Showing off the new site design.. BETA ZOMG (Page 1 of 2)

I really like the boxes on the menu.

I'm going to agree with Chris - the font for the title is kinda wierd looking. Very blocky and doesn't have the same smooth feeling the rest of the page seems to be going for. I kinda feel that the alien suffers from the same fate - it doesn't really fit in well with the page at all.

Humm, I think that the text does match the rest of the layout; which is, a futuristic theme. We are all used to fantasy themed stuff at blizzpub, since forever. I think that the theme works better than the current one, since the current one is a strange combination of fantasy pictures and a futuristic, minimalistic and cornery style.
I like the gradients of the posts, and how the buttons and sidebar stick out a little.

That being said, I dont get a blizzpub vibe from it. It might be more relevant when starcraft hits, but even then...
I dont like the alien head - its too ugly (which might be normal in the alien heads department, but when blizzard designs an alien, its more... stylish. Cool. Polished. You know. Impossible to beat blizzard at its own game.)
Why not use zerg or protoss as a base?

I like Bob, and I demand an easter egg in the banner in which you can click on him to make him generate funny noises, and continuous clicking resulting in bob's explosionous death. Maybe the flying saucer can be replaced with a starcraft ship, thus making a bridge beween warcraft and starcraft. It might corrupt the simplicity of the logo, though.

I'm also struggling on not starting a discussion on how much I prefer lighter skins. Weve been there.

I think its excellent that you guys are working on a skin again! And as always, it is impossible to make everyone happy with stuff like this.

As leymo mentioned, the logo/font is going for a futuristic vibe, along with being a throwback to the old "underground" communities (the terminal greens, the terminal fonts). Unfortunately most people don't pick up on that, so I might change some of this.

Second, the alien is *not* a starcraft alien, although it was based off of one (dark templar I believe he used). It's intended to be somewhat in a cartoony style, again tying into the whole oldschool community thing. We are certainly not trying to compete with blizzard on this, but with the sc2 artwork fade-in I can see how people might make that connection.

Leymo: If you feel up to it, using the same colour base(ish) for the font, try and make a new set of text for the logo that you feel integrate better. It needs to be roughly the same size overall as the text of the current logo. Don't worry about integrating the bob abduction, I'll put that in later if we use it. I have two versions of him, with and without the ufo (both in vectors, so they can be any size); If you want to make a completely different logo without the alien using those, just put a placeholder where he would go.

<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
<Bill_> but prencher, you were right

Posts by slvreagle deleted, this is not a place for flaming.

<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
<Bill_> but prencher, you were right

Updated; Removed 'all about the gamers'.

<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
<Bill_> but prencher, you were right

Uploaded a new screenshot, of the forums this time.

<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
<Bill_> but prencher, you were right

I don't see how anyone could not be in love with the sheep.

  I would love to have the days of War3Pub around again.   It was fun running it like that when I had the time, but honestly I ended up nearly flunking school in helping the running of the pub.  The amount of time the staff put into the pub then was much more than any of us have now.   Most of us are older now, a lot of the old staff moved on and have less time.  You can't blame anyone, that's the way life is.  Our community is definitely different from the community of 2002 and 2003.  But we trudge on.

The new layout is SC2-themed.  And while I have great dreams of picking up this site again to the same level of fervor we had in the war3 days, it takes a lot of time commitment.   Back in 2003, we had something like 35 staff members, 20 of which were rather active.  A solid core of something like 8 admins and supermods were all running stuff.    We missed the ball with WoW in becoming a central community site.  The nature of WoW doesn't really support the same kind of community anyway, since most WoW players don't spend much time outside of the game except for in their own guild's sites.  I want to have a replay exchange again, run tournaments again, and have active news posting.  But the delusions of grandeur have to be left behind for a more realistic approach, which is what we're taking now.  Every few months we'll try a new initiative at getting the site a bit more active, and we'll go into a coding spree, and eventually we'll settle more or less at where we were before.

I don't think I'm the best person to be running the pub.  Maybe if someone else could have kept this site running with the same level of fervor as when P-Toms was around, or CurtisTheGreat, or MagickHat, we could have some life in it.    Right now we're just maintaining the site while we can, in the capacity we're able to.   It may seem dictatorial for me to keep running the site my way, but I don't feel that there is anyone in the capacity of taking the ball and running with it right now.   There's always the question of trust, too.   Who can I trust to give the site to?   In a sense, I'm pretty protective of it, and I'd feel weird if someone ran it not in the way I felt it should be run, which is why I'm still here.

I haven't talked about this with many other people besides the admins and a few select people I chat with on aim, but due to some rather serious health problems I had earlier in the year, combined with financial troubles and a general lack of time what with my crazy schedule this semester, I had considered just shutting down the pub.   Originally I had set an ultimatum that I would only keep the site running till August, and had given about four months for the admins and me to figure something out.    Life cleared up in more ways than one, though I'm still really busy, and I decided that just leaving the site running the way it is is much better than shutting it down.    We're on a new server which costs significantly less, and things are generally just ambling along the way they were before, which means progress happens at a snail's pace, but it happens eventually.

Is the pub dying?  No.   But it may not be the same pub you wanted it to be, or the pub in your fond memories, possibly ever again.
Still, we keep kicking.

Side note:  war3pub wasn't a sexy layout.  It was pretty good for the time, but it was busy, hacky, and klugey.   Far too much crammed in there, and readability was tough. But that's how sites looked back then, cramming about a million links into a sidebar.    We don't have that many unique pages and features now, so it's not like we even have need for all those crazy links.   We're almost at the point we don't need a front page news and that our entire site should just be the forums, and we've tried changing it but things just don't take off the way I'd like things to.

"Throw away logic and kick reason to the curb"

If this site were treated as a business I would no longer frequent it.

This is a community site.. LinkedIn and so on are "social sites", there is a difference. Further, there is no way we are gonna approach this site as a business as we do not make money on it, and we do not intend to make money on it, only cover our costs. We are both busy, and investing in that sort of stuff is just not feasible. There will however be a lot of new stuff coming at some point, but it requires us having the time to do it. Some of it is the new design, another is rewritten forums, and bringing various user features back, as well as new ones. These things take time.

If you are so crazy about "community subject-focused sites," why didn't you start submitting news and articles when we asked for it at the launch of Blizzpub 3? There's a reason we scrapped those parts of the site again; Nobody wrote anything for them.  We'll be happy to oblige in terms of functionality if the interest was there in actually using the systems, but as there is not, it is just a waste of time. Crying "I want more content" isn't gonna help when none of you are writing it, or even considering writing it.

<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
<Bill_> but prencher, you were right

I'm not advocating more content. Relationships matter more. Content, however, is yet another tool that can be used to build a community. I'm not interested though in building a community around any purpose. (That would be F13 and that place sucks.) I'm more interested in communities that have clear purposes and defined sets of goals. What is the purpose of BlizzPub? Why do we come together here? Why should we come together? Despite the suggestive name, it's hard to tell from the homepage.