I’m working on a browser game, and I want to include a forum for interaction between the players. I want to embed the forum into the existing windowpane by means of an iFrame, and not have a separate page.url for the forum. I want to (partially) navigate it with buttons in the parent window. The page looks like this, with the empty center being an iFrame:
The forum does not need copyable links, since it’s all in-game and behind a login restriction.
Is this possible, or am I searching for something that doesn’t exist?
Addition: I would prefer to use existing BB forum software so I can have the functionality of a proper forum. I could attempt to create something simple with plain text only, but I don’t want to start on something that may well be as massive as the entire rest of my project.
Using that window in your case is appropriate for some small form of textual content such as notification.
But as soon as you get the forum inside you would get a vertical and horizontal scrollbar.
It can be set to not be visible (browser dependent)
but then it all doesn’t make sense because why the forum if the user can’t navigate through the content adequately ? (users will hate you)
The situation would be further complicated on lower resolution devices
where everything would break into a pile of broken content and visitors would of course feel claustrophobic.
in addition, the user can simply exit the iframe and open it in a new tab,
which everyone will probably do because that place/space is too small to adequately read the forum
and you will end up with a lot of work but no one will use it
the question is also how your game generates content… does that whole window is generated by the game? using some 3D engine, etc.?
in addition you should then use SSO
so when a user is logged into the game that he is automatically logged into the forum as well.
You have to restrict the use of the forum at least through login,
otherwise you will have a lot of spam messages and other inappropriate content there.
Thank you for the info, the forum would indeed be restricted to logged-in users. It’s not open to the public.
The iFrame will hold text only. There’s no 3D content, at most a few images, but the game is textual. It’s also bigger than it looks here, I shrunk the browser window to not have the screen capture be too gigantic for the forum page.
The game is built so that none of the “links” are actually links, it uses javascript to open content. This is to prevent the hyperlink target from showing up on mouseover. You can’t right-click open link on anything. I set it up that way to give the illusion of an actual application rather than a website.
And one irritating thing about using an iframe is that when a user wants a scroll down he must think well where he positioned the mouse arrow (or finger)
because if the user places it in the middle where the place is intended for the forum
and actually wants to scroll your entire page down
he will have to be very persistent and scroll first the entire forum until it reaches the end…
until then the browser scrolls the entire page down.
The forum also has a lot of links (some by default open in a new tab)
as well as an overview of the images a user has posted (if someone posts an image that goes quite wide) this can all further damage the appearance of your iframe later
However, you know best what and how you will publish information in that middle window.
Some forums have a special “embed friendly” theme. I know Vanilla Forums does. However, embedding other websites with iframes can get very messy indeed.
