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francis
3rd Jan 2006, 08:15 pm
My brother wants a forum for his site, although I can't really see it taking off, it's what he wants and I made it to the thanks list of his book, so I guess I should help...

Because I like to make my life difficult, I've decided to skin an install of the Invision board (IE, this thing). One thing that's always irritated me with the IPB is the icons, in particular: different icons for the members link at the top of the board and the users link at the bottom of the main page. From a usability perspective, it's also confusing that new posts have a bold "IPB" button and read posts have a faint "IPB" button.

I'm doing my own graphics for this skin and want to change those two IPB buttons. "New" is easy for a new post/thread but what about the other state? I could use "read" but that could be confused for "read" as in "I read some of my book last night" or "it's fun to read a book". So, I need a short word that means "you've read this" - it must fit into a 25pxX25px circle and read well at 8px Silkscreen font :)

David
4th Jan 2006, 08:33 pm
Why do you want to use a word? Most forums just use an icon and then have a description of the icons at the bottom of the page - although this version of IPB does not seem to follow that standard. The new IPB does, as do phpBB, SimpleMachines and vBulletin. Are you assuming that the people who will use this forum will be forum novices and will need to have stuff explained to them?

If you just want a very simple forum that is easy to skin I highly recommend miniBB (http://www.minibb.net/). I have an installation here (http://www.coursestuff.co.uk/forum/).