Hello all, hope this announcement finds everyone well.
Some of you may have noticed some time ago (March 2023, over a year ago) that the official "LMB Theme" lost all its images and became completely unusable. This was a big blow to the people that worked on it, and unfortunately it took a long time to find the time to fix the issues.
{LMB Theme Post-Mortem} The run down is that, vgy.me, the image host/cdn we were using to hold the vast amount of the theme images decided to to delete them from their systems. This was without communication, backups, or recovery. I don't know exactly what the reasons were but I suspect the large amount of calls for the images (whenever a user loads a webpage) was putting a drain on their small servers, resulting in them making the decision to take them offline.
Anyway, regardless of who's fault it was, it was a lot of work to rectify the problem. The original LMB Theme is old and relies heavily on image-based assets for things such as buttons, backgrounds, gradients, etc, instead of straight CSS.
Anyway, the corrected version is now public! I have done my best to correct all the broken images but please report any missing images or weird glitches to me in this thread!
Onto the good stuff, LMB Theme 2.0 brings some new features!
1. Dark Theme!
There is now a "Dark Theme" toggle button in the top bar of the forum! It will remember your choice per-device, so if you visit on multiple devices you will have to toggle on those separate devices. It is also compatible with our current selection of board themes, though this does mean that boards such as Disney and Legends of Chima can be a bit of a flashbang, but we'll just have to live with that.
2. Refactored Profile Pages
User profile pages have been restructured, at the bottom there is now a list of that user's activity, just like the original message boards.
Also included is a new section displaying a users last 5 posts. This feature is potentially a bit buggy however, I would appreciate your feedback on how it's working for you all.
Something to note is that I have not yet replaced user Badges, it will take some time to track down who had which badges. I cannot guarantee that all badges we be fully restored.
3. Quality of Life Improvements Quickfire round!
- Likes button updates in real-time! - No more wondering if you're like was processed.
- Individual Post Subjects! - When replying in a thread you can now change the "title" or "subject" of your posts!
- Better Nav Tree! - The Navigation tree that hovers above every page is now more detailed and responsive.
- Quote Timestamp Links! - Quoted posts now have a clickable timestamp that will take you to the original post
- Profile Page UX Improvements!
- A sidebar has been added to profile pages that includes extra stats and additional links to your bookmarks and settings.
Lastly, let's talk about theFUTURE. Time for some real-talk.
It's pretty clear the forum is past it's golden years, and I think that's important for us, users and staff, to understand going forward.
From a feature/development standpoint there is now nothing left to achieve, from now on the only work here is going to be maintenance and bug fixing.
From a community management standpoint there is the consideration to be had that moderated forums such as these are securely in decline. Online safety was a big part of the original LMBs and for LMBE/TBB though the years. The LMBs was a forum for kids at it's heart, and when LMBE/TBB was founded, it had the same mission at heart: to provide a fun, safe space for children and teens to talk about all things LEGO.
But these days most of us are grown ups! We all have less-and-less time to dedicate to the remnants of a LEGO forum and the need for pre-post moderation is becoming less necessary and more of a inconvenience for users as well as for staff. A good example is that we have had 1 reported post in the past year!
However, the path forward here is unclear. It'll require some discussion and some debate to figure out the best way to transition this community out of a top-down staff-management system to a self-sustaining space that will last many more years to come. Obviously moderators need to be present as long as there is an active community, but perhaps this is a system that can be simplified and expanded.
Anyway feel free to discuss this and tell us what you think!
But to wrap up now, this theme has been an accumulation of years of work and it's good to finally have completed all of our objectives and to be able to gift it to you all.
Once again, shoutout to Henny4315 ! We both worked super hard on this, and although he's retired from TBB, I couldn't have asked for a better coding partner.
Shoutout to our dedicated moderators and staff members who, despite my absence as admin, have kept this site going and have been moderating posts everyday. Lots of love to them all.
Lastly, thank you to all of you, users who keep coming back this many years after the original shutdown. Even though it's a small community, it's fantastic to see people coming back for a catchup here and there. This is probably getting close to our last ever announcement, the exceptions will potentially be about our moderation policies but we will see.
Peace
P.S Here is a link to the official LMB archives, courtesy of TopSecretSpyGuy . (Massive props) You can read his post about it here. We strongly recommend you download and keep these for yourself, they may not be up there forever!
The only glitch I'm noticing (and maybe there's unmoderated responses saying the same ) is that some of the buttons seem offset?
Also, I had to switch back to one of the classic Proboard-style themes to upload that image. Y'all got rid of the Star Wars one I used before, so now the closest to a dark mode I can get is the Classic one...
Thanks so much for all the hard work you've put into this site, and to all the other staff members! I appreciate that it takes dedication to keep this place up and running and it means so much to those of us who have disappeared for years at a time to still find it here when we come back.
Now to go switch back to the LMB Theme, I've missed it.
I have missed this place... Wonderful to see our hard work finally published, Sam , although some stuff is less finished than I would have liked.
The dark theme is wonderful. (For those wondering, Sam spearheaded that project, and he did a great job.)
Profile is an odd thing really (the best that can be done really with this PB software. ). It looks like latest active topics takes like a minute to load (which can probably be sped up...) and latest posts doesn't load at all, but the bottom activity feed works well.
Thank goodness likes finally load in real-time. And I don't know how well individual post subjects work (I tried it in this post. Hopefully it does work. )
Really happy to hear that we're going to move on from pre-moderation. I would suggest making account creation a moderated thing (which wouldn't be too inconvenient because we rarely have new members), just to avoid the off chance that some crazy person joins and spams the forum. I'm not sure about random accounts, but I trust basically everyone active on this message boards to post responsibly.
Thank you, Sam and all of my wonderful staff member friends. I've missed you all. And of course, I've missed all of our delightful members. Thank you to everyone who has kept this forum alive.
My only regret is not finishing the LMB avatar builder replica before retiring.
Now, I must be on my way, back to the LMBE Staff Retirement Home, before all my fellow retirees start worrying about me. Have a wonderful day, everyone! Henny4315 makes a post for the first time in two years
I have missed this place... Wonderful to see our hard work finally published, Sam , although some stuff is less finished than I would have liked.
The dark theme is wonderful. (For those wondering, Sam spearheaded that project, and he did a great job.)
Profile is an odd thing really (the best that can be done really with this PB software. ). It looks like latest active topics takes like a minute to load (which can probably be sped up...) and latest posts doesn't load at all, but the bottom activity feed works well.
Thank goodness likes finally load in real-time. And I don't know how well individual post subjects work (I tried it in this post. Hopefully it does work. )
Really happy to hear that we're going to move on from pre-moderation. I would suggest making account creation a moderated thing (which wouldn't be too inconvenient because we rarely have new members), just to avoid the off chance that some crazy person joins and spams the forum. I'm not sure about random accounts, but I trust basically everyone active on this message boards to post responsibly.
Thank you, Sam and all of my wonderful staff member friends. I've missed you all. And of course, I've missed all of our delightful members. Thank you to everyone who has kept this forum alive.
My only regret is not finishing the LMB avatar builder replica before retiring.
Now, I must be on my way, back to the LMBE Staff Retirement Home, before all my fellow retirees start worrying about me. Have a wonderful day, everyone! Henny4315 makes a post for the first time in two years
Great to hear from you, Henny, and I'm glad you can see the theme you worked so hard on finally finished. Congratulations Mr. designer. (PS, don't feel obliged to reply to this, get back to your retirement home, man. ) Community Newsletter + LMB Theme 2.0
I have missed this place... Wonderful to see our hard work finally published, Sam , although some stuff is less finished than I would have liked.
The dark theme is wonderful. (For those wondering, Sam spearheaded that project, and he did a great job.)
Profile is an odd thing really (the best that can be done really with this PB software. ). It looks like latest active topics takes like a minute to load (which can probably be sped up...) and latest posts doesn't load at all, but the bottom activity feed works well.
Thank goodness likes finally load in real-time. And I don't know how well individual post subjects work (I tried it in this post. Hopefully it does work. )
Really happy to hear that we're going to move on from pre-moderation. I would suggest making account creation a moderated thing (which wouldn't be too inconvenient because we rarely have new members), just to avoid the off chance that some crazy person joins and spams the forum. I'm not sure about random accounts, but I trust basically everyone active on this message boards to post responsibly.
Thank you, Sam and all of my wonderful staff member friends. I've missed you all. And of course, I've missed all of our delightful members. Thank you to everyone who has kept this forum alive.
My only regret is not finishing the LMB avatar builder replica before retiring.
Now, I must be on my way, back to the LMBE Staff Retirement Home, before all my fellow retirees start worrying about me. Have a wonderful day, everyone! Henny4315 makes a post for the first time in two years
Great to hear from you, Henny, and I'm glad you can see the theme you worked so hard on finally finished. Congratulations Mr. designer. (PS, don't feel obliged to reply to this, get back to your retirement home, man. ) Community Newsletter + LMB Theme 2.0
Just before I go, I must say this once more to you, A4… A few final words that truly encapsulate our friendship…
Thank you all so much for dedicating so much time and effort in polishing this site and making it such a good experience for us! Your work does not go unappreciated and the Boards would not be the same without you.
While I admit I feel a little sad that we have to talk about changing the way we run the site, I plan to stick around for a while yet and look forward to helping out in however I can to make this a self-sustaining home. (^w^)
Great to hear from you, Henny, and I'm glad you can see the theme you worked so hard on finally finished. Congratulations Mr. designer. (PS, don't feel obliged to reply to this, get back to your retirement home, man. ) Community Newsletter + LMB Theme 2.0
Just before I go, I must say this once more to you, A4… A few final words that truly encapsulate our friendship…
Hello all, hope this announcement finds everyone well.
Some of you may have noticed some time ago (March 2023, over a year ago) that the official "LMB Theme" lost all its images and became completely unusable. This was a big blow to the people that worked on it, and unfortunately it took a long time to find the time to fix the issues.
{LMB Theme Post-Mortem} The run down is that, vgy.me, the image host/cdn we were using to hold the vast amount of the theme images decided to to delete them from their systems. This was without communication, backups, or recovery. I don't know exactly what the reasons were but I suspect the large amount of calls for the images (whenever a user loads a webpage) was putting a drain on their small servers, resulting in them making the decision to take them offline.
Anyway, regardless of who's fault it was, it was a lot of work to rectify the problem. The original LMB Theme is old and relies heavily on image-based assets for things such as buttons, backgrounds, gradients, etc, instead of straight CSS.
Anyway, the corrected version is now public! I have done my best to correct all the broken images but please report any missing images or weird glitches to me in this thread!
Onto the good stuff, LMB Theme 2.0 brings some new features!
1. Dark Theme!
There is now a "Dark Theme" toggle button in the top bar of the forum! It will remember your choice per-device, so if you visit on multiple devices you will have to toggle on those separate devices. It is also compatible with our current selection of board themes, though this does mean that boards such as Disney and Legends of Chima can be a bit of a flashbang, but we'll just have to live with that.
2. Refactored Profile Pages
User profile pages have been restructured, at the bottom there is now a list of that user's activity, just like the original message boards.
Also included is a new section displaying a users last 5 posts. This feature is potentially a bit buggy however, I would appreciate your feedback on how it's working for you all.
Something to note is that I have not yet replaced user Badges, it will take some time to track down who had which badges. I cannot guarantee that all badges we be fully restored.
3. Quality of Life Improvements Quickfire round!
- Likes button updates in real-time! - No more wondering if you're like was processed.
- Individual Post Subjects! - When replying in a thread you can now change the "title" or "subject" of your posts!
- Better Nav Tree! - The Navigation tree that hovers above every page is now more detailed and responsive.
- Quote Timestamp Links! - Quoted posts now have a clickable timestamp that will take you to the original post
- Profile Page UX Improvements!
- A sidebar has been added to profile pages that includes extra stats and additional links to your bookmarks and settings.
Lastly, let's talk about theFUTURE. Time for some real-talk.
It's pretty clear the forum is past it's golden years, and I think that's important for us, users and staff, to understand going forward.
From a feature/development standpoint there is now nothing left to achieve, from now on the only work here is going to be maintenance and bug fixing.
From a community management standpoint there is the consideration to be had that moderated forums such as these are securely in decline. Online safety was a big part of the original LMBs and for LMBE/TBB though the years. The LMBs was a forum for kids at it's heart, and when LMBE/TBB was founded, it had the same mission at heart: to provide a fun, safe space for children and teens to talk about all things LEGO.
But these days most of us are grown ups! We all have less-and-less time to dedicate to the remnants of a LEGO forum and the need for pre-post moderation is becoming less necessary and more of a inconvenience for users as well as for staff. A good example is that we have had 1 reported post in the past year!
However, the path forward here is unclear. It'll require some discussion and some debate to figure out the best way to transition this community out of a top-down staff-management system to a self-sustaining space that will last many more years to come. Obviously moderators need to be present as long as there is an active community, but perhaps this is a system that can be simplified and expanded.
Anyway feel free to discuss this and tell us what you think!
But to wrap up now, this theme has been an accumulation of years of work and it's good to finally have completed all of our objectives and to be able to gift it to you all.
Once again, shoutout to Henny4315 ! We both worked super hard on this, and although he's retired from TBB, I couldn't have asked for a better coding partner.
Shoutout to our dedicated moderators and staff members who, despite my absence as admin, have kept this site going and have been moderating posts everyday. Lots of love to them all.
Lastly, thank you to all of you, users who keep coming back this many years after the original shutdown. Even though it's a small community, it's fantastic to see people coming back for a catchup here and there. This is probably getting close to our last ever announcement, the exceptions will potentially be about our moderation policies but we will see.
Peace
P.S Here is a link to the official LMB archives, courtesy of TopSecretSpyGuy . (Massive props) You can read his post about it here. We strongly recommend you download and keep these for yourself, they may not be up there forever!
Oh my goodness! We're finally getting a dark theme!!? After years and months and decades and centuries of begging.
Hello all, hope this announcement finds everyone well.
Some of you may have noticed some time ago (March 2023, over a year ago) that the official "LMB Theme" lost all its images and became completely unusable. This was a big blow to the people that worked on it, and unfortunately it took a long time to find the time to fix the issues.
{LMB Theme Post-Mortem} The run down is that, vgy.me, the image host/cdn we were using to hold the vast amount of the theme images decided to to delete them from their systems. This was without communication, backups, or recovery. I don't know exactly what the reasons were but I suspect the large amount of calls for the images (whenever a user loads a webpage) was putting a drain on their small servers, resulting in them making the decision to take them offline.
Anyway, regardless of who's fault it was, it was a lot of work to rectify the problem. The original LMB Theme is old and relies heavily on image-based assets for things such as buttons, backgrounds, gradients, etc, instead of straight CSS.
Anyway, the corrected version is now public! I have done my best to correct all the broken images but please report any missing images or weird glitches to me in this thread!
Onto the good stuff, LMB Theme 2.0 brings some new features!
1. Dark Theme!
There is now a "Dark Theme" toggle button in the top bar of the forum! It will remember your choice per-device, so if you visit on multiple devices you will have to toggle on those separate devices. It is also compatible with our current selection of board themes, though this does mean that boards such as Disney and Legends of Chima can be a bit of a flashbang, but we'll just have to live with that.
2. Refactored Profile Pages
User profile pages have been restructured, at the bottom there is now a list of that user's activity, just like the original message boards.
Also included is a new section displaying a users last 5 posts. This feature is potentially a bit buggy however, I would appreciate your feedback on how it's working for you all.
Something to note is that I have not yet replaced user Badges, it will take some time to track down who had which badges. I cannot guarantee that all badges we be fully restored.
3. Quality of Life Improvements Quickfire round!
- Likes button updates in real-time! - No more wondering if you're like was processed.
- Individual Post Subjects! - When replying in a thread you can now change the "title" or "subject" of your posts!
- Better Nav Tree! - The Navigation tree that hovers above every page is now more detailed and responsive.
- Quote Timestamp Links! - Quoted posts now have a clickable timestamp that will take you to the original post
- Profile Page UX Improvements!
- A sidebar has been added to profile pages that includes extra stats and additional links to your bookmarks and settings.
Lastly, let's talk about theFUTURE. Time for some real-talk.
It's pretty clear the forum is past it's golden years, and I think that's important for us, users and staff, to understand going forward.
From a feature/development standpoint there is now nothing left to achieve, from now on the only work here is going to be maintenance and bug fixing.
From a community management standpoint there is the consideration to be had that moderated forums such as these are securely in decline. Online safety was a big part of the original LMBs and for LMBE/TBB though the years. The LMBs was a forum for kids at it's heart, and when LMBE/TBB was founded, it had the same mission at heart: to provide a fun, safe space for children and teens to talk about all things LEGO.
But these days most of us are grown ups! We all have less-and-less time to dedicate to the remnants of a LEGO forum and the need for pre-post moderation is becoming less necessary and more of a inconvenience for users as well as for staff. A good example is that we have had 1 reported post in the past year!
However, the path forward here is unclear. It'll require some discussion and some debate to figure out the best way to transition this community out of a top-down staff-management system to a self-sustaining space that will last many more years to come. Obviously moderators need to be present as long as there is an active community, but perhaps this is a system that can be simplified and expanded.
Anyway feel free to discuss this and tell us what you think!
But to wrap up now, this theme has been an accumulation of years of work and it's good to finally have completed all of our objectives and to be able to gift it to you all.
Once again, shoutout to Henny4315 ! We both worked super hard on this, and although he's retired from TBB, I couldn't have asked for a better coding partner.
Shoutout to our dedicated moderators and staff members who, despite my absence as admin, have kept this site going and have been moderating posts everyday. Lots of love to them all.
Lastly, thank you to all of you, users who keep coming back this many years after the original shutdown. Even though it's a small community, it's fantastic to see people coming back for a catchup here and there. This is probably getting close to our last ever announcement, the exceptions will potentially be about our moderation policies but we will see.
Peace
P.S Here is a link to the official LMB archives, courtesy of TopSecretSpyGuy . (Massive props) You can read his post about it here. We strongly recommend you download and keep these for yourself, they may not be up there forever!
Hurrah! I'd reached the stage of assuming the LMB theme was never gonna be repaired. Looks good, especially the dark theme. but also where the brick has my shamrock theme gone???!!
I'll also say the like button improvement is incredibly satisfying, that bugged me when the LMB theme first became available.
On the question of the future, it's...six years since I stepped down from the staff so my memory of the moderation/quarantine plugin is a bit rusty, but iirc the plugin has several different features - it was set up to automatically put all new posts into quaratine, but there's also an mechanism to allow authorised users to place specific posts in quaratine through the 'options' button- staff used to used this occasionaly if we initially approved a post then changed our minds. Assuming it still works the same way, it might be possible to give that power to a group of trusted users (perhaps by resurrecting the Community Helper role) who could report a problematic post then immediately quaratine it to hide it from view. Giving the quarantining power to a larger group would ensure problematic posts were seen and quarantined more quickly in a system without pre-moderation, and reduce the pressure on the core group of staff members, who would then just need to react to the reported-and-hidden post and decide whether to delete or approve it - if more people had the power to place a post in quaratine mods would only need to check the site every few days. idk if that's workable with how the plugin works these days, but might be worth looking into. AlsoI think one of the other post-LMB forums might have had something set up to automatically catch posts with foul language - idk which one it was or had they did it but that might be another mechanism that could be used, perhaps in tandem with what I outlined above.
Anyway, I'll finish by saying thank y'all for working so long on the LMB theme, it;'s incredibly nostalgic! Community Newsletter + LMB Theme 2.0
I have missed this place... Wonderful to see our hard work finally published, Sam , although some stuff is less finished than I would have liked.
The dark theme is wonderful. (For those wondering, Sam spearheaded that project, and he did a great job.)
Profile is an odd thing really (the best that can be done really with this PB software. ). It looks like latest active topics takes like a minute to load (which can probably be sped up...) and latest posts doesn't load at all, but the bottom activity feed works well.
Thank goodness likes finally load in real-time. And I don't know how well individual post subjects work (I tried it in this post. Hopefully it does work. )
Really happy to hear that we're going to move on from pre-moderation. I would suggest making account creation a moderated thing (which wouldn't be too inconvenient because we rarely have new members), just to avoid the off chance that some crazy person joins and spams the forum. I'm not sure about random accounts, but I trust basically everyone active on this message boards to post responsibly.
Thank you, Sam and all of my wonderful staff member friends. I've missed you all. And of course, I've missed all of our delightful members. Thank you to everyone who has kept this forum alive.
My only regret is not finishing the LMB avatar builder replica before retiring.
Now, I must be on my way, back to the LMBE Staff Retirement Home, before all my fellow retirees start worrying about me. Have a wonderful day, everyone! Henny4315 makes a post for the first time in two years
Henny! The AWOL-ex-butler returns. idk if you'll see this but just thought I'd say hi. Community Newsletter + LMB Theme 2.0
![[heart]](http://storage.proboards.com/6672327/images/SynFAxjClulYuSIRbDRN.png)
) is that some of the buttons seem offset?
). It looks like latest active topics takes like a minute to load (which can probably be sped up...) and latest posts doesn't load at all, but the bottom activity feed works well.
And I don't know how well individual post subjects work (I tried it in this post. Hopefully it does work. 
![[derp]](http://storage.proboards.com/6672327/images/YqNTPqyQUocVMYXZgUAI.png)
![[tea]](http://storage.proboards.com/6672327/images/NfiRcvAeCCdJSjOEoxJM.gif)
I better go check in on him. ![[con]](http://storage.proboards.com/6672327/images/JsmndumMPsgiOVLouwWk.png)
![[bg]](http://storage.proboards.com/6672327/images/pSVuRUznx_wS1avOLKjF.png)
