Re: Domain name contest!

Yeah I like the colors of the main MGF pages. There are a few header images that I really dislike but they were just one of those things were you quickly whip them up to get something up there and then slowly work on it later on to fine tune it.

I think the main header image (the one with the blob) could be used across all the forums, only interchanging the images of the women, and the two helmeted people for soemthing more appropriate for each genre of game. I think the background itself (the crysis screenshot is the background) is the right colors for the site, it's got that green in there (teal?) that mixes well with the bars on the site, so if I could just take that background and maintain it throughout all 12 or 13 forums and only add something distinctive to it for each individual genre, I might have something consistant looking and that in my color blind ways might just look distinctive enough, consistant enough, and diverse enough to make a brand name out of (so to speak).

I like the font that I used for the wording on the that header logo image though I don't have a clue which font it actually was, but I think I saved that main MGF logo in layers, which if I actually did, that means I can likely remove the womens head and the other two helmeted peoples heads so that I have basically the same exact logo for every forum in the site, and then like I mentioned, only need to find something complimentary to each genre of forum to add a little something to it, so that people know what forum they happen to be in.

Some of the header logos are absolutely hideous. For example the Arcade header logo is so awful I just want to scream, it's some screenshot from a very very old 2D Mario Brothers or donkey kong or something and the colors just go kaboom with the rest of the page, as does the handheld logo and a few of the other ones too.

But I tell you, my usual method of working on this kind of stuff, is to quickly whip something up and then refine it as I go on, until i get it to the point that Im happy with, and having all the support, and different points of views of the people in the group here really helps me to not go completely overboard.

Anyway,...

I've ben conversing with my webhost trying to figure out why it is that I kept getting the page time out error in my firefox browser or the white error page in Internet Explorer like you were (hopefully not anymore) getting. They kept telling me that some other clients on the server were running very intense scripts and that their accounts had since been disabled and they were told that they would have them turned them back on when they either rewrote their php scripts so as not to be so CPU intensive or replacements for them. Well, they kept telling me they found one more person like that, and then the problems persisted and they'd tell me they found one more person. and one more and one more etc etc.

Finally I got someone that my guess is actually looked into the problem to really dig in and see what was causing my problems with all my sites being slower than they should and producing timeout errors. As it turns out (I just know that you and Max love this technical type of stuff), as it turns out he told me that what I had done is that I had created all these databases for all my different sites (they almost all run on MySQL databases to some degree) and that I had assigned the same "user" to each database. So what was happening was that the MySQL server was seeing just one user doing all these sequential reads to the database and even though it was for different sites, it was still just one user assigned to all the sites database so the MySQL server assumed that the one user was totally hogging all the MySQL server utilization and throttling me back, thus putting me on the back burner which was causing the time out errors etc.

The smart techie finally said that I should "try" something, and create a different user for each database that I run, thus the MySQL server won't think that it's the same user trying to hog all of it's processing time and wont put me at the back of the queue where I can time out or get slower page loads. So that's what I did this morning. So far I've not had firefox produce the timeout errors that I was getting so frequently over the past 50 hours or so which of course doesn't necessarily mean it's solved, but it looks more hopeful. He told me that if that doesn't cure it, then I'll have to have the developers of the forum software look into their package and see if it's nto optimized properly to use certain keys and something else that escapes my mind for it's name as im a bit tired at the moment (oh, indexes, that's the word he used), but so far so good, so hopefully now, both the CBG, CC R and MGF will run at an appropriate load speed and not time out when trying to post messages or do administration tasks. Time will tell I guess.

Okay, I've got a lot of real life work to get done now and I slacked the last 50 hours when I should have slept or did real work, so it's time to do some real work and try to earn a living.

I'll answer the rest of your posts on MGF later on this afternoon when I get to take a break for a while.

Laterz.