Orbiter-Forum

Orbiter-Forum - Orbiter & Space Flight Discussion Board

Launch Date: October 2007
Posts: 124,534
Threads: 10,117
Members: 3,269

Forum Software: vBulletin 3.8.4 PL1

Description:
Orbiter-Forum was setup for Orbiter Space Flight Simulator discussions since we outgrew the old forum software and server. Since then it's become the most important meeting place for users and developers alike. In addition to Orbiter discussions we also have space flight, physics, mathematical, and educational discussions, as well as various off-topic discussions.

Many features have been added to the site over time. Some of those include:

• Custom Pages & Menu, including an About Us page
• Photopost Pro
• vB Project Tools
• vB Blog
• Articles
• LaTeX Mathematical Typesetting
• BB Code Countdown Timers
• Cyb Statistics
• Cyb Chatbox
• Arcade

We also have various skins available for the members. Note the default skin guests see will not allow them to change skins until they register and log in, however I've included direct links to our extra skins below. Our current default skin is by MinerSkinz.

http://www.orbiter-forum.com/?styleid=57
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/?styleid=78
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/?styleid=36
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/?styleid=86
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/?styleid=38

Feedback is most welcome, I'm always looking for way's to improve the site. Thanks very much for your consideration.

 

Not an official review, but here's what I think about it.

I love the layout of the site. It's nice, simple and clean. Also like how you can change the colors, gives the users more of a choice on what color layout they'd like to look at. The logo and favicon do it's job in my opinion. They both represent what the forum is about without much thinking about it. The forum icons look nice as well. And the best part to me is the footer. You don't see many forums, well at least I don't see many forums with an extended footer for more quicklinks, etc in it. That's my favorite part about it.

The amount of forums look good to me. There's no forums with a very low amount of topics/posts in them, which is a good thing. The forum layout doesn't make it look unpopular or inactive either. All the forums look active, everything has been posted in at least once today, more from the looks of it to me. Overall, it seems very active and lively and the forum layout works for it. I like it.

The articles and tutorials look very well written and seem to do what they are teaching you very well. I would get it since I'm a first timer to that flight simulator. Easy enough for me to understand it =)

Overall, I like it, if I were interested in the Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, I'd certainly join it. Keep up the good work Tex =).

 

Hi Bryce,

Thanks very much for taking the time to look at my site and leave comments here. We've worked hard on the organization and number of forums used, although I'm sure it's not perfect we seem to have found what works for us. It's the only forum for this particular niche that uses vBulletin, but I still try to keep things fresh for the members and implement as many feature requests as I can.

Anyway, thanks again for your post. :cheers:

 

1. Your signature image is really awesome and conveys spacey, orbitory (lol I made that word up I think), outer space type things really well. However when I visit your site the default theme that appeared didn't do such a great job.

I suggest creating a quick style, make the page background black with feint stars. At the top of it, incoporate the styling from your signature image (Rounded corners, with the planet/ozone coming up).

2. You have two sets of navigation, one default navbar, then some buttons under the header graphic. I suggest figuring out to condense them to one section to prevent confusion among users and save some screen space

3. Your favicon is nice

4. Your tutorials section is awesome

5. It appears to have default status icons. I'd get some custom ones, perhaps increase the size of your favicon and use it to make a set.

6. [Invalid] Markup Validation of http://orbiter-forum.com/index.php - W3C Markup Validator Validate

7. Validate CSS: W3C CSS Validator results for http://orbiter-forum.com/index.php (CSS level 2.1) (only 3 errors)

 

Hi David,

Thanks very much for the review! Wow, look at all those markup validation errors! I've never done that (obviously), so this should be interesting fixing all of that.

About the status icons, I completely agree and plan to improve those - perhaps to something more related to space flight. I like your idea for a skin with stars in the background, but since we are mostly a support forum I wanted the default skin to be clean, bright, and easy to read. We do offer several other skins, one of them is very spacey - which all incorporate the logo graphic you see in my signature. Links to those skins are in my original post, however the closest skin to your suggestion I think is this one:

http://www.orbiter-forum.com/?styleid=86

Thanks again for the review. :cheers: