i have to agree with fiz to a certain extent. it seems to me that a lot of "custom" ubb sites are very cluttered. while it is impressive that some administrators have managed to get "over 50 hacks" installed, i find most ubb implementations bloated and without regard to actual user needs/wants. very few site have truly unique content or design, as they are just standard hacks that are downloaded and plunked onto existing code.
planetplastica is very flashy, and the title graphic is superb. but, there are several things that are not working correctly (like the planetary diagnostics, for example) or do not look right (like the red folders for new posts, which looks odd in a black/blue color scheme). my overall opinion of planetplastica is flashy fluff. i honestly mean no disrespect toward the administrator, but glitzy doesn't mean better.
emceearena is better, but not by much. it's color scheme is more coherent, though a little hard to read (and the orange scrollbar? what's up with that?) while catering for the 800x600 crowd with the narrow columns, it looks kinda silly with a fixed width to those of us who browse in 1280x1024. please use percentages, not pixels, your users will thank you for it.
what concerns me is something that several people have mentioned. what is with the fascination of using all of this flash stuff that is not functional to a portion of your audience (the sylized scrollbars, the DHTML mouse-over cell changes, etc)? most of this stuff doesn't work in NS. i will be one of the first people to crow "netscape sucks!", but the fact remains that 47% of my users use it, so i must cater to that percentage. if everything was up to me, i'd have a site optimized for 1280x1024x32, DHTML out the wazoo, and XHTML 1.0 documents with CSS2 styles. i've actually set that up, and it's pretty as hell, but few people can view it correctly.
so, i ask the judges of this contest: how closely did you look at the true functionality of these sites? how thorough was the compatibility testing? was useless and/or flashy stuff taken into consideration, or ignored? was the number of hacks considered, and if so, why?
i am just worried, because these boards don't impress me, because they seem to be the same "put ubb in a table, give me some menus, change the color scheme, and drop a few hacks in" formula. where is the new stuff?
