Snover wrote on 2020-01-02, 20:58:

There’s a significant difference between using Stylus to overwrite a few CSS rules locally and integrating new board themes, bot […]
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dann86 wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:25:

cde wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:11:

So essentially, it's too complicated and not worth the effort.

I know theming in CSS can be a donating task to undertake on the surface but I have a hard time believing that when others have made their own changes with nothing more then a few lines of code.

There’s a significant difference between using Stylus to overwrite a few CSS rules locally and integrating new board themes, both from a technical perspective and from a resource availability perspective.

Ignoring everything I said earlier about how phpBB themes work and focusing exclusively on the CSS side of things: official VOGONS themes have to work with every browser the site supports, not just whatever browser an individual is using. New official themes are the responsibility of VOGONS to maintain, so if something is broken, then it becomes our responsibility to fix it too. The risk of bugs increase as the number of themes increase, and maintenance becomes more difficult. Due to CSS limitations in some browsers and for performance reasons each colour scheme gets pre-baked into its own separate CSS file using a preprocessor. This means each new scheme will generate a new copy of the entire CSS for the site. There are also a couple raster images—again, due to CSS limitations and for performance reasons—so any non-trivial modification to the colours requires those to be edited too. Finally, each new theme needs to actually be added to the theme selector, and pages tested, to make sure nothing accidentally becomes invisible.

It’s not my intent to make it sound like any of these steps are impossible or even particularly challenging, since they aren’t, but in aggregate it’s just not as simple to deploy new colour schemes on this side as it is for you to add a few rules into Stylus and call it a day. On the other hand, there are other things that can only be done on this end—blocking bots, making image uploads easier, improving the searches, etc. are all on my list of TODOs, and I can’t do any of that if I’m working on building new colour schemes for the site.

Having managed websites and web servers at my job I can say without a shadow of a doubt you are way over complicating things. But what ever...

Lately I have been taking photos with my Google Pixel 3. I then edit them on my computer and then crop and reduce the image size in one direction so it won't fill more than a 1080p screen... so either 1920 width or 1080 height depending on which dimension is larger than a 1080p screen.

Then I save it as a jpeg. Sometimes with those dimensions it will be a bit over 2MB, but then if set compression at 98% original quality, it is fine.

dann86 wrote on 2020-01-03, 14:57:

Snover wrote on 2020-01-02, 20:58:

There’s a significant difference between using Stylus to overwrite a few CSS rules locally and integrating new board themes, bot […]
Show full quote

dann86 wrote on 2020-01-02, 18:25:

I know theming in CSS can be a donating task to undertake on the surface but I have a hard time believing that when others have made their own changes with nothing more then a few lines of code.

There’s a significant difference between using Stylus to overwrite a few CSS rules locally and integrating new board themes, both from a technical perspective and from a resource availability perspective.

Ignoring everything I said earlier about how phpBB themes work and focusing exclusively on the CSS side of things: official VOGONS themes have to work with every browser the site supports, not just whatever browser an individual is using. New official themes are the responsibility of VOGONS to maintain, so if something is broken, then it becomes our responsibility to fix it too. The risk of bugs increase as the number of themes increase, and maintenance becomes more difficult. Due to CSS limitations in some browsers and for performance reasons each colour scheme gets pre-baked into its own separate CSS file using a preprocessor. This means each new scheme will generate a new copy of the entire CSS for the site. There are also a couple raster images—again, due to CSS limitations and for performance reasons—so any non-trivial modification to the colours requires those to be edited too. Finally, each new theme needs to actually be added to the theme selector, and pages tested, to make sure nothing accidentally becomes invisible.

It’s not my intent to make it sound like any of these steps are impossible or even particularly challenging, since they aren’t, but in aggregate it’s just not as simple to deploy new colour schemes on this side as it is for you to add a few rules into Stylus and call it a day. On the other hand, there are other things that can only be done on this end—blocking bots, making image uploads easier, improving the searches, etc. are all on my list of TODOs, and I can’t do any of that if I’m working on building new colour schemes for the site.

Having managed websites and web servers at my job I can say without a shadow of a doubt you are way over complicating things. But what ever...

Good to hear you have managed this in your job and presumably being paid for it.

Maybe doing your day job, whilst trying to do work in your free time, possibly without additional pay, maybe trying to look after a family, with long-term plans for minimal site maintenance due to lack of resources, and being temporarily disabled, might generate a different outlook for entitlements?

The explanation was perfectly clear in the last paragraph for requests not being complicated.

dann86 wrote on 2020-01-03, 14:57:

Having managed websites and web servers at my job I can say without a shadow of a doubt you are way over complicating things. But what ever...

I also manage a few websites and a forum, and I can perfectly understand the reasoning behind not adding more themes.
It's always a wish of the users! But if you're the only person handling it you end up with a dozen themes you have to support. Every minor software update of the forum might break the themes in different ways and this adds up to a lot of maintenance needed. The time could be spent on improving other, more important parts - especially, if it's spare time.

Best just keep it simple.

Can we have "public domain" added as an option for attachments? Otherwise it could look like we're trying to claim copyright on stuff when uploading something that's legitimately in the public domain.

...or should I just use 'fair use' for that?

Will there be an option to actually block users to prevent them from seeing my posts/comments?
Or does Mute do that?

I wish the old color scheme would become the default color scheme, all this white text and purple background really hurt my eyes.

For those of you whose retinas are burning and are on Desktop PC's (the following would need additional tweaking for mobile to look good), I played around for a while with the "Stylus" plugin for Google Chrome, making some font changes as well as various color changes. Here is what I came up with:

Click Here for full-sized, non-embedded image

Below is the code you need to enter into the plugin. You can of course tweak these settings to your own liking:

1.root {
2    background-color:#000;
3    color: #fff;
4       font-family: "Arial";
5}
6
7.post_header {
8background-color:#005;
9}
10
11.bb_quote_body {
12background-color:#005;
13}
14
15.post_container {
16background-color:#000;
17}
18
19.table_cell {
20background-color:#005;
21    color: #fff;
22       font-family: "Arial";
23}
24
25.root a {
26    color: #bbdbdb;
27       font-family: "Arial";
28       font-weight:normal;
29       text-decoration:none;
30}
31
32.table_prep {
33        color: #979797;
34}

Overall I think the new style is an interesting idea, but it does have a bunch of problems.

From what I can see the font used doesn't seem quite "websafe" and has problems on different devices. I'd suggest going for a more common, but still wider font like Verdana, or something less wide like Arial. This will also mitigate some readability issues regarding different symbol heights.

The "dithering pattern" has issues on a lot of different LCD devices, be they defective or by user configuration, this is a good reason why such patterns should be avoided on the web.

The random lines everywhere, while suitably 90's magazine style in certain ways, are distracting especially in topic lists.

The purple does look decent on certain screens, but on others it might be overbearing, I'd suggest looking into the purple background colour on the old Vogons style. I also suggest removing the zebra striping in topic views it adds unnecessary clutter.

Descriptive text should follow every icon, especially uncommon icons. UI elements with unknown icons and no visible text tend to be ignored, even if there are tooltip descriptions (which obviously don't work on touch devices)

The breadcrumbs are kinda cool, but something should be done to make it clear that "C:" is clickable and leads to the index. Maybe just be boring and just rename "C:" to "Index:".

Avatar shadows look a bit odd and draws attention to avatars which shouldn't really be getting more attention. The same with button shadows as they are inconsistently applied.

This is a quick and dirty suggestion I made in Chromes inspector
https://tore.cnc-comm.com/stuff/vogonstopic.png

^^ somebody really needs to make a theme overloader browser extension so that everyone can tweak the site themselves, seeing as there are so many differing opinions on this. (Pouet.net has all kinds of that stuff floating around, because attempting to change anything on its 20-year-old site design results in 50+ pages of scenedrama. It's amazing what you can do with a few custom CSS styles on that site.) Personally I think your mockup is stodgy and dull, and would MUCH rather use the current site as it is, but to each their own. I guess I like my info presented with a bit more visual flair & I never liked the old board design much.

On a positive feedback note, I just realized you can ctrl+click (cmd+click) multiple files to attach them all at once from the upload dialog. You guys have no idea how happy I am about this. Try it!

Also, the much improved handling of newlines before & after inline image attachments is noticed & quite welcome.

Tore - Wow.. that's a fantastic balance using many design choices from the new theme made less-overbearing so the content itself takes center-stage.

It's less taxing for me to 'digest' the gestalt on first-glance as well; I'm not sure if there's a proper GUI/UX/design term for that.. but the easier the better (and will result in me visiting more).

xjas - If only the colors and small layout changes where available as skin/themes (a thin CSS riding on top of a larger/common functional CSS layer), then hopefully that would be easier to offer users.

In general, desing-wise, i would just crank the saturation lower and all would be nice. The colors used are a bit too saturated for my taste...

Interesting thing here. The new site causes Android Firefox to crash/freeze on two tablets I use. The site won't even fully load. Seems related to the display driver or the OS perhaps. HP Pro Slate 8 (Qualcomm Adreno 330) and Teclast T8 (PowerVR GX6250). Works ok on my Pixel (Adreno 530).

Probably something Mozilla needs to fix. I submitted a crash report.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-01-05, 00:37:

In general, desing-wise, i would just crank the saturation lower and all would be nice. The colors used are a bit too saturated for my taste...

The background colour is pretty powerful but I prefer a good contrast over the all too common light grey text on a white background that has me bobbing my head to find a workable viewing angle.

I posted this in another thread, not sure which one it should be in, so I'll just put it here as well:

realnc wrote on 2020-01-04, 18:15:

Is it just me, or does the forum now hijack my mouse cursor? Instead of the mouse cursor I have set in my OS settings, it changes it to a weird, thin and very small mouse cursor.

It does. To me, this is an inappropriate "form over function" situation. I need to use the largest cursor I can on my screen due to ocular issues. Having my cursor shrunk for no good reason makes it very hard to use this forum. This change should be removed ASAP as it adds nothing to the site and impacts usability. For all this talk about "best practices" when building a website, I can guarantee changing the cursors size so it is a fraction of what it needs to be for some people to use their systems correctly is absolutely not considered a "best practice" in any situation.

badmojo wrote on 2020-01-05, 02:19:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-01-05, 00:37:

In general, desing-wise, i would just crank the saturation lower and all would be nice. The colors used are a bit too saturated for my taste...

The background colour is pretty powerful but I prefer a good contrast over the all too common light grey text on a white background that has me bobbing my head to find a workable viewing angle.

Saturation has nothing to do with contrast...

yes changing the level of saturation does not affect brightness hence contrast stays the same

badmojo wrote on 2020-01-05, 02:19:

The background colour is pretty powerful but I prefer a good contrast over the all too common light grey text on a white background that has me bobbing my head to find a workable viewing angle.

Yup, the overall choice of bright-on-dark is very welcome; screens are not paper. OTOH there are objective (i.e. scientifically backed) reasons for avoiding very saturated colors as site backgrounds - some examples... not that the colors here are especially bad or anything, but toning it down slightly wouldn't hurt.

Likewise there are fairly established criteria for choosing fonts, in terms of design/letter spacing and how they affect readability, so for one, I'm hoping that all those Helvetica suggestions being thrown around won't be followed (such fonts are okay for titles, but not for long stretches of copy). I can tell that Snover and Qbix do pay attention to these principles... in general, people ought to keep in mind that the goal is to provide a good overall experience for the most common scenarios, not really to cater to people's personal aesthetic choices, which differ too widely anyway.

Snover wrote on 2019-12-31, 19:21:

precaud wrote on 2019-12-29, 13:40:

The new color scheme is nearly as unreadable as the old one was. I really like my purple and violet shirts, but displays that have background colors with lots of red (and blue) are really bad for readability and eye comfort. This is because our eyes' contrast sensitivity is primarily in the green part of the spectrum. So screens with predominantly purple and violet color tones (which have very little green) causes strain when reading the white text.

Suggestion: Either choose a background color scheme that is more comfortable and friendly to the users, or how about making the background color a user choice?

Do you have some research that you can point me at which supports this assertion that backgrounds with a low green component cause eye strain? I’ve done quite a lot of research on accessibility and colour and have never seen anyone making this claim.

Just google "eye response to light" and look at the sensitivity curve. Purple is at the end of the spectrum, where our eye's sensitivty is the worst, and the color wavelength is the shortest. UV sits right above it. Do you wear sunglasses? It's the part of the spectrum we filter out to reduce eye strain and augment clarity, even under "natural light" conditions. Flooding the background with it is a mistake.

https://iristech.co/what-screen-color-is-best-for-eyes/

I will vote with my feet and spend less time here until its fixed.

VileR wrote on 2020-01-05, 12:32:

reasons for avoiding very saturated colors as site backgrounds - some examples...

Thank you!

I lowered saturation on every color to 30 instead 59.
Still retains the purple theme, but does not assault the eyes.