Steve, thanks for your answer.
No problem-o!
I see. I thought XenForo was so modern and user friendly compared to vBulletin. I remember you said something like "XenForo is the future". The XenForo developers who are former vBulletin people, wanted to make something better than the old software. So I'm surprised to learn that XenForo is so hard to customize.
I have no doubt in my mind that the migration over to XenForo was the best thing to do, and I still believe that "XenForo is the future" -- although I do not recall saying those exact words -- and I'm so much more satisfied with this new software than I was with vBulletin.
Just for clarification: I did not say skinning XenForo was "hard," I said it was "time consuming" - as it would be for skinning most applications. Whereas XenForo is "time consuming," vBulletin is, well, much more so. So, while still not nearly perfect, XenForo is still superior this regard, in my opinion.
What is it you have to do in order to make it dark again? I would imagine you just had to change some color codes. I do believe you when you say it's a lot of work, but I just don't understand why it should be so hard.
I don't have any experience with HTML templates, but Wikipedia makes it sound so easy:
Style_sheet.
Yes, that is, for the most part, correct. Much of the work required would consist of altering colour codes. But "far too much to be worth my attention" would be more accurate than "some". The way XenForo handles templates (much like most modern database-driven applications) revolves around a system that is, to the company's credit, extremely easy for less code-savvy users to tweak basic colours, but mind-numbingly monotonous to do the sort of things I would like to do.
I think many of us appreciate the color option, so the latter option (disabling it) would cause some sad faces. The first option sounds better.
Understood. I really wouldn't want to in any way limit the community's posting options. My reason to move over to XenForo was partially down to being able to allow more freedom and customization for the users, so the choice to disable a feature would be a last resort.
Regarding readability, there is actually one thing that is more readable now, and that is the header in quotes (where it says who originally posted the quoted message). But this small improvement can't make up for the many thousands of posts that are now unreadable. We can highlight text as Magnolia pointed out, but it's quite bothersome to do.
Unreadable for the time being, perhaps. As soon as I have decided the best way to go about rectifying the situation (two methods having been mentioned in a previous post), then this will no longer be an issue.
Wow, XenForo - being new and all - already have elements that are outdated. How can that be?
Perhaps I explained poorly - the old template was outdated, not XenForo.
This community has endured much the past 9 months. First, on March 10th 2011, the change from vBulletin to XenForo caused the loss of more than 50% of the threads.
The loss of so many threads (I could not realistically put a figure or percentage on it, but I highly doubt it was anywhere close to 50%) was a catastrophe. I was mightily displeased by how XenForo Support handled the situation, but, the way I see it, we can either say "screw it" and abandon the place or carry on and not let this bring us down. I know which one I've chosen.
We were that much castrated then, and now we have to endure another drastic big-impact change. The unreadable content is still here, technically, but the loss of contrast and readability is a loss nevertheless. After our heavy loss in the near past, I don't think we can afford to lose more.
I'm afraid that I must respectfully disagree with this new template being a "drastic" or "big-impact" change to the forum; I also don't believe that the new look should in any way hinder a user's posting experience. If anything, it should
improve it -- if only slightly -- given the number of bugs squashed as a result of XenForo's maturing. I can empathise with those that prefer the look of the old skin, though.
I feel I've said all that I can say right now regarding the situation with certain posts being temporarily illegible due to different colour fonts; it's a trivial problem which can be remedied very, very easily. I only ask that I be granted some time to decide how best to pursue this. There are multiple solutions -- each of which being very straightforward -- but I would not like to jump into this without doing my homework first.
Black font on white background is harder on the eyes than bright font on dark background. This is another reason why the dark background was better for the eyes. It's not only about the posts with custom bright colors, although they are the biggest problem now.
I would say that is entirely down to the user's preference, more than anything. Personally, I find darker text on a light background to be the ideal reading format for me, but I understand that this will not be the case for everybody. I will look into finding a satisfactory middle ground for everybody.
