thank you! this will come in handy, since ultraedit is my editor of choice on the windows side.

"relevancy" is standard search engine terminology, and it's rather important. and of course a search engine needs to have a decent relevancy algorithm, or you might as well not bother using it! it determines how the engine ranks the results with which it presents you.

These forums were written from the ground up without the use of even so much as one line of code from another forum such as phpBB. i figured as much; you guys know about copyright and giving credit. people say the dumbest things sometimes. i am curious as to why you wrote it from scratch though, since there are some excellent open-source boards around.

i am actually quite in favour of not splashing large images all over the forums, but there should be a printer-friendly version, which would solve the problem quite elegantly, especially for tutorials. and as i said elsewhere, image display size should be user-configurable, or at least sized appropriately for the user's browser window, not hard-coded.

add my vote for that -- user configurability would be best. personally i don't care to see large images in the forums (yes, this is an art site, but i read the forums for information, and it's rare that i think a large image is useful), and i am all for a small base size on which one needs to click to get the full size. people with slow connections would probably rather not have large images either. if we can't get user configurability, making it dependent on the size of the browser window would be a reasonable alternative. hardcoding, however, is suboptimal.

ah bah, nothing to be ashamed about; programming isn't everyone's strength, and we all have our own idiosyncracies and mental blocks. also, there is no reason at all why anyone should need to program in order to use an art site; this is just a temporary stopgap measure until the designers and programmers come up with a better way. it's a shortcoming of theirs to not have done this for you, it's not your fault! tell you what; give me a screenshot of a site that does colours and font sizes the way you like them, and i make your CSS for you.

well, i am going to say "thank you!" for actually giving a quick fix for my main complaint re. colours and fonts, instead of the original "sorry, not gonna happen". i'm a programmer, and i can fix even broken CSS, so this works for me. tonight i am looking at the forums in exactly the colours and font sizes i need, which makes me happy. it also makes me happy that you respond so quickly, and keep communicating with your userbase. i imagine y'all realize that this won't do for the vast majority of your users. sorry. :/ i can imagine what this looks like from your side, and i feel for you. maybe next time some user input before a major change? wry grin.

there are bugs in the main html style, which overrides .forum_message_cell (as pauljs75 already pointed out). what you need to do as a work-around, is to redefine the tr element in your own stylesheet. have a look at the code i posted in this message, it shows how to do it. i just tested it with a larger size and it works like a charm. (i redefined a bunch more stuff because i didn't want to bother carefully checking the entire main html for similar stuff, i just wanted to get on with getting a darker background and larger fonts.)

And don't call your readme 'readme.txt. Call it 'myproductname.txt' heartily seconded. in general i really like it if people name their files usefully, including their runtime zip -- starting with product name, terminated by their own name. that way i never lose track of whose product this is, and can give proper credit. the hogsoft utilities are fabulous for maintaining a well-organized runtime.

thanks, svdl! i have okino's polytrans, and it can allegedly open .max files, but it needs to have max installed for that to work, and i've never tried it. i heard the same about right hemisphere's deep exploration -- this would explain why. alas neither option is cheap -- polytrans is just under U$400, and while deep exploration std isn't anywhere as much, i suspect the original poster still doesn't want to spend U$150 on it.

i had a good look at both these books in the bookstore last month (i spent more than an hour browing through both). practical poser 6 is a very good book (i bought it), while poser 6 revealed sucks dead warthogs through a thin straw, IMO. i don't know who their target audience is, since it's basically just a rehash of the documentation, proceeding at a pace that would bore a snail to tears. don't waste your money, unless you need to have tabs and buttons explained to you despite them being clearly labelled with their functions. it reveals such stunning things about poser as a full description of what you see when you switch to one of the rooms -- maybe blind people would find that useful? i didn't. no, definitely go for practical poser 6. it takes you through each setting, explains what the setting does, and when you might or might not want to use a particular option. it doesn't just offer a rehash of every basic tutorial on the web, but it also shows you specific details about trouble spots, and how to work around them. it teaches you how to achieve a realistic, natural pose, not the usual stiff-limbed display of newbies. and much, much more -- all of it in very clear language, and well-organized. it is not just the best book about poser i have seen, but one of the very best application guides, period. it is well worth the price.

oh, a rose window! excellent. thank you!

gnarg. stacey, this is now the third time i am seeing you trivialize this concern, and so i am gonna say something rather pointed about that. i suspect you're just fending off people because the PtB have told you this is how it is, so this is much more directed at them, and less at you; though you might want to reword your stock reply. changing display colours and font sizes is not about "fun", it is about comfort and health. i use a browser that allows me to override the often uninformed and silly design ideas of website owners, for the simple reason that sitting all day behind a computer is tough on the eyes, and i care about my eyesight. before opera came along, i often had headaches and my eyes ended up burning from the sharp contrast and the bad colour choices on so many websites. now i can switch to my own choice with a single click. but not everybody uses the same browser, and as of now, website owners need to still be concerned with good all-around design. good design pretty much spells "flexibility" when it comes to colour and fonts, because people vary widely in what is comfortable for them. this is not trivial. usability should always trump branding, and it is entirely possible to brand a site well without detrimental effects on the users. this is why stylesheets exist, and why well-thought-out sites offer a sensible selection to their users. some features are just bells and whistles, and yes, there will always people who complain about the smallest change -- this isn't one of those issues IMO. this really matters.

dphoadley said: I don't feel the need to hide behind a mask, nor behind a pseudonym i think for many people it's not a matter of hiding at all, but more a means of expressing aspects of themselves that legal names and actual photographs don't. that's certainly true for me. this particular avatar is an aye-aye (daubentonia madagascariensis), a seriously endangered species of madagascar lemur which uses echolocation to find grubs in trees. google images has lots of cool pictures of aye-ayes. i like strange and funky things, especially if they're alive. :)

signatures can be useful for adding a couple of personal links, for example, like ddaydreams above. but for the most part i'm with you, i don't want to read/skip over the same once-witty quote 50 times over. even worse -- some people have started to include large images in their signatures. now i want a killfile.