I'd be a happy camper if all text-modification were disabled.
I generally agree with this. Posting in a color or font is not the only way to separate people on this forum. Avatars and sigs help someone who's scrolling quickly through a thread to identify who is posting. Colored text makes tags that change color - mod text, foil tags, etc. - more difficult to notice because people post in colors similar to the tag.
As far as I can tell, there is little benefit to posting in colors or different fonts. What with the inivisitext issue and unreadable fonts, it clearly presents problems. Rather than adding additional rules to our already lengthy list, I'd prefer this option just be removed. I use dark skin, and when some users make a post in this color I find it difficult to read. Obviously there are additional colors that are hard to see as well. I suppose getting rid of skins besides the default is an option for clearing this up, too.
Les, this is more or less what I mean. Another frequent poster on the forums uses similar font styles. While I generally do not read the posts that poster makes, the choice of font color does not help discussions where I'd need to.
I generally agree with this. Posting in a color or font is not the only way to separate people on this forum. Avatars and sigs help someone who's scrolling quickly through a thread to identify who is posting. Colored text makes tags that change color - mod text, foil tags, etc. - more difficult to notice because people post in colors similar to the tag.
As far as I can tell, there is little benefit to posting in colors or different fonts. What with the inivisitext issue and unreadable fonts, it clearly presents problems. Rather than adding additional rules to our already lengthy list, I'd prefer this option just be removed. I use dark skin, and when some users make a post in this color I find it difficult to read. Obviously there are additional colors that are hard to see as well. I suppose getting rid of skins besides the default is an option for clearing this up, too.
The Dark skin is awesome and I regularly switch between skinds, if you must know. And although the rule to ban unreadable fonts is honorable, the best and easiest thing would be to ban font modification altogether. Half the time it's used maliciously (just to annoy) and the other half of the time it's ignorantly annoying (such as not realising that no shade of pink, brown, red, blue, gray, or yellow is easily readable in every skin.)
Removing the option for font modification is the easiest and best solution.
I agree with wamyc for the most part. The only change I'd make to that argument is to allow bold, italic and underline as they're legitimate, except perhaps bold.
I think it'd work if you could limit the range of colors to, say, only F00, 090 and 00F, but I'm guessing that's not an option.
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My anecdotal evidence disagrees with yours! EXPLAIN THAT!
I think we should ban forum skins instead of fonts or colors. And avatars.
But seriously, how about bringing some of the code of the forums up to modern standards and removing the font tags altogether? We really should be using CSS and then all these problems are easy to solve.
(This will only make sense to people who understand CSS/HTML.) Instead of:
hello
my posts would be marked up in a way akin to: hello
Users could choose from a variety of CSS files where the class "purple" is defined in different ways. The default, of course defines "purple" as purple, but it could be black or white or whatever. This doesn't require past posts to be changed and doesn't require stripping tags from anything. It is fully cache-able. I'll help implement it if needed.
Ah yes, because, of course, people want to recode the whole site in CSS
1. You don't code *in* CSS. It isn't a language (like PHP).
2. The site already uses CSS in some ways. Even if it didn't, it isn't hard to add CSS.
3. As far as I know, the only recoding that needs done is the part of the site which replaces vB Code with HTML. Currently, when a user enters:
[color=red][font=verdana]Hello[/font][/color]
It gets replaced with tags when the post is actually displayed. You only need to replace it with tags instead. Not hard. Further, tags can be nested and can handle fonts, colors, underlining, bolding, and any other formatting option you could want.
There would be a few other additions needed, but nothing so major as recoding the entire site. You don't seem very knowledgeable about how CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) work, so I'll try to explain it in layman's terms. (This got kind of long, so I'll spoiler it.)
The biggest advantage of CSS is that it separates the content or words of a post from the formatting of that post. Let's say we have three styles of text available: Style1, Style2, Style3. When we write a post, we can use any of those styles.
This is a post.
But how does your browser display that to you when you're reading? It looks to the site's style sheets. In the style sheet, the site admin would define Style1, which can include information about pretty much anything including fonts, colors, size, etc. This style sheet is a completely separate file from the post. The site admin can change the definition of Style1 and the change will instantly show up all across the site, without changing any other page. For example, Style1 could be defined as red, bold, and underlined. The above post would show up as: This is a post.
But if the admin later decided he didn't like red anymore, he could change the color in the style sheet to green. Instantly, every post which was posted as Style1 would look like: This is a post.
Even though the actual content, including hidden tags, of the post never changed.
Here's the neatest part: you can have multiple style sheets defining the same class. But each user only sees one style sheet at a time, which he can choose for himself. For example, some people want to see a rainbow of color, so they pick the first file:
Style1 = black, Style2 = white, Style3=purple
Posts in Style1 show up in black text, Style2 produces white text, and Style3 is the best color, purple.
However, some people want every post to look the same, so they pick a different file:
Style1 = black, Style2 = black, Style3 = black
OR
Style1 = white, Style2 = white, Style3 = white
In these cases, all text shows up as either black or white depending on which file the user picked. In all cases the post itself never changes but the way it is displayed does. tags are really a thing of the past.
A long time ago, I talked to Hannes, and he pointed me to this site: http://www.csszengarden.com/
Since then, I've read and learned and am convinced this idea is the best way to satisfy everyone who is currently complaining about fonts and colors. Like I said, I'm volunteering to help. I'm not some random guy who read a website and thinks he knows everything. I'm a professional software engineer, with a college degree and everything.
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I generally agree with this. Posting in a color or font is not the only way to separate people on this forum. Avatars and sigs help someone who's scrolling quickly through a thread to identify who is posting. Colored text makes tags that change color - mod text, foil tags, etc. - more difficult to notice because people post in colors similar to the tag.
As far as I can tell, there is little benefit to posting in colors or different fonts. What with the inivisitext issue and unreadable fonts, it clearly presents problems. Rather than adding additional rules to our already lengthy list, I'd prefer this option just be removed. I use dark skin, and when some users make a post in this color I find it difficult to read. Obviously there are additional colors that are hard to see as well. I suppose getting rid of skins besides the default is an option for clearing this up, too.
Les, this is more or less what I mean. Another frequent poster on the forums uses similar font styles. While I generally do not read the posts that poster makes, the choice of font color does not help discussions where I'd need to.
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The Dark skin is awesome and I regularly switch between skinds, if you must know. And although the rule to ban unreadable fonts is honorable, the best and easiest thing would be to ban font modification altogether. Half the time it's used maliciously (just to annoy) and the other half of the time it's ignorantly annoying (such as not realising that no shade of pink, brown, red, blue, gray, or yellow is easily readable in every skin.)
Removing the option for font modification is the easiest and best solution.
I think it'd work if you could limit the range of colors to, say, only F00, 090 and 00F, but I'm guessing that's not an option.
But seriously, how about bringing some of the code of the forums up to modern standards and removing the font tags altogether? We really should be using CSS and then all these problems are easy to solve.
(This will only make sense to people who understand CSS/HTML.) Instead of:
hello
my posts would be marked up in a way akin to:
hello
Users could choose from a variety of CSS files where the class "purple" is defined in different ways. The default, of course defines "purple" as purple, but it could be black or white or whatever. This doesn't require past posts to be changed and doesn't require stripping tags from anything. It is fully cache-able. I'll help implement it if needed.
1. You don't code *in* CSS. It isn't a language (like PHP).
2. The site already uses CSS in some ways. Even if it didn't, it isn't hard to add CSS.
3. As far as I know, the only recoding that needs done is the part of the site which replaces vB Code with HTML. Currently, when a user enters:
[color=red][font=verdana]Hello[/font][/color]
It gets replaced with tags when the post is actually displayed. You only need to replace it with tags instead. Not hard. Further, tags can be nested and can handle fonts, colors, underlining, bolding, and any other formatting option you could want.
There would be a few other additions needed, but nothing so major as recoding the entire site. You don't seem very knowledgeable about how CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) work, so I'll try to explain it in layman's terms. (This got kind of long, so I'll spoiler it.)
This is a post.
But how does your browser display that to you when you're reading? It looks to the site's style sheets. In the style sheet, the site admin would define Style1, which can include information about pretty much anything including fonts, colors, size, etc. This style sheet is a completely separate file from the post. The site admin can change the definition of Style1 and the change will instantly show up all across the site, without changing any other page. For example, Style1 could be defined as red, bold, and underlined. The above post would show up as:
This is a post.
But if the admin later decided he didn't like red anymore, he could change the color in the style sheet to green. Instantly, every post which was posted as Style1 would look like:
This is a post.
Even though the actual content, including hidden tags, of the post never changed.
Here's the neatest part: you can have multiple style sheets defining the same class. But each user only sees one style sheet at a time, which he can choose for himself. For example, some people want to see a rainbow of color, so they pick the first file:
Style1 = black, Style2 = white, Style3=purple
Posts in Style1 show up in black text, Style2 produces white text, and Style3 is the best color, purple.
However, some people want every post to look the same, so they pick a different file:
Style1 = black, Style2 = black, Style3 = black
OR
Style1 = white, Style2 = white, Style3 = white
In these cases, all text shows up as either black or white depending on which file the user picked. In all cases the post itself never changes but the way it is displayed does. tags are really a thing of the past.
http://www.csszengarden.com/
Since then, I've read and learned and am convinced this idea is the best way to satisfy everyone who is currently complaining about fonts and colors. Like I said, I'm volunteering to help. I'm not some random guy who read a website and thinks he knows everything. I'm a professional software engineer, with a college degree and everything.