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AobaruNet

Usually neon is one of those things you want to avoid when making layouts, but I don't think these are that bad. The ice blue is kind of intense, as is the red. I like the purple one the best too.

I'd work a little more on the spriting tutorials - right now they seem like Butterfree's only shorter and less helpful. Try explaining things more, adding more examples, et cetera.

The MBTI Pokemon thing is a neat idea (I'm a Clefairy?) but it might be more helpful if you linked to a quiz or included something like this on the page.

...Is there even a way to win that square game? I did it, but I think I cheated.

Your interviews section is one of the most interesting, and it'd be cool if you could find more people to interview. :]
 
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I changed from ESTP to ISFP. Amazing.

Anyway, I think you should get rid of the revamp and recolor galleries. There's no way to know if someone stole a sprite unless you put one up there yourself.
 
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I'd work a little more on the spriting tutorials - right now they seem like Butterfree's only shorter and less helpful. Try explaining things more, adding more examples, et cetera.

Thanks, I'll try to explain everything more.

The MBTI Pokemon thing is a neat idea (I'm a Clefairy?) but it might be more helpful if you linked to a quiz or included something like this on the page.

I don't know if you saw it, but I do include a link at the top of the page to a personality quiz. Maybe I should make it stick out more...

...Is there even a way to win that square game? I did it, but I think I cheated.

I made the Square Game to test out my JavaScript-ing skills. It's not a serious game, more of a way to introduce my new character, Alakazaan.

How exactly did you win? It should be unwinnable. xD

Your interviews section is one of the most interesting, and it'd be cool if you could find more people to interview. :]

Thanks, I'll ask around.

Thanks for the great review! :]]
 
Don't know if 'Miroir Noir' was supposed to be in French, but if it is then it's Miroire Noir.

Um... I actually did a modest amount of research into the title, and I'm pretty sure it's miroir noir. In fact, I looked and I can't find any French word "miroire".

Am I just not getting it? Is there something grammatical about it that puts an "e" at the end?
 
Aobaru is right. Mirror is masculine in French, meaning there's no need for the 'e'. Plus, noir is the masculine version of black, so it would make sense that mirror is masculine also.
 
Aobaru is right. Mirror is masculine in French, meaning there's no need for the 'e'. Plus, noir is the masculine version of black, so it would make sense that mirror is masculine also.

Thanks for clearing it up for us. :]
 
Mind if I ask you why, to affiliate with your site, you MUST have W3C-compliant valid HTML/XHTML? I mean, that's great and all, but there are some sites that blow you mind away but don't have valid HTML/XHTML. It's like climbing a mountain and falling off just before reaching the top.
 
Actually, rather than disabling Javascript, the really non-cheating way to win is to place your mouse over the box and then refresh the page. The box will appear but not disappear, since the mouseover event doesn't fire until you move the mouse. Thus, you can click it.

Why in God's name are you using images for it, though? It means the user has to load the second image when they mouse over the box, which means they have a second then to click it, too. It would be far easier to just make it a div with a set height and width and make the Javascript change the background color (you can even make it transparent rather than just black on mouseover, which would avoid causing trouble with any future layouts that might not actually have a black background).

I also suggest you put an onclick event on it which checks whether the box has disappeared and gives you some sort of a prize if it hasn't - since it would be an onclick event, it wouldn't work when people have just disabled Javascript. :P Heck, you could also make it a colored div inside another transparent div which is slightly bigger and put the mouseover events on that - then it would disappear slightly before you've actually put your mouse on the colored box itself, also helping to prevent people from being able to click it while Javascript is firing the mouseover event.

Now. Your styleswitcher is kind of useless - it's more of a gimmick here than an actually useful tool, because it doesn't change anything that actually matters about the layout. Sure, it lets you turn the headings into your favorite color, but all the styles are still dark, fixed-width three-column layouts. The main point of a styleswitcher is to really cater to people's layout preferences, at least by providing layouts that are both dark and light and preferably something in between as well; I like to use different navigation schemes and basic page layouts as well to provide a still more extensive choice, but allowing the choice between dark and light as the actual background color of the page is pretty much the minimum. Dark layouts hurt some people's eyes and light layouts hurt others'.

The AAPA bugs me largely for basically the reasons detailed on my Sections that Suck page; it feels like a flash from the past, from that time when Anti-Pokémon was actually still somewhat relevant. It really says a lot that your featured Anti-Pokémon site looks exactly the same as it did when I first saw it in 2003, and knowing Anti-Pokémon, it had probably then already looked exactly the same for the past few years before that.

But aside from that, the "Why people hate Pokémon" article is sadly not very in-depth or thought-provoking, since it only basically repeats briefly what Anti-Anti-Pokémon has been saying since it started. Also, Sudoku is a puzzle, not a strategy game, and I don't see why you waste a paragraph trying to demonstrate that girls play video games since that seems awfully irrelevant. You generally do not really make much of an argument, since the article fails to make the connection between "There is such a thing as mature fantasy" and "Pokémon is not immature"; "Pokémon Requires No Thinking" is a strawman to begin with; and the only point you really make under "It's Evil" is "Well, I don't think it is."

"Why are you AAP" contains such wallbanger comments as "I HATE pokehaters just as much as I HATE dora", which really hurts the cause more than anything else; in general, having people join an "Anti-Anti-Pokémon Alliance" today when Anti-Pokémon really doesn't exist anymore is just sort of silly and overly militant, trying to strike up old conflicts. I realize your site began as the AAPA so it can have a nostalgic importance to you, but at the moment it's just not a very good subsite and its subject matter is too grossly outdated to actually warrant having this sort of "alliance" thing with people joining it to begin with. I really suggest you just ditch it and move on.

(And if you don't: on the AAPA home page, the link to AobaruNet just links back to the AAPA home page, presumably because you forgot to link it back to the main directory.)

The title "New DP Types" is misleading, since it's about new type combinations; I saw the title and thought you had somehow gotten the impression there were actual new types in Diamond and Pearl.

The catching legendaries page could use a mention of the fact that sleep and freezing are better than paralysis for catching.

The Platinum Sprite Reviews page really needs comments on all of the sprites, not just some (excluding "Facing the wrong way"); I really do not see what is so wrong with that Chatot. You're also missing several sprites that definitely look more wrong than those, such as Quagsire (the far leg is drawn and shaded as if it's closer to us than the near leg).

The "Power Contest" and "Cute Contest" are over; are you planning to make new rounds or what? "Whose Tail Is It?" is awfully easy in general, which is a bit more of a problem than just being easy because when all your games are easy it feels like it subtly insults the viewer's intelligence (hence why I make sure my games are ridiculously hard).

How many possibilities are there for the Miroir Noir, out of curiosity? I've gotten Jirachi, Togetic, Eevee, Darkrai and Magikarp. If those are the only ones, it would be fun to have more.

Your recoloring and revamping guides have mostly the same problems as before; the recoloring guide does not actually say how to "transfer" Minun's colors onto Plusle, and the resulting Voltorb sprite in the revamping guide is sadly not that good. (The shadow should curve around its body like on the D/P sprite, it should probably have a shine on its "eyebrow" since that part juts out and would provide another place for the light to reflect off, it's got JPEG-blurring, and the lines around the eye should use some of the shadow color because they stand out way too much right now.) The guide also really does not explain well what you're doing or how to add new shading to make it look better (in fact, the guide seems to instruct people to make paint-buckety recolors), and in the last two paragraphs, it repeats itself.

Having a "fanfic contest" with only two entries is a bit silly, don't you think? Since fanfiction can take a while to write, in general I don't think fanfic contests can really work unless you have a pretty large site with plenty of writers frequenting it. :/ (Also, is it just me or is "The Tragedy of Vulpix" kind of disturbing? It's kind of like a slightly milder, Pokémon version of torture porn; it's just a random Vulpix who is brutally killed and torn apart for no reason. Characters being brutally killed and torn apart can work without being torture porn if there is actually something of a story to go along with it, but I don't see any there.)

"Usually buttons are used for more important or bigger sites -- they are bigger and stand out more." In a discussion about buttons and banners, it seems extremely odd to say buttons are bigger and stand out more. o.O Also, you might want to note that it's fine to ask a webmaster for affiliation again if you've visibly improved what they told you last time and it's been some time since.

PHP is not "a dynamic web script", it's a scripting language.

"And try to make the font contrast the background (i.e, Navy Blue font with a black background)" implies that a navy blue font on a black background is an example of a font that does contrast with the background, not the opposite.

Calling attributes "another class of code" in your HTML is rather odd. You also don't describe what attributes actually look like until you get to the part about the style attribute.

I still think HTML guides that teach basic tags but don't actually fully explain the basics of HTML (you don't have anything about the structural tags, how to declare a doctype, you only mention the <p> tag when you happen to use it in examples about alignment and fonts) are rather aimless and without a target audience; either people know basic HTML, in which case they know most of that stuff already, or they don't know basic HTML, in which case that won't actually help them create a website. It's nice to teach the basics of how XHTML differs from HTML, but then you also have all those descriptions of basic tags that are sort of just... there. Either do it properly or don't include that stuff.

SSI is not technically a scripting language, since the only thing it actually does is include files, and it is not "HTML SSI"; it's just SSI. PHP includes are also unrelated to SSI barring the fact they are two ways to include files. It would be better to call it an "Include Guide".

Imagine that SSI is a crayon and PHP is Photoshop. They are two drastically different tools that can be used for drawing; Photoshop is not somehow a type of crayon, and when you talk about crayons it is already implied that you are not talking about Photoshop, so there is no need to specify the crayon as a "paper crayon" or say "Technically, Photoshop drawing is not actually done with crayons" somewhere in parentheses.

There is also nothing wrong with naming the include files top.html and bottom.html or whatever else with whatever extension you feel like. I believe I pointed this out when you asked to affiliate with me long ago.

In the transparency guide, you don't actually erase all the white in your example (the space between the wool and the tail is still white). Ironically, this would be the perfect chance to actually make note of this and remind the user to always remove any extra white areas that are left.

You're missing some of the more interesting meta tags you can have in the meta tags guide.

I noticed you sent me another affiliation e-mail recently; I suggest you fix this stuff before I get off my lazy behind and start going through all my zillion-and-one affiliation requests.

(Wow, this is longer than I thought.)
 
0.0 Very nice review, Butterfree.

I've copied down all of your reviews. I'm going to close the site from the general public until all the changes are made. Moreover, I'm probably going to make a new layout (or rather, use one I already have made).

I've changed the link in the first post so everyone here can still review.

Thanks everyone for all your help! :3

How many possibilities are there for the Miroir Noir, out of curiosity? I've gotten Jirachi, Togetic, Eevee, Darkrai and Magikarp. If those are the only ones, it would be fun to have more.

I think this was the only direct question you asked. There are currently only five possibilities, but I'm working on many more.

I'll reply to the rest of your review later. :3
 
Instead of closing the site, why not keep the old one up and make changes as you go? Or, if you don't want visitors to see a slowly changing site, why not keep the old site open and make a new subfolder for the changing site, so there's still something for visitors to see?
 
Instead of closing the site, why not keep the old one up and make changes as you go? Or, if you don't want visitors to see a slowly changing site, why not keep the old site open and make a new subfolder for the changing site, so there's still something for visitors to see?

Because I'll be doing a lot more than changing the content. I'll be changing up the layout too. Believe me, the site will be a mess for a few days xD
 
Well, then why don't you just copy all the site files and put them in a subdirectory, mess around with it there, and then copy those files back over to overwrite the site when you're done? It's always annoying when sites close while they make renovations, especially since they're always closed longer than the webmasters intended.
 
Well, then why don't you just copy all the site files and put them in a subdirectory, mess around with it there, and then copy those files back over to overwrite the site when you're done? It's always annoying when sites close while they make renovations, especially since they're always closed longer than the webmasters intended.

Well, I'm done with the other layout now. xD I'm having some trouble with the styleswitcher, though. When I switch from the Neon Blue, Ominous Gengar, etc. layouts to the new one, it messes up. I know it's because the divs are in the wrong place.

My question is: how can I get the style to switch correctly even if the divs are placed differently?
 
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