I feel that companies simply save credit/debit card information for far too long. Not too long ago, Home Depot had about 40 million cards stolen. I never keep that much money in my checking account just as a precaution, but still, I've honestly become a little paranoid about it. Plus, infrared sensors can be used to detect heat changes on PIN pads to steal your pin code. That's a little scary. 

Anyone else paranoid about this? I personally use cash as much as possible to avoid using my card more than necessary. 

After over two months since MyBB's initial release, we've finally become fully prepared and ready to make the upgrade here at Makestation. You'll notice the difference very quickly, as we've also pushed a brand new, 100% custom theme, built entirely in-house. For nostalgia's sake...



Our old design was not bad for MyBB 1.6, but 1.8 has a number of improvements worth noting: 

• Various improvements across the forum (including buddy list improvements, theme switchers, better default avatars, thread rating improvements, postbit improvements, edit reasons, better image resizing, etc. )
  
• Our new customized theme that works much better on smaller monitors and larger monitors alike. 
  
• Our registration form was fixed. (/oops)
  
• Better post editor
  
• We've taken a gamble to enable guest posting. Yes, captchas will be displayed, and yes, new guest posts will have to be approved before they go live. Of course, registration is still encouraged by all means, but our feeling is that visitors with something quick to contribute shouldn't have to go through MyBB's painful registration system to write a single post.
  

• Much better status updates plugin that will be significantly improved and have full support for status notifications and replies. (May be rolling out in the next week or so. )
  
• Significantly improved forum notifications
  
• Content management system/community wiki? Development is in the early stages, so I won't promise much, but some cool stuff might be planned...
  

The makestation Wall of Shame consists of a list of threads, projects, and members that have been noted as infamous for any reason in the community. To be eligible for the wall of shame, you must have a project, thread, or something of value that meets at least one of the following qualifications: 

• Mutually considered as low quality by the community
  
• Results in you being banned (either temporarily or permanently)
  
• Dissolves due to internal drama after gaining significant financial support
  
• Is dropped for no reason at all after a single criticism. (Don't be this guy!) 
  
• Is nominated by a minimum of five members (may be rejected by administrator if significant opposition to these nominations is expressed)
  
• Is nominated by any member who possesses one of the five "rare jewels" badges.
  
• Is involved with spam, inappropriate content, or otherwise unwanted content
  
• Is considered highly troll-like by the community
  
• Possesses a "forever broke" badge
  

• 9 lives. I'm just not really sure where the idea of emotional cats constitutes content for a good movie. (Nominated by Darth-Apple)
  
• Ramavia, a clever spambot that wrote posts related to nothing other than law on completely unrelated threads. (Nominated by Darth-Apple)
  
• AcoG000, for being the first user to be permanently left with the "forever broke" badge. (Nominated by Darth-Apple)
  
• Clayton, for possessing a forever broke badge and a dishonorable scum badge at the same time, AND for being proud of it. (Self nominated and approved)
  
• Electric2Shock, for self nominating himself for the wall, and gaining four other nominations from the community to support his nomination. (Self nominated and approved by the community)
  
• Darth-Apple, for letting his own site go down. (Nominated by Darth-Apple)
  
  
  
  
  

It's a debate of whether to encourage compatibility with legacy monitors, or whether to make use of the glamorous real-estate of large 1920x1080 LCDs. Mine is personally a 1600x900, which I think is pretty much the sweet spot as far as good webpages are concerned. 1366x768 is workable as well, but outside of this narrow range, designs either end up incompatible with small devices or they end up looking bad on large screens.

I personally think that a design should be supported on monitors of at least 1024x768 because, believe it or not, the resolution is still in use. Besides that, people don't always keep their web browsers maximized, so I think it's fair to require support for at least 1024x768, if only to allow people to keep webpages clean on the eyes (and personally, I think this is the only primary reason 1024x768 isn't dead yet). I don't personally think webpages (whether fluid or fixed width) should extend past around 1600 pixels in width either, as I think once you start going far beyond that, it gets hard on the eyes. 1600 pixels in width looks just fine on a 1920x1080 monitor. Then again, highly responsive designs may make good use of the extra real estate.

With the port of the current theme to MyBB 1.8, one thing I have worked hard on is to implement smarter fluid width values to ensure that the page is within reasonable limits and can adjust better depending on the monitor size. I've also done some basic responsiveness to adjust padding and a few other values to look at its best on 1024x768 monitors. The max width for the container/wrapper is 1460 pixels, and the minimum will be about 990 pixels, and after doing a lot of testing, I think that's pretty much the sweet spot that manages to make good use of a variety of monitor sizes while maintaining compatibility and readability, as well as a somewhat consistent theme feel.

What is your opinion as far as widths? Do you generally lean towards narrower page layouts, or do you prefer wider layouts that cater towards modern displays? Personally, I feel that some sort of responsiveness is the future, but the internet has been slow to catch on.

Originally, phpBB had planned on a ground-up rewrite from their existing phpBB 3.0 base for phpBB 4. Relatively recently, they completely changed their approach to modernizing their development and have come up with... phpBB 3.1. It was released today, and it looks pretty slick. Most of the changes are very much beneath the surface changes, but they have done some really neat stuff, including:

• A responsive default theme (whoo!)
  
• Notifications system
  
• Contact pages and improved "show team" pages
  
• Many theme improvements (may look similar, but they've touched up on a lot of details)
  
• A real plugin system (finally!)
  
• Tons of code cleanup (and symfony components)
  
• Security auditing to ensure minimal vulnerabilities
  
• Improvements with announcements, soft deletes, and other forum related features.
  
• More neatness on header links, usage of dropdowns, etc.
  
• Lots of additional ajax
  

I recently switched away from my old iPhone 4 (with its small screen) in favor of the HTC m8. I have to say, there was a lot to be said about the iPhone's small form factor. It was very comfortable to hold in my hand and fit very nicely in my pocket. However, the small screen size made some things very hard to read on the screen, and typing was not the easiest. I'm sure the iPhone 5.x models were a little easier to use in terms of typing and reading text while keeping a unique form factor, but I can't say much considering I've only ever used the iPhone 4.

I have to say, the large screen on the m8 is pretty nice, however. It's not gigantic. I've seen phones that are a good bit larger, but the m8's screen is definitely large enough to type more comfortably and to read what is on the screen. Perhaps I'm just a little biased towards the large screen on the m8 because its design so happens to make it very comfortable to hold, but so far, I have to say that having the larger screen space has definitely been worth it for me.

What is your opinion? Do you prefer smaller phones that are easy to hold, or larger phones with larger screens for better usability? Be sure to vote in the poll!

What is your opinion on using object oriented heavily? And by heavily, I mean basing an entire application on it. We're definitely not talking about applications that selectively use any sort of combination between "procedural" and object oriented programming styles here.

Personally, at least as a PHP programmer, I hate code that is object oriented for no reason (although, to be fair, PHP isn't the greatest as far as object oriented code is concerned ). Some may call the shots and call me a bad coder for it, but if something isn't an object, I don't really see the point in making it one. Of course there are advantages. One of my favorites is the fact that you can use function names that you want without having to conflict with other functions from other elements of the code. It definitely helps keep function names very short and easy to remember.

However, that said, I find code that is object oriented for no reason to be much messier and significantly harder to follow. I personally use procedural code for elements of code that aren't necessarily objects or meant to be object oriented, or for basic API functions used throughout the code. For things that can be considered objects (where instances need to be created, etc. ) I'll definitely make use of object oriented code very quickly.

What is your opinion? Do you feel the advantages of clean code and the lack of conflicts between variables and function names are worth the mess involved in making entire projects 100% object oriented? Or... are you more like me and use object oriented code only when it makes a specific task at hand significantly easier?

MyBB 1.8 has an already emerging database and with the emergence of designers like enVy, the standard has seriously upped since the 1.6 free theme database.

I know I need to work on the footer, but I kept it here in case I've been working for naight this whole time.
Nevermind, I somehow finished the footer.

The modern trend of web design... instead of actually, you know, making a web page in standard article form, you make it in slideshow form and make people click like 20 times to read three paragraphs. And it's a great idea, for, you know, webmasters.

Why? ad revenue. I personally find it so annoying that the moment I see a page that uses this, I immediately close the tab, only to be confronted with a bunch of popups and an alert notification trying to get me to stay on the page.

I mean, totally understand the need to make revenue. I have expenses of my own to keep projects online, but there are ways about getting the revenue without alienating users. To each their own, but they certainly won't get traffic from me. Anyone else find this extremely annoying?

Microsoft apparently announced their development preview roadmap for what will be called Windows 10 recently. Of course, as rumored, the start menu is back, but they've made some interesting improvements that people will probably love if they weren't particularly happy with Windows 8 or 8.1

http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/686869...d-official

From the looks of it, the development preview will be free. Anyone interested in testing this? I know I sure will be.