Designer? Programmer? Enthusiast? Join Open Designs Now!

Open Designs Forum » Site Specific

[sticky]

Site Rules & Design Submission Guidelines (Last Updated: 25 May 2008)

(391 posts)
  • Started 5 years ago by LobsterMan
  • Latest reply from jelontok

No tags yet.

12…14

  1. LobsterMan
    Key Master

    Here are the final site rules, and design submission rules and guidelines. As this site is a community site, rules might be changed by popular request.

    Site Rules

    Community Rules

    1. While debate and discussion is fine, we will not tolerate rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks or purposeless inflammatory posts. Members should post in a way that is respectful of other users. Flaming or abusing users in any way will not be tolerated.
    2. Members should remember this board is aimed at a general audience. Posting pornographic or generally offensive text, images, links, etc. is not allowed. This includes nudity, graphic language and profanity. As a rule, don't post anything you wouldn't want your grandmother (or grandchild) to read.
    3. Advocacy of illegal activities such as software and music piracy and other intellectual property violations are not allowed.
    4. While self promotion is allowed, excessive repeat posts of the same nature will be considered spam and shall not be tolerated. Promotion or services and sites that are not web design related, personal sites or projects of the posting member will also be considered spam. The definition of spam will be left to the decision of the site staff, if you are not sure, please ask first.
    5. While these rules cover most common situations, they cannot anticipate everything. Consequently we reserve the right to take any actions we deem appropriate to ensure these forums are not disrupted or abused in any way.

    Treat others how you wish to be treated yourself. Show respect to others and you will be respected.

    Design Submission Rules and Guidelines

    Rules

    1. Designs must be valid XHTML
    2. No table-based layouts, tables should be used for tabular data only.
    3. Text cannot be contained within images.
    4. Buttons (e.g. W3C) are not allowed in designs.
    5. All images must be your own and not copyrighted.
    6. No JavaScript / DHTML is to be used in your design.

    A design that won't conform with these rules will not be approved.

    Guidelines

    1. Try keeping your XHTML semantic and logically ordered.
    2. A CSS layout alone isn't a template, please put some time and effort into the styling of the design.
    3. Keep all images optimized for the web. Please keep the total file size under 200 kb. Normally 50 kb is more than enough.

    Outgoing Links

    All outgoing links in the design previews will have rel="nofollow" added to them. Please note that we will not change the download file, only the preview page will be affected.

    Sponsored Links

    You are welcome to include sponsored links in your template(s) under the following conditions:

    1. Users must be free to remove the sponsored link(s) if they wish - you cannot force a user to keep the sponsored link(s) in as one of the terms of use for the template.
    2. A maximum of 2 (two) sponsored links per individual template is allowed.

    The Open Designs site administrators and moderators have the final decision on what is classed as a sponsored link.

    Uploading Designs

    Place all of the required design files into a folder with your design name, and create a zip archive of that folder. Please do not use any special characters such as !, &, or ?. Please also use underscores instead of spaces when naming the folder.

    Last Updated: 25th May 2008

    Posted 5 years ago #

  2. Josh
    Member

    Looks good. (shame about JS though) 1. Designs must make us of valid XHTML should be something like 1. Designs must be valid XHTML though.
    Posted 5 years ago #

  3. LobsterMan
    Key Master

    Fixed. thanks.
    Posted 5 years ago #

  4. aanimo
    Member

    [quote]Normally 50 kb is more then enough.[/quote] "then" should be "than" Looks good!
    Posted 5 years ago #

  5. refueled
    Member

    Can I use images that are part of the public domain for my templates?
    Posted 5 years ago #

  6. Josh
    Member

    Posted By: refueledCan I use images that are part of the public domain for my templates?
    I wouldn't see why not. Public domain pretty much means anybody can use them for anything. It'd still be nice to give credit to where you got the images though. (but don't take my word for it, wait for an official staff comment)
    Posted 5 years ago #

  7. LobsterMan
    Key Master

    You can use any images as long as you have the rights to use them and distribute them under the license you use on OD. That obviously means that public domain is 100% fine
    Posted 5 years ago #

  8. acousticsam
    Member

    Posted By: LobsterManThe definition of spam will be left to the decission of the site staff, if you are not sure, please ask first.
    decission should be decision. The rules look good, especially that huge 200kb file size limit! Keep up the good work! (On a side note: there seems to be too much padding-bottom on the blockquotes... I'm viewing in FF2... maybe just a quick style sheet modification will do the trick?)
    Posted 5 years ago #

  9. wildleaf
    Member

    padding bottom looks fine, I think you mean margin-bottom.
    Posted 5 years ago #

  10. Gnome
    Moderator

    wildleaf and Acousticsam: that should probably be decreased by about 1 em. Lobsterman: I was under the influence that JS fixing Browser-Rendering was allowed...
    Posted 5 years ago #

  11. Syuk
    Member

    I am only joking here! The original post by Lobsterman reminded me of the great novel by George Orwell entitled "Animal Farm", esp. where you see 'edited' and if you know the book, :wink: These are great rules! Is there going to be a static page, or maybe even better make the current rules appear before designers/posters actually verify their account?
    Posted 5 years ago #

  12. Dieter
    Member

    Why is not my template "Beautiful Curves" approved yet?
    Posted 5 years ago #

  13. Sean
    Founding Member

    @Dieter: I think we are waiting a couple days now between approvals. I'll check with the other admins and find out.
    Posted 5 years ago #

  14. Dieter
    Member

    Sean: Ok, just wondering since it has been about a week since is submitted.
    Posted 5 years ago #

  15. Sean
    Founding Member

    @Dieter: I actually approved it shortly after your message. Check your profile page :bakie:
    Posted 5 years ago #

  16. drago
    Member

    Looking good... admins when this is finalized why not make a rules page or something to that effect and place it on the main menu on the top left. I know from a usability standpoint if I found this site from a search engine or somewhere, I would have no clue how to upload/ create designs and would have no clue that you had to create an account and then log in and upload a zip file... why not explain this in detail on that page.
    Posted 5 years ago #

  17. Sean
    Founding Member

    @drago: we do have a help/FAQ page which is always being added to... the link is in the footer along with the site map link. Of course a detailed page would be great and behind the scenes we are compiling all of this stuff. If we waited to have all of these things done before the site went live, it wouldn't ever get up... hehe... this site is bleeding edge... we do almost everything in a live working environment and on the fly. Thanks for the suggestions and continued support of the site and community. :bakie:
    Posted 5 years ago #

  18. Aaron D. Campbell
    Member

    Out of curiosity, why: 6. No JavaScript / DHTML is to be used in your design. It seems that JS would be fine as long as it's cross-browser?
    Posted 4 years ago #

  19. Gnome
    Moderator

    JS is only allowed in templates if you are hacking IE into functioning like a standards-compliant browser. The reason it is not promoted is that while JS can add extra functionality to a website, it is not necessary for a standalone template. Unlike CSS and XHTML, there is no way to ensure that any JS included in a design is well-formed. Also, many popular libraries are quite large, which could bloat file-sizes for templates beyond what is reasonable. In addition, JS is not known by some users (I just don't want to learn), which might prevent them from using any template containing it. That is the general consensus for submitted templates, although JS is still very popular in websites. Open Designs uses no fewer than 10 to run all this goodness. JS is not a bad thing, but it doesn't belong in templates, unless you have a good rebuttal.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  20. Christopher
    Moderator

    "JS is only allowed in templates if you are hacking IE into functioning like a standards-compliant browser." The site rules state no JavaScript... it doesn't make any exceptions for hacking Internet Explorer as far as I am aware, but will double check with everyone else though.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  21. Gnome
    Moderator

    Christopher: You are probably right.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  22. soliac
    Member

    @gnome: a couple of weeks ago i was talking to Lobsterman (on gabbly!) and he said that you are not allowed JavaScript in your designs AT ALL. He did say that including *.htc files for IE via CSS was allowed: /*for example*/ body { behaviour:url(iepngfix.htc); } But definitely no *.js included via HTML.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  23. Gnome
    Moderator

    Okay. I don't know where I got that idea from.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  24. Andreas
    Member

    "Text can not be contained within images" - but still image texts are used in several templates. Is this rule still valid or is it OK to make titles and headers in image format nowadays?
    Posted 4 years ago #

  25. Sean
    Founding Member

    Andreas, we don't want text in images. If you see on the site where it says it's ok, let me know so I can remove that. I do recall something about if people provided image source files, there might be an exception but again, I don't completely remember.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  26. Andreas
    Member

    I haven't seen any place on the site that says image texts are ok, only a few templates that use images where they should probably use text instead. The new Nautica09 has four text images, just to give one example. It doesn't bother me at all, I would not put texts in images myself even if it was perfectly allowed. :) I just wanted to know if the rule is still valid or not.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  27. Gnome
    Moderator

    /preview/?template=405 /preview/?template=182 /preview/?template=193 All use images containing text. I'm sure that there are others.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  28. yugnats
    Member

    Posted By: LobsterManCommunity Rules - Rule 4 - ...personal sites or projects of the posting member will also be considered spam.
    i'm confused. the 'self promotion' category in this forum says:
    Do you design websites? Do you program or write applications? Self Promotion discussions go in here, so strut your stuff.
    so if you were promoting something you built, etc wouldn't you put a link here as well? maybe i'm reading it incorrectly :confused:
    Posted 4 years ago #

  29. Sean
    Founding Member

    @yugnats: you didn't quote the beginning of that rule that states:
    While self promotion is allowed, excessive repeat posts of the same nature will be considered spam and shall not be tolerated.
    So as long as it's not excessive repeat posts, it's cool.
    Posted 4 years ago #

  30. yugnats
    Member

    Posted By: LobsterMan4.While self promotion is allowed, excessive repeat posts of the same nature will be considered spam and shall not be tolerated. Promotion or services and sites that are not web design related, personal sites or projects of the posting member will also be considered spam. The definition of spam will be left to the decision of the site staff, if you are not sure, please ask first.
    there, i'll quote the whole rule. the first sentence clearly says self promotion is allowed but the second says personal sites and projects will also be considered spam. sorry but to me it sounds confusing. so, are personal projects allowed to be promoted? what if they are non-design related?
    Posted 4 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

12…14

Reply »

You must log in to post.