Those Electric Blues...

[Michael Morris]

EDIT: Electric Blue has underwent it's transformation.

Well, PHB has underwent some modifications and now it's married to the mysterious new default style. I'm relaunching it now, and it gives you a chance to speculate on what the new default will really look like. Highlights of it's differences.

• The largest functional change is the navbar. The staff has carefully evaluated what was being used, what wasn't, and moved some things about. There are now more options on the navbar than before and it's moved slightly higher on the page.
• Tips of the day will now launch in this styleset, either in the page, or if you command it to do so, as a popup. If a pop-up launches unbidden tell me immediately
• The post icons are now available again, though when I get the time PHB will get it's own set. You'll note that different forums have different icons available, up to 24 in any given forum.
• You can now select from 7 new options that control various parts of the page display, including the ability to choose the postbit layout - new posts in bold, and so on. The subscribed threads in italics feature though will still not function until after the server upgrade.

Please alert me to any display problems immediately, and enjoy.

 

[cybertalus]

It looks awesome, man, just awesome. Ads are back, and so is the new posts in bold feature, which I felt lost without. Haven't put it through the paces by messing with the postbit options you describe, but I'll try to at some point.

The only thing that sticks out a little bit is the way the post times are in red. The red sometimes draws my eye to that column. If that's intentional so post times stand out, cool. If not, well I thought you might wanna know.

Oh, and while I'm not a huge fan of the topic tags, the ones I see for here in meta look pretty clever. If people use them here it's bound to make things easier for the people in charge.

I dunno if you get thanked enough for making EN World easier on the eyes, but thanks. I spend a lot of time at the computer, so I'm appreciative of anything that reduces eye strain.

 

[Truth Seeker]

*Looking around at the new stuff*

OKay...cool, and cool, and cool.

But the menu bar for font, color and size, etc, etc...is still not working.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Looks good Michael!

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

The only thing that sticks out a little bit is the way the post times are in red. The red sometimes draws my eye to that column. If that's intentional so post times stand out, cool. If not, well I thought you might wanna know.

Having looked around a bit more, I am also fining the red post times to be distracting. Can they be made another, less invasive color?

 

[Desdichado]

I preferred the old black post times as well (as a dedicated user of the older PHB styleset) but it's not that big a deal to me.

Related to the new change, I didn't think the icons in the Storyhour forums were particularly useful. Most of them were for a historical period, with only a handful of genres (in fact, I only remember Space Opera.) I think concentrating on genres would work better than historical time periods. I also didn't much like the white on white (with black outline) text of most of the buttons. I kinda missed the older, more colorful ones like the old Grim Tales or Call of Cthulhu icons.

I also don't much like the shape of the icons. They are too long, making the rest of the page feel a bit squished.

 

[Knight Otu]

I like most of what I see, but I can't help but notice that Living Enworld receives only a single icon with its name - which, considering that it is a subforum of its own, isn't particularly helpful. I'm not sure if this is the final list to use, but over at the forum, we brainstormed a little to create a small list of possible icons:

Adventure
Announcement
Archive
Discussion
Judge
Proposal
Record
Tavern

Archive and Record might be considered the same for our purposes.

 

[Michael Morris]

Time color changed to orange.

The icons for each forum are still very much in the air. As to the width, it's important that they remain visible at all screen resolutions Josh. If I make them any narrower they become illegible at resolutions beyond 1024x768

 

[Desdichado]

I actually liked the more blocky ones of the past iteration.

And I didn't mean to sound too negative; these icons are actually pretty good when you're in the post. They make that column take up a bunch of room on the threadlist page, though.

As for the Story hour icons, have you also thought about including most of the main settings as options?

 

[Michael Morris]

I had, but I only have room for 24 icons. If I expand beyond that the expansion must go across every single forum. There are easily more than 24 settings out there, so I didn't want anyone to feel like I was dissing their fav setting.