Than the Moa

No, no, not building with Lego. Building with code! Microsoft announced their BUILD developers conference today. I also get a significant amount of money to go to a conference for work of my choosing. Guess I may be in Seattle the week of Halloween. (Please give me a free Surface tablet, please?)

Thanks for the quick fix. It looks much better; those buttons are now quite visible. However, the buttons such as "Find Content," "Add/Remove Friend," and the one to send a message on profiles still have the problem.Edit: Oh, and the button to update status in the dropdown corner section also still has the problem too.~B~Ok, I'll take a look at those this afternoon when I get off work.

So, why is this not an appropriate place to discuss it? It happened, didn't it? I'm getting really sick of BZPower censoring anything remotedly negative, even when it's absolutely relevant and staring you in the face, and pretending it doesn't exist, therefore blatantly ignoring the impact and tragedy of the situation.Because this is a site for a childrens toy. We are not going to discuss a madman that mass murdered a group of people. It's not ignoring the impact or tragedy of the situation, it's choosing not to have discussions about something that is abhorrent and disgusting. Or would you prefer we just let a bunch of 12 year olds have to relive the horrors they saw unfold on television by discussing them here.BZPower is not the venue to discuss this, and it never will be. Sorry if that disappoints you.Guess what? The world is abhorrent and disgusting, and those kids are reliving the horrors they saw everywhere else. Do you really have to go out of your way to censor world events and people's condolences for them?So you're saying that because the world sucks, we need to bring up its sucky aspects at every given opportunity? And did you read my post? Because that explains how pointless it is to bring it up.- TiliusNo, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm protesting BZPower going out of their way to ignore and censor those aspects if they come up. If no one wants to talk about it, it's fine, but if someone wants to express their sympathies for a tragic event, and they can't, then something's wrong here.If you do not stop derailing this topic I will suspend your posting rights.This is your last warning. Go make a blog somewhere else if you want to whine about how oppressive we are.

So, why is this not an appropriate place to discuss it? It happened, didn't it? I'm getting really sick of BZPower censoring anything remotedly negative, even when it's absolutely relevant and staring you in the face, and pretending it doesn't exist, therefore blatantly ignoring the impact and tragedy of the situation.Because this is a site for a childrens toy. We are not going to discuss a madman that mass murdered a group of people. It's not ignoring the impact or tragedy of the situation, it's choosing not to have discussions about something that is abhorrent and disgusting. Or would you prefer we just let a bunch of 12 year olds have to relive the horrors they saw unfold on television by discussing them here.BZPower is not the venue to discuss this, and it never will be. Sorry if that disappoints you.Guess what? The world is abhorrent and disgusting, and those kids are reliving the horrors they saw everywhere else. Do you really have to go out of your way to censor world events and people's condolences for them?Yep.And for continuing to dredge up this discussion enjoy the proto drop.

The dark red was used for many things other than just pointing out new Premier Members (which happened on the home page anyway ). It's our main accent color (again, see the home page). It's not going anywhere.

For the sake of consolidating discussion, I'm going to close this topic and redirect everyone to the talkback topic for the news story.

Button fix should be in, it was an issue where the wrong background color was being aplied to browsers that don't support gradients (which would be Internet Explorer). Thanks for pointing it out guys

First off, I'll start by saying I appreciate your comment. It's obvious we both needed to cool our heads a bit, and reach some common ground and reasoning with one another. I think when John says "warm" he isn't necessarily referring to color temperature (of which the skin is most certainly not featuring warm colors temperature wise) but more of a feeling he got from it. He described it to me once as the feeling of coming back home, a place you're comfortable at. While I agree that you can make designs that evoke that feeling with colors that pop more, they're also much more divisive. For example, our quote boxes originally featured much darker tones (even a gradient at one point) and was a huge point of contention during the process. People tend to feel more strongly about darker/brighter colors (ie. colors with more "pop"). By opting for the more gray tones, it may be more "dull" so to speak, but also comes across more neutral and unoffensive. There's a reason the Silver Chevy Impala is such a popular car, it doesn't offend anyone's tastes. You may find it boring (heck, I find the silver Impala boring, it's why I drive a dark red Mazda 3 ), but it still sells. And yes, that isn't to say other colors don't sell as well, but when you're aiming to make a default, baseline skin, you shoot for something that will be appreciated by the widest audience. We are having preliminary talks on the idea of creating future skins and even opening things up to have member driven skin creation (through some kind of submission process or a skin contest). I know personally that John, Andrew, and I are committed to following through on this and taking our experiences from working on this and making sure we do give people more options beyond just one default experience. I can't speak to when that'll happen, but we'll make a stink about it when it does happen. Sorry we got off on the wrong foot about this, I'm sure we both have our reasons why, but let's let the past be the past. I'm willing to get forgive and forget so to speak.

So, why is this not an appropriate place to discuss it? It happened, didn't it? I'm getting really sick of BZPower censoring anything remotedly negative, even when it's absolutely relevant and staring you in the face, and pretending it doesn't exist, therefore blatantly ignoring the impact and tragedy of the situation.Because this is a site for a childrens toy. We are not going to discuss a madman that mass murdered a group of people. It's not ignoring the impact or tragedy of the situation, it's choosing not to have discussions about something that is abhorrent and disgusting. Or would you prefer we just let a bunch of 12 year olds have to relive the horrors they saw unfold on television by discussing them here.BZPower is not the venue to discuss this, and it never will be. Sorry if that disappoints you.

First off, I want to thank everyone at the staff who help contribute to the skin! I know I was probably a pain to deal with sometimes, but hey, we managed to get a skin done! Special thanks to John for jumping in from time to time and making some changes, and to Andrew for giving us the opportunity to work this. Now then, if you have a problem with it, come at me. I'm the one that made the majority of the skin coloring decisions. I wanted it to evoke the classic BZP style while being able to evolve upon that. The base gray used in the background was selected for it's non-eye searing quality, something that is always important to consider in web design. The blue-gray tones blend well together and make for a sleek visual approach that is not gaudy or distracting. The dark red jumps out immediately, and are used on items that are meant to catch your attention. Yellow is used as a highlight across a number of places as well, especially as an indicator color to inform you of what items you are currently targeting with your mouse. If you don't like the skin, that's alright. There will be a couple avenues for you to use. You can offer constructive criticism, but it needs to be constructive. I can't improve anything if all you want to say is "I don't like it" or "it's bland and generic". Those statements don't mean anything to me, I can't design a skin around "make it not bland and generic". There will also be a potential for member driven skin development. We haven't decided what form this will take, but it does seem likely that we'll go the contest route. Stay tuned.

Don't you feel clever.

I'm sorry, next time I'll put rainbows and ponies everywhere.

That'd be a safe bet.

<3 I love the Takua you found Pat!

The white text on buttons issue is due to the button background not displaying properly in some browsers. We've identified the source of the problem and will put in a fix asap. Thanks guys!

Glad you like it.

We're aware of it but sadly don't have a way to resolve it. We're hamstrung a bit by the existing board code and would have to modify that instead of just css files. I'm sorry, you're more than welcome to go back to using the out of the box bland, generic skin if this bland, generic skin doesn't meet your fancy.This is supposed to be a modern take on the classic BZP skin. We went with those colors and made it to look like that. The goal wasn't to make something with rainbows and bright colors shooting out of every corner.You may as well not use the internet if you think this is bland and generic, because it turns out that the rest of the internet is typically this "bland and generic."Oh, and Ballom. We identified your issue and will get a fix in for that asap.

Great job, guys =)Glad you like how the quote blocks turned out, they were one of the harder bits to get figured out.

I'll address the rhetoric bit in a moment...When it comes to people getting annoyed, it probably stems from the fact that there are people, not specifically you, that adamantly argue that Hero Factory shouldn't be on this site. It's not a straw man argument, it actually happens! It's happened in this topic even, just look through all the pages and you'll see people arguing that Hero Factory is essentially a scourge against BZPower. But that becomes then thing then, when people say those types of things, it happens to associate all dissent with it. People grow tired of constant complaining, so even if it isn't much more than "I'm disappointed it wasn't Bionicle" it ends up bringing back up those old wounds so to speak.And that dovetails into our rhetoric that supposedly shows that we are throwing away our rich Bionicle history (despite several staff members saying that we have a surprise in the works that definitely keeps up our Bionicle tradition). Our rhetoric may seem more heated at times, but it's because we've grown weary of having to deal with people telling us we shouldn't do anything not related to Bionicle. We want what's best for BZPower, we want to move the site forward and continue to be a great news and community site, but that's difficult to do when your subject material is dead and not coming back. We do our best to honor Bionicle (and if we were going to throw away our Bionicle history why would we keep our rank images, the existing 10 years of spinnies, etc..) but we need to be forward looking and do what we can to keep interest in the site alive. It's a struggle for us as we lost one of our biggest differentiators against other Lego fan sites. So if we seem impatient when all we get is people complaining that we're ignoring our Bionicle history by doing things not related to Bionicle, understand it comes from the perspective of people trying to juggle keeping this site relevant while hold true to our roots, all of which takes us time to develop.

Trust me, I cry myself to sleep everyday because of this.

Has it really been 3 years since I last had a blog post? Astounding! So much has changed in that time. The last time I had a blog post it was my first summer home from college. Between then and now, I moved out of the dorms, got my first apartment with some amazing people, had a year long internship with a focus in web dev, lived by myself for 3 months, graduated college with a degree in computer science, moved to Minneapolis, MN (ewwww), and got a job right out of school in application and web development for a technical consulting firm that has a deep partnership with Microsoft.. My oh my how much things can change.

Guys, while the shooting is very sad and a very serious situation, BZPower is not really the appropriate place to discuss it, nor is this topic. Please remain focused on the movie and more positive things.

Ewww, who put these ugly kanoka disks on my profile. Gross.

And there are those that like Hero Factory and want to see more of that in the forum and are told it shouldn't exist on this board because it somehow degrades the rich Bionicle history we have.Both sides are making silly, overdramatic arguments that make a way bigger deal out of a little spinning icon then there should be.Hence my reaction to this argument.

So we're all arguing about the significance towards our Bionicle heritage that an icon, that takes a member 11 years to reach and will only appear on a small percentage of our posting population, has?Cool.