Customizing the look of the forums?

[TinDragon]

Dear mother god of all that is holy, that blue-on-gray is a million times worse than anything satan himself could come up with. You just made the grey-on-grey look palatable by comparison. My eyes feel like I just stared into a camera flash. I actually think I can see your post on the back of my eyelids.

I actually read that as "I can see your past on the back of my eyelids" and laughed a bit.
"The text is staring into my soul."

[cdq1958]

I have had migraines off and on for more than 30 years. I once had a migraine start after I had to take my children somewhere and I was blinded by the flashing lights and drifted into the wrong side of the road (I would never have left home if the migraine had started while I was at home). I have cataracts now after taking anti-inflammatory medicines for acoustic neuronitis (deaf temporarily) and ulcerative colitis. Add to that, I have high myopia and must wear trifocals. Still, the default scheme here had sufficient contrast and didn't induce a migraine. Chalk it up to the fact that someone will be negatively impacted by changes that most can tolerate. Berating the team for making the choices they did that work for most is not a good thing. Posting up tweaks and add-ons that help is a good thing.

[Taravith]

Berating the team for making the choices they did that work for most is not a good thing.

This is not a matter of some poor hard working souls happening to makes choices that unpredictably make some people physically sick but eh, it's life.

Choice of color and contrast are the most basic principles of any kind of document design. This forum blatantly violates those common sense principles (it's really not rocket science) which also happen to be guidelines, and is comfortable with both users and staff dismissing people's legitimate physical discomfort because apparently accessibility is a principle that some still consider to be beneath them.

But you're right in that the team shouldn't be berated - because there's no team involved. They bought the theme ready-made for 30$.

[Mandli]

But you're right in that the team shouldn't be berated - because there's no team involved. They bought the theme ready-made for 30$.

How much you wanna bet that someone from the Community Management Team did this update? It really wouldn't take a professional website developer to install a prepackaged theme, even if a small amount of customization were needed. Perhaps that's why so many amateurish mistakes have been made.

Just a guess...

[SNy-lotrolinux-EU]

[... completely irrelevant story yaddayadda ...]
Still, the default scheme here had sufficient contrast and didn't induce a migraine. Chalk it up to the fact that someone will be negatively impacted by changes that most can tolerate. Berating the team for making the choices they did that work for most is not a good thing. Posting up tweaks and add-ons that help is a good thing.

Nonsense.

The default theme did NOT have enough contrast, why do you think they have already made changes to it?

Also, people tolerate all kinds of stuff that are borderline broken, that's really no excuse to break said stuff in the first place. As Taravith already wrote, usability is really not rocket science and you simply DO NOT put light grey text on a dark grey background. You can weasel-word around as long as you like, but that is a simple fact.

Calling them out on such blatant mistakes is, therefore, absolutely NECESSARY. Don't like it? Well, then stay out of the threads and go read to forum in the stupid default theme. Geez. Why do I even still reply to fools like you.

SNy

[Gilreth_EU]

I suppose I am odd in that I work better with light text on a dark background by preference ..... when I am struggling (with incipient migraine or other headaches) the white background of many things on the Internet actually causes me problems (ok with printer material on paper however). I find the new forums readable for me since the tweaks Sapience made. I am actually not fond of black/white combos in any combination for reading for any length of time but as I said at start I am a bit odd. May have a play around with stylish at some point to tweak a bit but for now I am happy with the forums as they are.

[Crimsonrayne]

Dear mother god of all that is holy, that blue-on-gray is a million times worse than anything satan himself could come up with. You just made the grey-on-grey look palatable by comparison. My eyes feel like I just stared into a camera flash. I actually think I can see your post on the back of my eyelids.

**Cackle** I will make sure Satan is made aware that the color combo is a success, so he can add it to his repertoire

LOL sorry, as I said, I only did that to try to show as close to what I was using as I could. For me, my eyes do not get tired and I do not see double letters when I use blue. Other color combos work better for other people, a very obvious fact presented in this thread.

I am actually finding the extremely different color preferences that are selected by people in order to avoid the negative and (in some cases) extremely debilitating side effects to be fascinating. For example, If I were to try to use some of the suggested combinations, I would develop a severe headache- yet what makes my brain happy is not at all easy for others to read.

There will always be a need for some level of forum customization, because obviously everyone cannot use the exact same color palette without some people having eye/stomach/head issues.

I suppose I am odd in that I work better with light text on a dark background by preference ..... when I am struggling (with incipient migraine or other headaches) the white background of many things on the Internet actually causes me problems (ok with printer material on paper however). I find the new forums readable for me since the tweaks Sapience made. I am actually not fond of black/white combos in any combination for reading for any length of time but as I said at start I am a bit odd. May have a play around with stylish at some point to tweak a bit but for now I am happy with the forums as they are.

Yep... I am the same. Paper is fine- but on a lit screen... I need a dark background with lighter text.

[Khafar]

I suppose I am odd in that I work better with light text on a dark background by preference .....

You're not odd at all - lots of people prefer that. Where I work, nearly everyone (ages ranging from 22 to 52) who use WebStorm as a development tool have settled on a light text on dark background theme. I had set up the old LOTRO forums to have light text on a dark blue-gray background, and this one suits me quite well once I made a few modest tweaks.

At home, the reason for this is that my home office has low-medium light levels (on purpose... I mostly use it for gaming and relaxing, with spot lighting for reading), and glaring white backgrounds give me a headache after awhile. They're simply too bright. At work, it's simply a matter of preference. Most of my web browsing is naturally black text on white background, but whenever I can set up my own environment, I invert that... off white text on dark grey/blue.

Khafar

[SNy-lotrolinux-EU]

So I uploaded a new version of my theme that now has the static background from the lottery page, gets rid of the rounded corners and has a few other tweaks.

Enjoy.

SNy

[Nimdraug]

Interesting...

When did they make these changes to the site?

[ChromiteSwiftpaw]

For those who are using Stylish and might like a more streamlined set of forums, here's mine:

    /* Hide a bunch of stuff I rarely or never read */
    #forums #forum33,  /* Kinships */
    #forums #forum721, /* Player Guides */
    #forums #forum97,  /* Roleplaying */
    #forums #forum144, /* Player Events */
    #forums #forum108, /* Music */
    #forums #forum105, /* Creative Endeavors */
    #forums #forum701, /* Cosmetics */
    #forums #forum106, /* JRR Tolkien */
    #forums #forum95,  /* Fansite News */
    #forums #forum376, /* Real-life Player Events */
    #forums #forum121, /* Adventuring in Middle-earth */
    #forums #forum196, /* Instances, raids, and skirmishes */
    #forums #forum85,  /* All class forums */
    #forums #forum48,  /* Monster Play */
    #forums #forum313, /* Legendary Items */
    #forums #forum709, /* Warsteeds, Mounted Combat */
    #forums #forum30,  /* Crafting */
    #forums #forum521, /* LOTRO Store */
    #forums #forum710, /* MAC Tech Support */
    #forums #cat77,    /* All server forums */
    #forums #cat531,   /* German/French forums */
    .tcatBar,          /* Collapsible section bars */
    #wgo {             /* What's Going On */
        display: none;
    }

The result is a clean front forums list which lists what I read, and only what I read. If you want to turn some of those back on, just remove them from the list above. If you want to add some more, you can see forum numbers just to the right of the question mark when you hover over a forum link. "Helm's Deep" is number 711, for example.

Hunter safety orange "collapse section" buttons removed down the right side is a bonus .

Khafar

You need to change the second to last line to this to make it work correctly:

        display: none !important;

So I uploaded a new version of my theme that now has the static background from the lottery page, gets rid of the rounded corners and has a few other tweaks.

Enjoy.

SNy

Thanks so much for the changes! Looks great without all the rounded corners.


I added a few tweaks to make signatures be less obnoxious. I made images in them smaller unless you hover over them and also reduced the text size. Some people really go overboard with their signatures without thinking how it bloats up a forum page.

/* Adjust Signature Font Size */
.signaturecontainer {
font-size: 70% !important;
}

/* Adjust Signature Image Size and Allows Hover for Full Size */
.signaturecontainer img {
max-height: 60px !important;
}
.signaturecontainer img:hover {
max-height: 100% !important;
}

[Capt.Hunor]

I'm sure that is a joke, a bad joke Turbine.

1.This vBulletin Style is...WOOOOWWW... I have no words :-)
2. Have you seen the Post Editor? Is not to small?
3. No vBulletin Suite with CMS?
4. No Wordpress Frontpage anymore?

Maybe some alternatives.

ZoneOne Series

[Widoch]

Thanks everyone for all of the style posts. I've never needed to use stylish before and didn't even know there was such a thing. While not perfect, at least the forums are much more readable for me and I'll be spending more time here. Props to all of you.

Sapience, having had to work with designers myself on web content, I totally understand how long it can take to get things adjusted when it relies on a third party to get it done. I'm sure you're taking all the feedback and doing your best with it. Really, the forums are a huge improvement in speeds and useability.

[Khafar]

You need to change the second to last line to this to make it work correctly:

        display: none !important;

Hmm. I can assure you that it works fine on Chrome without "!important". I don't like use !important unless it's truly required, just as a matter of habit... it can make related overrides a pain to do. However, it doesn't hurt anything in this case.

Khafar

[Kirsche]

Many thanks to Khafar for pointing me to this thread. The forums are much more to my liking with a combo of Khafar's forum hiding, SNy's edits, and a few tweaks of my own. I don't mind the light on dark theme personally, but now everything is a much more manageable size. Now to fix a few other sites that have issues that bug me...