Thanks.

@cheese:

Ill foward this to one of the admins. proably a mis-understanding. shrug

Thanks. It’s an addition to my own notice submitted by the contact form (http://the-starport.net/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3).

Our bar has been deactivated yesterday as The Starport has obviously banned the IP-address of our server making it impossible for the Wordpress-plugin to load the files containing the links of the FLCN.

As my modded version of the FLCN-Bar is neither working with Gecko (Firefox Engine) nor Trident (Internet Explorer Engine) but Presto (Opera-Engine) and Webkit (Safari, Chrom, Konqueror Engine) I dug deeper into the JS code (which is appareantly for the malfunction) and noticed that the sources are simple JS arrays in seperate files. I now began to write the Wordpress plugin, which is already parsing and presenting the main links (those visible on the bar without any interaction). I’ll add the routines for the other parts tomorrow and with the permission (which I don’t have yet) of w0dk4 I’ll release a first version of the WP plugin.

Currently I’m parsing the JS source files with regex, which is a real performance killer which is why I would prefer another source, simple text files with an easy pattern to be split by “explode()”. I would provide a script for maintenance of these txt-files to automatically produce the necessary JS source code, making adding and removing members a lot easier and more comfortable as well.

Hi!

Although I’ve now finally added the FLCN-Bar to our main site, I’m not really happy with it.

1st thing is that it’s based on JavaScript but I’m following the doctrine that every page must be browseable without JS. It’s also a problem when updating templates automatically, because hardcoded text may be eradicated.
2nd place goes to, as mentioned before by Huor, XHTML-Validity, which is very important to us - simply disregarding the now nearly eight years old IE 6. We don’t support Opera 7 or Firefox 1 either (which should do fine), so why should we care for IE 6?
3rd and last but not even close to least important: The, due to the JS-Implementation, very poor SEO-effect.

But I’m not only a critic, I hereby offer to write a pendant in PHP, fully XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 valid, including (with time) plugins for Wordpress and Woltlab Community Framework / Woltlab Burning Board 3 since I hate to mess around with templates although I know what I’m doing - at least most of the time. ^^ If possible (it is) I won’t be using JS, only CSS. Links will be added at server side, so search engines will be fully aware of them. I may add other SEOs if applicable.

Why did I not simply implement and present it here?
This implementation should be up-to-date at any time just like the original and that’s only possible if I draw the information directly from the source - a database, e.g. Or if I get to know a usable interfaces.

Interested?

Nevertheless, the current FLCN-bar is great work - it just doesn’t meet my needs.

PS: I’m not adding the FLCN-bar to our board 'cause to style and template issues - but to be “able” to discuss with you in the meanwhile, I added it via include() into the WP-templates. Application pending.

Finally, we at Station-Network also managed to include the FLCN-bar on our main site, though not in the board; I put the reasons for this decision into this thread. On one hand there are currently no articles about Freelancer on the main page due to the fact that we rebuilt (and are still recreating) the whole project. On the other hand the board’s hugest sub area is the Freelancer area (“Freihafen 9”) and the main site attracts approximately 300 unique visitors / day.

The other criterias won’t affect this application I think, since we are one of the oldest Freelancer portals (freelancerstation was its former name) out there and though it’s hard times for general space sim portals, we stay as active as possible and try to encourage new projects - maybe the next project of our brand new STN Engineering branch will be dedicated to Freelancer, who knows?

//edit: Well, a team member just told me that the bar is not showing up in IE or FF - though in Opera (which I use) and Midori. It’s in the sources, but it’s not displayed. I’ll fix this.

@Grey:

Seems this image verifying he sold the MOD has vanished from Photobucket.

I restored the picture now.

See here for a picture of the according correspondency.

@Dias: We would like to hear your opinion as well: http://www.forum.station-network.de/thread.php?postid=255145#post255145
Pouting isn’t really an option for you. I’m quite positive we would successfully enforce a boycott against servers running “your” (another controverse) mod if you would be found guilty. Not that I think that this is necessarily the case but the other party has a clear advantage if the main person from your party isn’t present.

Our (Station-Network’s) proposal is to hold a tribunal with a jury which is elected by the Freelancer community, consisting of well-known but for all that neutral modders like w0dk4, OP-R8R, Louva Deus, etc.

The condition for a tribunal is an adequate interest by the community else chosen consequence wont have neither an prevention effect for the future nor the support of the community.