing any code.  I've never been too happy with the menu system.

Suggestions collection:

If there is a bumping feature I think the bumped pictures should retain original file name.  Personally I wouldn't mind if there was no bump feature.  (I suppose that I don't mind it is a form of feedback too.  I'd bet it will be in it though ;)

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As mentioned elsewhere, the file name should have place holding zeros at the beginning for file names that don't use all the digits yet, and a draft or save number at the end.  The place holding zeros conform to computer alpha-numerical character ordering and make file management easier.  The save number allows users to save different drafts without manually renaming the file or using different directories, and more importantly it allows the latest image to show up without needing the user's cache to be replaced.

Example:  The board's file name prefix is set to "pbbs".  The programmer or the board administrator sets the number of digits for the image number to 6, and I suppose the save number digits could be set to 2.   (I've seen images with over 10 saves and never with over 100 saves.)  The file name for the 3rd save of the 11144th image would be:
pbbs_011144_03.png

Or possibly pbbs_011144_02.png; Although most boards use "_02" for the 3rd save as they use "_01" for the 2nd and no save number addition for the 1st, I like "_03" better for the 3rd save because it's more logical to me.

For simplicity there would probably be no "_01" for the 1st save.  pbbs_011144.png (1st save) shows up before pbbs_011144_02.png (2nd save) in computer file name order so it works out.

I suppose "safety saves" would not up the save number, but I don't really care if that part uped the number or not.  I would guess most of your users would desire safety saves to not up the number.

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Allow for images to be posted as replies. 

Administrator option to
allow threads to be started with no image.

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I would like the inclusion of a "paint chat" program
and or
a "graffiti wall", maybe with a dedicated url seperate from the main board.

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order threads by most recent post/latest change to thread

Wacintaki has sorting based on drawing order, and based on comments.  I would like a selection that would order them based on both.

The threads would be ordered by the most recent time of any change in the image's thread, or creation time of an image when there are no changes yet.  So the "most recent time" used in each thread for ordering would be one of the following:

the original draw time for a new image that hasn't been retouched or commented on,
the most recent image retouch time,
the most recent comment time, or possibly
the most recent comment edit.

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Thanks