New look and feel (and how to get the old blue and silver look back)

[Montmorency]

Also, we may make the fonts in we_universal a bit larger (and maybe better suited for text). Our survey here a few months ago suggested that the default size was just a bit too small for a large group of readers. We want to people to be comfortable reading here.

Is there any possibility of offering users font display options? Mainly size, but I'd quite like to try serifs. I think I prefer serifs in general (I know a lot of people here don't though). It could be that when I try them "side by side" (as it were), I'll find they don't actually help (and I only like them because that's what I'm used to). However, I can imagine this might be very "fiddly" to implement, so don't worry if there is a lot involved to it.

Colour options might be another thing.

[Expugnator]

One thing I miss from old site is that we could see the number of the post in the thread and the total number of posts:

Message 328 out of 332 , for example

The way it is now, I run into a long post and get into despair not knowing how much is left unless I scroll down through several other long posts (which is clumsy on the phone).

I like the new theme, clean and unique. Better font size, thus better and faster reading.

[Chmury]

Ah.. the kind inviting colours of prosilver are back again. Definitely was not a fan of we_universal, so thanks for giving us the option to revert back to prosilver. We_universal felt as others have said harsh and kind of Eastern Block; oppressive. And also felt like a degenerative step back in terms of design, more reminiscent of HTLAL in terms of layout with the profiles on the left and the general blockiness, whereas prosilver feels lighter and softer, more welcoming.

[Elenia]

I second user controlled fonts, mainly for size. I don't like bigger font sizes, but I know others prefer/need them.

[astromule]

I just wanted to say that I've become a prosilver fan.

[Bakunin]

In the thread Styles! Help us find some new looks to try, we've been discussing alternate visual "themes" for the forum, and the most popular choice seems to be the one called we_universal. I recently proposed making it the default theme, and nobody objected too loudly, so we're going to try it.

O gosh, can I register my opposition now? I tend to browse the forum without logging in for a quick update on what's going on, but now with we_universal that's not very appealing anymore. And if we're stuck with we_universal - which I hope we aren't -, can we lighten up the title banner? Are hieroglyphs really a good symbol for this language learning community?

[Elenia]

Are hieroglyphs really a good symbol for this language learning community?

Well, I don't know about the community, but they're a great symbol for emk!

As for the theme - I got a massive shock when I reloaded my tab, as I had completely ignored the other thread, but after using the site with it for a little while, I don't mind it any more. I am really easygoing, though (in case there was someone on this forum who hadn't noticed)!

[MorkTheFiddle]

The new default suits me better than the old default because the new theme looks cleaner and less fussy to me. But Digi suits me best of all for being easier on my eyes, both on the computer monitor (23" wide LED) and on the iPod 9.1.

I would even vote for bringing back the green-text-on-black-background days from black and white monitors. That was for me the best "theme" of all.

Expugnator has a good point about the need to restore the post number and the number of posts. Time is occasionally limited, so sometimes one needs to know when to stop for a later, better time.

At first I did have an uneasy moment about where to log in. But just a little moment.

Good job, emk.

[emk]

As a programmer, I've learned that it takes me a while to evaluate whether a new "look and feel" is actually successful or if people are going to hate me for it.

Once upon a time, I worked on a 2D graphics toolkit that was used to display lots of text. And every once in a while, my coworkers would come to me and say, "All our fonts look horrible! They're all blocky and pixelated, and everybody else has nice new antialiased text!" So in an effort to make everybody happy, I ripped out the font rendering engine and replaced it with a more modern open source library. I rolled out the new, anti-aliased text to my coworkers.

Everybody was happy, right? Hah.

Everybody yelled, "The new fonts are terrible! We liked the old ones better!" I sighed and said, "Yeah, but the old ones never worked right on the Mac, so please give these a try." I was all stressed out and miserable. But then a few weeks later, something weird happened: Everybody said, "Hey, actually, these new fonts are really comfortable to read, and when I go back and look at our earlier work, it just looks old and gross."

But the crazy thing was, this kept happening. One specific coworker would bug me to update the font engine every six months or so. And then he'd hate it, and about two weeks later, he'd decide that it was actually a big improvement. After several repetitions of this, I just started saying, "Hey, here's the new font engine you asked for! You're free to complain, but for the next two weeks, I will ignore everything you say on the subject." He'd scowl, then laugh, and I'd ignore him for two weeks.

The point of this story isn't that prosilver is bad (it's actually a great classic forum theme, with a slight retro feel), or that everybody is going to love we_universal. Rather, I want to acknowledge that almost any UI change will feel awful and frustrating, especially at first, and that's totally normal and understandable. It feels like an old friend got replaced by a lizard person. And that's one of the reasons I'm happy that we can keep prosilver available as an option.

As of right now, according to the look-and-feel summary stats in the admin control panel, 17 people have switched back to prosilver, 7 are running Digi (including 4 from before), and 46 people have logged in today and left "we_universal" unchanged (in addition to the 38 who had voluntarily switched to it before). Happily, phpBB has really good per-user customization support, and we can continue to make all these themes available.

Anyway, this is your geeky forum update for this afternoon.

[emk]

I tend to browse the forum without logging in for a quick update on what's going on, but now with we_universal that's not very appealing anymore.

If you're using a personal machine, you can usually stay logged in by checking the "Remain logged in" box on the log in screen. This will allow you to keep your customizations in force at almost all times. If you can try this, does it help any?

Are hieroglyphs really a good symbol for this language learning community?

Well, I don't know about the community, but they're a great symbol for emk!

Well, the original we_universal theme actually used a dramatic stock photo of an office building, which was really weird looking on a language forum!

The hieroglyphs are really just a placeholder. I needed something that was roughly the same dark color as the original office building photo, and which we could legally use and redistribute. Oh, and it needed to have something to do with language learning.

I've always wanted to have a more interesting banner, one which features more languages (especially ones with interesting scripts). We could, for example, ask native speakers to translate "Welcome!" into as many languages as possible, if that's not too corny. I like the idea of using text in interesting scripts, but I'm open to other suggestions.

The banner needs to be a JPEG, 1170x240 pixels in size, under an open source or creative commons license. It needs to be dark enough that the white text shows up legibly.