New Theme!

[brianmanahan]

meh, there's too much color for my tastes

and the font screams "2010 web 2.0"

 

[Stopsignhank]

Just like everyone else. The navigation bar should not be on the same page as the thread. I don't like the posts only being on the right side of the screen. The font color on the posts is washed out and makes it difficult to read. The no lines on the main page of the forum is kind of confusing also.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Also need to do something to better highlight links. If you do change the font color to black there will be no distinction at all. As it is now, they're difficult to see.

 

[Crono]

I don't know if a change was made or whether I needed to clear my cache, but the theme is now working in Firefox on Android for me.

More suggestions:

- I suggest losing the color green for the theme's palette. You already have shades of blue, orange, black, grey (main site colors), and white. If you are going to use green, use it for the "user is online" indicator (does that need to be in two locations, by the way?). Otherwise everything that is green could just as easily be orange... the theme is a little busy or overloaded with colors, otherwise.

- The background gradient is a little annoying the more I look at the theme. It would be cleaner and more consistent to just use a single shade of blue. The logo has a gradient - which is fine - but the forum background doesn't need to. It just gives the page an uneven or assymetric look left to right (almost like one is using a panel with poor viewing angles), and does make it look more dated.

Gradients are fine for UI elements (like buttons), where combined with drop shadows the illusion of solidity or depth helps them stand out and makes the interface slightly easier to use, but in the background it doesn't help anything.

 

[Captante]

I'll be sticking with the original.


Also I second the request for a return of the "Dark" theme.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Left side navigation is too big.

This. I run my browser on a portrait-mode monitor and the posts are mobile-device sized with this new theme.

Colors are nice. Fonts are a bit big. I pulled the browser over to my 1:1 4K monitor and they are still pretty big.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

This. I run my browser on a portrait-mode monitor and the posts are mobile-device sized with this new theme.

Colors are nice. Fonts are a bit big. I pulled the browser over to my 1:1 4K monitor and they are still pretty big.

Yes, navigation is too big. Collapsible, maybe even only half collapsed that expands on mouse hover would be nice. There are also several categories missing.

I've been sick of the look of these forums for some time now, so a new theme is long overdue, but this is just not doing it for me. Maybe it needs softer lines and rounded corners, and the colors are not working for me. Too many colors, too much contrast. It works on the main site, but not here. One site theme that has been raved about for over a year now is Voat's night mode. It's simple and easy on the eyes.

Split-screen portrait mode:

 

[Ryan Smith]

does this theme give us the ability to imbed twitter, instagram, youtube, or any of the other cool shit most 21st century forum software allows?

No. A theme is just a theme; it doesn't enable additional embed functionality.

As long as you make this optional, fine, go for it. But please don't fuck up the default vanilla theme. That one works better than this one.

AnandTech Style isn't going anywhere so long as we're still on vB 3.x. It's a solid and proven theme.

The primary purpose of the new theme is to offer a better mobile theme. The current one is functional, but otherwise pretty lousy. But Google penalizes the heck out of a site for not offering a mobile-appropriate view, hence the current mobile theme is the band-aid solution. The new theme is the proper, long-term solution, and ideally is meant for both desktop and mobile.

 

[MongGrel]

Um, well, hmm...

 

[Dude111]

We've got a fancy new theme we'd like you to try out, and give us your feedback on. You can find the new "Sultan" style theme in the picker on the bottom left of your screen, as well as in your user control panel settings.

You wont get mad Joe If I keep using the defualt VB3 skin will ya buddy? (I love that skin and always have )

 

[AnonymouseUser]

This is the same size screen and same zoom level as the Voat theme I posted earlier. Notice how the navigation menu hasn't collapsed yet, and a couple of other issues.

It's pretty much unusable on a split screen. :\

 

[shortylickens]

god no!

The ugly bar on the left is even bigger.
The hell with that.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's entirely too bright and I was honestly surprised at first. Bigger issue is there's too much white space. There's bar

Sadly that seems to be a new UI trend. Look at windows 8 and 10. Everything is big and lot of white/empty space.

On the positive it's nice to see a new theme, it might grow on me once they fix some of the bigger issues like the side panel. Nice to see the forum getting some attention and asking for feedback.

 

[NTMBK]

It's really slow and laggy compared to the old theme. (I have one of those fast-scrolling mouse wheels, so I "powerscroll" through the entire page very fast.) This is on a 3.4GHz Haswell system, using Chrome. So long as the old style remains available, I don't mind

 

[Anubis]

as others have said this new theme is not good

this is how it looks full screened at 1080p in IE.

compared to standard

the left side bar takes of 2x as much space as it needs to and everything is just too large, its a giant waste of space, the theme looks similar to what a lot of subreddits did recently, no idea who thought that style was a good idea. its not. more on the sidebar, it should just be flat out removed all together and replaced with a dropdown list that does the same thing, that takes up nearly no space and does not shift the threads to the right

also its too flat, far to flat, the flat design shit from apple and google is also bad

as I stated earlier the forum needs a simple dark theme not a Fischer price theme

I posted a pic above of what it looked like 6 years ago, there is a user script to make it look like that now as well, but ideally it would be a default option.

this is what offtopic.com default dark theme looks like and it TBH is all we need. its also running VB

 

[cbrunny]

Will this help with the huge ads and screen jumping? That's the only issue that needs fixing imo. It's definitely the #1 priority for me.

For this theme though, quick reply box is out of place. no need for it to stretch across the screen. Looks very unnatural.

 

[John Connor]

Theme is a little weird. I guess it works on this laptop of a Res. of 1440x900. But like others have said there is too much space on the left and I feel like my eyes are always having to look right instead of straight on. Perhaps if the quick links to the left were gone and you used a drop down breadcrumb for navigation instead.

I just noticed the links in my sig aren't highlighted.

 

[clamum]

One thing I just noticed is text above quotes can behave weirdly:

 

[Miramonti]

I enjoy the fonts and conversation spacing/display much better than the original, while preferring less real estate on the navigation pane (as others mentioned.) It would be great to have different theme colors, but while I like the new blues, the background is very dark and displays too much contrast for me. I'm not really a fan of the serif font in this quick reply window. In general, the new font/style looks nice on my 4k 40".

 

[John Connor]

I'd just update vBulletin or use Xenforo which I hear was made in part from the vBulletin devs. I don't care much for Xenforo, but it would be a better upgrade than what's running now.

 

[Megatomic]

I'm going to have to agree with the others, the left-side nav bar is too wide for my taste but I like the color scheme. I'll post more after I use the site more.

 

[jpishgar]

I encourage everyone to continue offering constructive feedback on this. I'll be aggregating your input and making recommendations for changes to the theme. Naturally, we won't be shifting this over as the default theme anytime soon based on the initial response, so you'll have the AT vanilla, and even after the changes are made, you'll still have the old default theme as an option.

Having an optional dark theme would appear to be a very strong request here. Ideally, if we can get this theme situated, it should be relatively straightforward to swap out the colors in the CSS to make a dark/night iteration of it.

 

[herm0016]

I encourage everyone to continue offering constructive feedback on this. I'll be aggregating your input and making recommendations for changes to the theme. Naturally, we won't be shifting this over as the default theme anytime soon based on the initial response, so you'll have the AT vanilla, and even after the changes are made, you'll still have the old default theme as an option.

Having an optional dark theme would appear to be a very strong request here. Ideally, if we can get this theme situated, it should be relatively straightforward to swap out the colors in the CSS to make a dark/night iteration of it.

Even though we are all being quite negative on the change, we appreciate that you ask and will take the feedback. We can be a picky bunch, but that's part of what makes this one of the best communities on the web IMHO.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Is there a reason you don't just upgrade to the latest vBulletin? $249 ($209 upgrade possible?) seems pretty cheap for a native responsive template compared to the time and effort of converting this one, or even $399 with mobile apps included.

 

[ViRGE]

Is there a reason you don't just upgrade to the latest vBulletin? $249 ($209 upgrade possible?) seems pretty cheap for a native responsive template compared to the time and effort of converting this one, or even $399 with mobile apps included.

Besides the fact that the latest versions of vB are rubbish in their own special way, my understanding is that any update would require a time-intensive DB conversion. AT has 38 million posts over 17 years; that has to be a massive database.