If I may .. let me give you guys some hints and info.
1) A thread like this one (IMHO) gets long a drawn out where the real 'current' info may get lost.
2) We have a main "Community Chest" section that you should check .. even as a die hard Enigma Fan .. as it give much more current info..especially about what is going on at Tides.
http://forum.tidesofwar.net/index.php?showforum=197
but .. I'll post a quickie.
Skins. The one you see now "as this date" is our "Tides-Main Skin'. It is the look and feel for the main forum entrance and well as most of the public area's of the site. Since Tides original conception was based on a naval game, our colors are basic deep blues.
We are having constructed 'skins' for each of the major sections of the board so the 'user' .. which is YOU .. will know what area of the board you are in by the "look and feel". Our "by Sea" section will be in Navy blues, the 'by land" section is in army greens and browns. The "by Air" section is in sky blues. Each of the sections have graphic look and feel that is all one branch of the military. The Enigma Section will be done in the "Navy Blues but with a very Enigma Centric Headers at the top of the page. Not everything turns out perfect at first, but we work on it until its acceptable. So the skins will be installed as is when they are ready, then we will come back at a later date and 'tweak' them. Tweaking is lower priority then other things, so we can't do it right away.
If you look at the main forum vew .. realize that any section your NOT interested in ... can be "folded up" so it does NOT display (the little -minus button at the right of a category). We suggest you don't fold up the "Community Chest" which contains "Announcements", "Your Tides of War" as well as our books and movies libraries and reviews. Then fold up all the fourm categories you don't want to read leaving only ERT open for view. This method allows very 'quick view of new posts in ERT section
Slowly we are figuring a way for you to use "View New Posts" button and know if the new posts are Enigma posts or not. The simplist of solutions might be for Tides to add ERT: to the front of every forum name. This method would let you know right away in the 'View New Posts" if the post IS or IS NOT Enigma. Once you have read the ERT new posts, I suggest your mark the 'whole forum' as read so your next view of New Post wont keep increasing as much.
ERT is not the most active areas of the board, so New Posts will always be full of other sections posts. Jesper is still working out some method to 'concentrate on ERT:new posts" but it most likly requires a 'script' and we don't have the funds at this time to have a scrip written.
We are a 'free community' that depends on user donations, frankly ERT folks make very little to no donation contributions, so its is very hard to justify spending funds we don't have for Scripts and other nice additions for Enigma. We just do our best with what we have.
NOTE to Theta:
We will eventually allow user choice of skins. This will break the 'section recognition' that our skins give however and will NOT be recommended. New users will NOT be given this option . .. we don't want to confuse them. Once a user has so many post etc, then they will be allowed to choose a skin display as a 'privlage', by that time they should be familiar with the board as a whole and how it work.
ToWF
