EricNoah said:
woodelf, are you using a non-standard style/color scheme? That list of things you're seeing isn't what we're seeing. For example, none of the users has anything called "warn" anywhere on the screen.
edit -- whoa, freaky, I've never tried any of the other styles. Some of them are weird!
2nd edit -- it looks like maybe you're using the one called Exposed. *shrug* I guess whoever put that one together didn't include the date.
When i first got an account, the first think i did was go through the control panel to turn off/on a bunch of stuff (i don't want to use messageboard personal messages, frex), and i looked at the various styles. It didn't even occur to me that the styles might actually present different content, so all i looked at was how easy to read, how easy to navigate (obvious breaks between posts, frex), and color scheem. I'll have to poke around--on first pass, this was the only one that was easy to read--the default drives me batty. I can handle light-on-black, but not yellow-on-black or white-on-black. And a screen full of black makes my head hurt after a couple of hours--light, bland colors are good. ;-)
Thanks for the diagnosis.
edit: What is it with geeks and low-contrast? Or, in general, lousy color theory? (Things like using a more eye-catching color for unimportant stuff than for important stuff.) The Red style would be acceptable, if it weren't red--that is, the style is fine, the contrast and readability are great, except for the actual choice of color. Do the same exact style with, say, two shades of blue-green, or blue, and you'd have a winner. Silver, like Exposed, is quite readable. Not quite as good, but at least the message body is high-contrast--it's only the header info which is low-contrast, and that's actually a point in its favor (makes it easy to not read it, which is what you do most of the time). But it doesn't even seem to include timestamps, much less date-n-timestamps, so it's even worse. As for the default, and several others: if you're going to put light text on dark background, any design book will tell you that you have to use heavier strokes--bold all the text, at the very least. I'm not sure whether i'll go for readable, and just not care how old posts are, or go for info, and make my head hurt.
Am i really that weird to want a date/timestamp on messages? I'm genuinely surprised that ,of all the info they could include or exclude, any messageboard style would exclude *that* info. Does anybody else look at the date on posts?
