Theme Poll - Do you like the forum theme?

[Eunice]

To be honest, I don't care for black pages with white type. It tests these poor old eyes a fair bit, especially as I have the beginnings of macular degeneration. So I always switch it to the white page with black type theme. The only annoying thing is I have to switch it every time. It doesn't "remember" which theme I prefer. Anyway, thanks for making the light theme.

[Melooon]

It doesn't "remember" which theme I prefer. Anyway, thanks for making the light theme.

You can default it to a particular theme in your Profile/Look and Layout Settings ~ omg it seems like no one reads the forum guide

Though one question; white on black? We don't have much white text here; is it displaying correctly for you? Or is the issue more light on dark regardless of colour?

[Eunice]

Heh! Got it now. Didn't realise. Thank you. I think I meant dark background and light text. Couldn't remember if it's yellow or white on black. But it's sorted now, thank you.

[greyskieshappymind]

I really appreciate the Newspaper theme since the other theme's contrast made my eyes hurt.

I notice though that it hides users signatures (I get it, it does make reading easier, but...) regardless of whether I have "Don't show user's signatures" ticked, and it's like that even when I go to check out their profile. Not sure if this is a bug or was intentional for the design.

I would also like the option to see people's gifts with this theme, but at least I can see those on someone's profile page if I decide to check it out.

[xwindows]

Hi, just looking for some feedback on the forum theme, how do you feel about it?

Can I choose everything except and A, B, and D? A single choice doesn't adequately describe my gripes with the current default theme at the time of this writing; so I'll elaborate more.

Since the first time I visited MelonLand forum half-year earlier; I had to activate one of my custom overlay stylesheet to kill off the serifs and custom fonts (1), which required me to squint (worsening my myopia) or zoom in (trading off much of the information density) to read.

So, needless to say that soon after I officially joined, I proceeded to craft my own homemade CSS overlay for MelonLand forum, to do the following things, important first...

• Kill off all custom fonts and custom font sizes (making it use my browser's readable defaults)
• Kill off all background images (to make it use less RAM, thus less likely to push my browser to crash (2) and bring nigh-400 other open tabs down with it)
• Kill off large and animating images in the headers that link to things I have no interest in (to make it use less CPU and RAM)
• Change dotted lines to solid lines (so they distract my eyes less)
• Change each post in a topic to use a proper notion of table border (so they go well with my other creme-on-black high-contrast CSS overlay)
• Kill off the floating left-sidebar (so it can't steal my attention)
• Make the page background truly black (so it can't give annoying ghostly "glow" on my cheap laptop LCD screen)
• Kill off the annoying underlines in the top backtracking navigation bar-- between folder icon and each level of forum I'm currently in.
• Make all smiley images display vertically centered on the line (so they --including the so-called "News:" quip on the top-- wouldn't be as jarring as they were)
• Make multiple-pages link at the top and bottom of topic view actually underlined (I don't need mental double-take every time I have to click to navigate through long topic)
• Force all of the so-called "spoilers" to display by default (I would rather spoil myself to oblivion than inflicting JavaS'creep on myself)
• Make all topic names in the forum's topic list more spaced away from the grid (the original didn't have this problem; this is rather for papering on unwanted effect of some changes above caused by the poor separation between markup of each view)

And this is what I would like to do, but wasn't done properly yet because I'm still not knowing enough CSS-MovingGoalpost (3) to put overrides in this area:

• Kill off all text animations (including marquees and spins, which are bane to my eyes and burn off precious CPU cycles when I'm on battery; I'm working around by wholesale-killing off such text instead)

And this is what I would like to do, but wasn't done because relevant HTML elements in the forum weren't tagged specifically enough:

• Kill off inter-entries border in each forum's topics listing and replace that with cell-spacing (so it would look less like jail cage, and more like the "Vaguely similar topics!" listing tiles at the bottom of each topic).

And this one is what I would like to do, but wasn't done because it cannot be done with CSS overlay; not very serious with this one:

• Kill off all the Unicode icons at the start of each forum name (some of them don't render correctly in my setup, and become ugly code-point blocks)

As a demonstration of my aforementioned pain points with the current default theme, here are whole-page screenshots for comparison:

• This thread, in my browser's default configuration.
• This thread, with my own aforementioned styling overlay applied.
• Forum Info & Questions forum, in my browser's default configuration.
• Forum Info & Questions forum, with my own aforementioned styling overlay applied.

...just in case these could be pointers regarding possible improvements you'd make into the default theme (or into a new theme).

The #2 and #4 are the face of MelonLand forum I could comfortably navigate and use for an extended period of time. Enforced with classic XUL User Styles add-on, they're in full force on my setup, effective now.

I haven't gone as far as removing the top icons and replacing them all with just text yet. (This is doable in CSS overlay, albeit in an awkward way) While I appreciate the late-90s vernacular web style and associated glitters from time to time, I'm more of a Prof Dr. style kind of guy when it comes to things that I actually spend time to read. (4)

Note that I'm not asking you to nix the background glitter, big text, small text, marquee, or spin-- they're kind of the point of MelonLand, I understand; but I'm asking you to at least provide a variant of main theme that fully nullify these (add it in the sidebar too); for people who want less "fun", prioritize readability, or would like to avoid their browser bogging down or crashing while being at it.

From what I've seen, the so-called "MelonLand 98" theme was supposed to save me from all these: but it doesn't seem to do much-- other than removing the animated top icon-links and changing the background from cloud-star to gray stripes that is. (Screenshot of forum home in this "theme" in reality vs. its false-advertising thumbnail, for comparison) So, as already mentioned, I have changed back to the default theme, and taken the matter into my own hands now.

P.S. Kaizen point: you should also add tooltip text (containing theme name) to each theme-switch button on the sidebar too; so people can find a correct theme to set in account preference after they experimented and found a favorite one.

P.P.S. Another Kaizen point: The "RSS" link at the bottom of forum (in every theme) is actually linking to an Atom feed rather than RSS. As much as I would like MelonLand to use Atom-- which is a better format when post summary is concerned; SMF seems to have bugs which caused it to produce Atom feed with a questionable validity; so it might be better to link to RSS like it claimed, and move the Atom into the second `<link>` tag choice instead.

P.P.P.S. Maybe I should write my own warm-dark apocalyptic "Sunset" theme overlay for MelonLand forum too...


(1) Many of those are also being dog-terrible with antialiasing turned off (like in my setup), which in turn, required me to squint even harder.

(2) My preferred setup is a specific combo of browser, OS, and machine which are time-traveled a decade from the past. Having near-400 browser tabs in this 32-bit 4 GiB RAM no-swap configuration is normal in my usage; but this doesn't gel well with MelonLand's default form, so crashes happened while I was browsing on MelonLand forum for at least 3 times now.

(3) "CSS3", in the word of their proponents. I however, personally swear by the last properly-standardized CSS (CSS 2.1) for everything other than non-structural cosmetic effect in my personal works; for longevity reason.

(4) While it's tempting to use WAP-XHTML1 view to work around, posts are often rendered incorrectly there. (For example: polls are omitted, links are rendered in plain text, numbered lists --which I often use-- are rendered without number, single-line quotes where quote tags are being in the same line with quoted text are also displayed in hard-to-read way, etc.)

[ヤーナム]

I looooove the theme <3 I just wish it had a different font than Times New Roman.