Suggestion Overlay Cover Photos Under Profile Text

This is a good suggestion. Profile reworks are definitely something we want to work on and something we're likely to undertake with the new theme, Valcadia.

However, this sort of change won't be ported/available on the themes that are currently available. They are unsupported and new features/big changes will be on the new theme(s), so keep an eye out to see what we cook up!

 

Typically when sites allow for customization of pages there's going to be issues regarding it. Usually has to deal with trolls who intentionally try to break things so if it's between a profile becoming completely unreadable and a slight issue with the display of a non-troll profile I'd take the latter. Part of an issue with tailoring profles to look "sleek" for a customized profile is anything that the individual can't customize id est what the site says has to stay where it is, is that those items are there for customized and non-customized alike trying to plan around a customized profile might just screw up a default profile and the default profile IMO should take precedent as not everybody is going to bother customizing their profiles. You also as an admin have to pick a resolution to plan for which means it's not always going to look perfect as folks have higher or lower than you actually design for and that can come into play and create something that looks "off" for some people. With all that said can you actually customize your profile page on this site? Never actually bothered to check.

 

Except as it is now you don't have to worry about troll eye sores on profiles which easily are a problem where it is allowed even if the text remains visible there's easily the possibility for offensive content and not to mention sheer aesthetic eyesores mismatched with the user's chosen site skin, granted where it is allowed there's an option to disable user customizations, but then that just kind of defeats the purpose and would allow potentially offensive content to go undetected if everybody simply blocked customization to avoid issues. Some sites even allow gifs in the profile design space and that causes loading issues particularly for people with slower computers so there is some merit to consideration of the users as a whole as well.

I looked around and I didn't see anyway to customize your page with the current system, but yes trolls will be trolls but you also don't have to give them unneeded potential weapons either. It'd be like leaving a table of free guns and ammo at a mall for anybody who happens to want to shoot up the place, a law abiding non-psychopath will ignore them, but somebody who was going to do it anyway now has incredibly easy access to tools to help him. Pokémon is generally geared towards children and the staff can't check everybody's profile 24/7 or even be online 24/7 if somebody joined and uploaded say hentai as their profile and little Suzy loads the page well damage is done or Johnny loads the page and his folks happen to be behind him, well that certainly doesn't look good either.

This system was implemented on many sites when forums used to be semi-popular and even the large sites that had lots of bells and whistles (and thus clearly had competent coders) never managed to get a the auto-fit to work properly and it ended up tiling images over and over or requiring a specific resolution to look right. Then other sites could get the image to scale upwards, but too large of an image vs a smaller resolution created side-scrolling on those pages id est it couldn't properly downscale images.

 

I think you're confused @Dwlr. Profile covers are already in place - @survivalist is suggesting we make a simple tweak so that more space is saved on the page. The actual content won't be changing at all - it's already there.

I'm not sure what you're referring to in regards to trolls, because the "tools" are already there yes, but we're not going to remove a popular donator feature simply because of an unlikely risk of a troll donator making a bad profile cover.

Anyone could already do the same with their avatars, for example, but that doesn't mean we're going to remove avatars. If you see an inappropriate avatar or profile cover, please report the post or profile you're on.

With that being said, we've had covers for a long time and I have never seen anyone upload an inappropriate one. Given they are a donator feature, people don't tend to donate money to access these features just to make a troll cover that will get removed shortly after. After all, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot since we retain the full right to remove their donator status if they end up banned, and we don't do refunds.

Also, all of these potential changes are easily done codewise. The images already aren't perfect on every screen, we have no control over that. It is up to the donators discretion on what image they use.

 

If it's paid it's far less likely to be abused, being a normal member thought part of the request was to include it as a generic feature like other sites.

Anybody could do it with avatars, but that's far more likely to be noticed than profile customizations, but are you sure normal members can actually see profile customizations as it is now? I've browsed through several staff and vip accounts and none of them are different when I look at them.

 

I think we only have profile covers for the customization? Or at least that I know about. I have a profile cover of a galaxy thing if you want to take a look.

 

As a normal member it just shows the default appearance, then as your profile doesn't have any differences from any other profile.

 

Can you take a screenshot of my profile for me?

 

As Ben mentioned in the Updates thread, he was able to fix the glitch that wasn't letting regular (non donating members) view profile covers that other users had. That should take care of that.

@survivalist I like the suggestion you out forth and definitely think it has merit to be discussed with the team Thanks again (psst..new or old member, we appreciate your feedback as it helps us become better! =))