New Look

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Cadden
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New Look

Post by Cadden »

No, there is nothing wrong with your eyes.

Unless you're Nich. Then it's definitely your eyes. ;)

I am pleased to give you... our new theme! Enjoy!
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Re: New Look

Post by Mir »

We hates it, Precious.

Kidding. Looks good.
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

Filthy hobbitses!
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Re: New Look

Post by Mir »

#Cadminning.
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

You have a right to remain silent... I hope to God you use it.
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Re: New Look

Post by Nichalus »

I don't see a damn thing!!! *wife hands him his coke bottle bottom thick lensed glasses*

Oh...
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Re: New Look

Post by Xalsin »

I like it. One question: is there a way to make the reply box white on black or gray on black instead of the black on white that it is now? It seems so much brighter now when compared to the more subdued color scheme.
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

There might be. I'm tallying any and all suggestions and taking them into consideration. Though, at the moment, my focus is diverted back to finishing the Wikia banner and Canon/Legends classification projects.
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Re: New Look

Post by Vox »

Yeah...so the black with white or black with grey text box would help the eyes....holy smoke. Also, any chance we can change the thickness of the font for posts? That's about the only issue I see honestly.

Great job guys, seriously. Amazing.
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Re: New Look

Post by Starlight »

My aging eyes appreciate the blissful darkness. Two thumbs up!
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Re: New Look

Post by Archangel »

The space above every post showing avatars, names, and stats looks like wasted space to me. Can we move it back to the side, or am I alone in hating that? Looks like the old theme used .postprofile, which floated right and displayed inline, and the new one uses .mainpostprofile and floats left, so it might not be as plug-and-play as I hoped, unless there are theme settings for that in the admin panel. Also, if everyone else likes it, I can learn to live with it.

* * *

Do we want the fancy new logo and the boring-text title next to it? Do we need the "slogan"? That seems unnecessary to me. Maybe I'm wrong.

* * *

The particular flavor of red for "Who Is Online", Administrators, "Options" under the posts, page number links, and all standard link hovers is too low-contrast, compared to the background. Color-tester says the contrast is 2.5:1 -- it ought to be at least 7:1 for good readability. We could try some other shade of red, or we could do something crazy like blue. I also don't like gray text on gray backgrounds. The contrast there is only 5.2:1, which is okay, but not great. I was going to suggest using the color of our fancy new logo, but that's technically even worse (5.1:1), but looks fine because it's so large.

While I'm at it, the WoH Coordinators color is also bad (3.8:1), and even though it looks okay, the Moderator green is only 5:1. Changing moderator green to 00B800 instead of 009900 would get us up to 7.1:1, which is good. WoH could change from 996600 to D68F00 and get to 7:1. There's no way to keep the Admin red (currently AA0000 = 2.8:1, even FF0000 only = 4.7:1) or the hover red (currently B20304)... or any pure red, really. It just doesn't work with this gray at all (once you start trending toward purple or yellow, it gets better). True Star Wars crawl is around FFDD02, which is a swell 14.1:1 (although, as I said, the current logo is fine, so long as it remains so large; "A" and "FORUM" a little hard to read, though).

Anakin's lightsaber / Luke's first lightsaber is somewhere around 41A8F1 in hue (although a little lower in luminosity, I guess), and that's 7.3:1. Something to think about, especially re: reds. My suggestion is crawl for header & admins, lightsaber for links, maybe Mace Windu's lightsaber for hover (D972FB), which is 7:1 contrast. See the bottom of this post for comparisons of all these colors. Please make sure people agree on them, of course; if someone goes livid at the sight of lavender, we don't want to upset them.

Re: colors, I think the board icons can stay red, because we don't need to read them, and because red has a rich history in Star Wars. :P

* * *

The "subforum" indicator on the forum icons is pretty lackluster. Same with the "folders" for each post, which also doesn't make sense, conceptually. The mild-mannered asterisks for "you posted in this thread!" are probably fine, but do seem a skosh out-of-place.

* * *

Tiny bug of the day: the border for the search icon does not fit into the prescribed area. Looks like the easy solution is to set .search-icon:hover:before { background-position: -245px -19px; } (instead of the current -245px -20px). -18px might fit in the space even better, but that makes it look like the icon is moving when you hover. Other icons appear okay, as far as those I have found. (Also, a single icon image with variable starting positions is, in my opinion, kind of a weird way to do icons. I guess it saves on loading time for slow connections, though -- just one download instead of 34, and no extra loading time for hover images. I can appreciate that.)

* * *

I'm kind of a critical person.

* * *

EDIT: Oh, we've also returned to the age of white pixels around emoticons (or "emojis" as the kids seem to be calling them these days). That shouldn't be too hard to fix, but it isn't done standard with phpBB.

* * *

Reading color comparison for folks:
Current Moderator color (bold for honest comparison)
Proposed Moderator color
Current WoH Coordinator color
Proposed WoH color
Current Admin color
Current link (regular) color
Current link:hover color
Star Wars crawl (proposed Admin color)
Blue lightsaber (proposed link color)
Windu's lightsaber (proposed link:hover color)

We might need to adjust these further, because post backgrounds are different from main forum backgrounds, and the contrast is even worse in some areas.

EDIT2: And yes, I adhere to WCAG AAA, not mere AA. :P
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Re: New Look

Post by Archangel »

After looking at details with the post body background, I should up the blue link color to 5FB5F3, the purple link color to E293FC, the proposed WoH color to F6A400, and the proposed moderator color to 00D700. The proposed admin color (Star Wars crawl!) is fine.

This is all because the post background is 1F1F1F, rather than the 101010 of the main board page.
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

I cannot guarantee Amy significant changes. My CSS knowledge is limited, at best. I believe the basic color changes can be accomplished via the admin control panel. I don't know if I'll be able to fix the profile view positioning (Mir has already expressed his distaste in the new position, and I agree it would take a bit of getting used to), but I might be able to alter the Reply button.

I can agree to the "slogan" being removed, but not the text. In mobile view, the logo will not appear, and the text is the only indicator of where you are. Not that it's a critical aspect, but I'd rather have something up top for mobile viewing. Unless there's a way to set it to only show on mobile devices....


Board icons wouldn't be too terribly difficult to change, either. I'll try to find a pack to make it "space-themed," but, failing that, I'll see what I can do with the current presets. I haven't looked much into modifying the layout, other than the predetermined size for the logo. However, I do seem to recall there being .psd files, which means editable pics.

I noticed the white around the emoticons (I refuse to call them emojis!), too. That's a relatively simple enough fix. Though could be time-consuming, but relatively simple.

I... think I responded to everything. All feedback is welcome. I honestly wasn't expecting this to be 100% perfect, but it's a start. :)
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Re: New Look

Post by Jagtai »

Most of the colour changes can be fixed easily using the ACP (I've done so before).

EDIT: And I like the slogan. It has been our slogan for a long time now.
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Re: New Look

Post by Ninzi »

I like the new look. Well done, Cadden. The colors don't bother me that much.
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

As an FYI, I can change the colors, but when I reenable prosilver, those colors will still apply when using that theme. There is no theme-centric option, here.

Also, I cannot modify the administrator colors. I don't have the permission to change that. I suspect that only the site owner (goober, if memory serves, holds that role) can change that grouping.

Alternatively, they should be able to be manually changed in the CSS code but, as Arch pointed out, they may get overwritten in a subsequent style update/fix.

To note, I'm not changing anything of these sorts at this time. Once we nail down the changes we'd like to see, we'll put it to community discussion on your proposed colors. Or someone can simply speak against them, here. I don't care, either way. :oldrazz:
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Re: New Look

Post by Archangel »

For what it's worth, the colors seem most essential when my laptop is not plugged in (and therefore, the screen is dimmer). On a bright monitor, the reds are only mildly unpleasant, and everything else is okay.

I think we should change the colors, but if we can't find a way to make theme-exclusive color changes, it won't make the site unreadable to most people.

I don't have anything against the slogan, I just don't remember much about it, and I was hearkening back to ye olden days when we just had the logo in the top left corner. The mobile consideration is legitimate. For what it's worth, the Internet tells me that there is code to make things show up only for mobile users, but the ACP won't make it easily implemented.

Editing files directly is not a bad option--we'd basically be inventing our own forum mods--but we'd want to keep track of every file we edit so we can make sure they don't get ruined by software upgrades. I can also look into actual mod coding, where we could (hopefully) avoid that issue without sacrificing our versatility. But if there are easier ways to accomplish it, we should aim for those ways.

I guess one question for the community to consider is whether we allow people to use the default theme (if they so choose). If we don't, there are much fewer considerations when it comes to universal color modification.
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

Now that we are a week into the new style, we need some feedback from the community. Please do not repeat above comments.

1) Do we want to keep the phpBB default of prosilver disabled and keep the new style as the only style available? Or do we want the new style to be the default and give people the option to override that with prosilver?

2) Do we want to implement the proposed color changes? Is anyone else wanting this, or are the current colors fine?

3a) Board slogan: Keep or discard?
3b) Board title: Keep or discard? (Note: This is provided I can figure out if it can only be visible via mobile. If this is not the case, the title will stay, as it's the only way to identify the boards on mobile devices.)

4) Opinions on our logo? I'm up to changing it, I just need to know what to, if we don't want to use what I drafted up. I'm looking into giving the "EXODUS" text a "hammered bronze" look (I tried when I made the logo, but it wasn't cooperating, so I gave up), and might bold-face "FORUM" to make it a little more visible.

I'll leave these questions up for a week. I felt it far more appropriate incorporating it, here, than on a new thread with a poll. (My opinions on threads with polls notwithstanding.) Majority opinion will prevail with these.

My answers:

1) Keep new style as only style. My reasoning is because it's easier to manage if we decide to do aesthetic changes, such as with #2.

2) I, personally, see no issue with the colors. While I can go either way in this, my personal preference would be to keep it as-is.

3a) Discard. Despite Jag's argument... I don't know when or why we implemented it as a slogan. I, personally, don't much care for it.
3b) Discard... though I want to stress, only IF I can discern that it is only visible on mobile devices. The logo in place and the board title makes that a bit redundant.

4) I'm a bit biased, but aside from minor tweaks, I like it. :oldrazz: See my comments above.
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Re: New Look

Post by Jagtai »

My answers

1) Keep the new style as only style, for the same reasons as Cadden.

2) Change, just to make certain colours more visible (like the admin colour, for one)

3a) Honestly, don't care.
3b) Keep. I like it, redundant or not.

4) I like it.
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Re: New Look

Post by Pryde »

The reply box is a bit bright compared to all this darkness. That's really my only problem with this.
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Re: New Look

Post by Nichalus »

Sorry for the late response, but I think you've done a great job. Even my old eyes like it. Is old folks like the dark. *smirk*
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Re: New Look

Post by Archangel »

1) New style only.

2) Most of my suggestions were, "Oh, we could meet accessibility requirements while we're at it!" I only consider the admin color and link:hover color necessary changes (when my laptop is unplugged--i.e., my screen is dimmer--looking at those hurts my eyes). I think the gray-on-gray and oh-my-goodness-my-screen's-exploding new post textarea are highly recommended changes. The rest are, "Why don't we meet accessibility requirements while we're changing things?"

3a) Don't care one way or the other. It just stood out to me when I looked at the site.
3b) Currently, the CSS applying to the title text is:

Code: Select all

#site-description h1 {
    margin-right: 0;
}
Changing it to this should work to hide it from all but mobile (though I haven't tested it yet):

Code: Select all

#site-description h1 {
    display: none;
}

@media only screen
and (min-device-width: 320px)
and (max-device-width: 480px) { 
    #site-description h1 {
        margin-right: 0;
        display: inline;
    }
}
4) I have nothing against it. Without the "glimmer" of bronze, I think the color is a little duller than you were going for, so I can see what you mean about tweaks. If you want, I can also toy with it, too.

EDIT: Just tested #3b above, and barring something else weird going on, that code works. At least for my phone.
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Re: New Look

Post by Archangel »

FYI, I also figured out the CSS needed to move the profiles back to the side, in case we decide to do that.
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Re: New Look

Post by zephre »

Dig it! nuff said.
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Re: New Look

Post by PhantomFury »

Very cool! I thought it was something only users that are here for X number of days can see it, but apparently it's a new theme! I like it a lot! :lol:
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Re: New Look

Post by Cadden »

You've been here a month, you've satisfied the minimum requirements. :oldrazz:
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Re: New Look

Post by coronhorn »

Did the new theme break???
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Re: New Look

Post by Mir »

Everyone knows "Pops and Junior = #Ratings"
Everyone knows "Cazzik and Mir = #Wynning"
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