Those of you on the allgreen theme (Soda_piggy and some less-frequent members) have also been forcibly converted to the new style. If you hate it, the option to switch to allgreen or the old theme is still available in your profile. But you should stay on the new theme, because not only am I not going to continue supporting the old themes, but you'll also be missing out on the existing features of the new theme. These exciting features include:
- Mobile browser support has been vastly improved. No more horizontal scrolling for smaller viewports, and no need to keep pinching the screen on your phone.
- In the desktop version of the site, the left nav flows with the page for easier navigation (unless your browser is too short to fit it all in the first place).
- In the mobile version, the nav starts out collapsed so you can more easily get to the part of the page you're interested in.
- Link visibility within posts has been dramatically improved. It's now much easier to distinguish links from other text, especially relative to the old theme.
- Spoilers are now inline (like this).
- You can click on spoilers to toggle permanent visibility on and off. (This is especially handy for phone/tablet users.)
- Images too large for your browser are scaled down, so no more horizontal scrolling when someone posts a massive image.
- You can double-click an image in any post to view it full-sized.
- Every form on the site has been revamped to bring it up to standards. This means, among other things, that you can click on checkbox/radio button labels. There are lots of other minor improvements in this vein.
- The forum presentation is generally cleaner, de-emphasizing a large amount of phpBB cruft and providing better readability.
- The forum HTML is much better-organized and no longer consists of a jillion tables. This makes maintenance is much easier for me. (I'm personally very excited about this, even if you aren't.)
Why?
A few reasons.
When I opened up the site, I knew basically nothing about the web. I did what I could at the time to make the site look good (which essentially consisted of handing the look and feel over to Fortis, who did a wonderful job with graphics and so forth), but it's still pretty obviously been the default phpBB theme with a coat of green paint for nearly ten years now.
Today, "web" is pretty much my job description. Not so secretly, Slime Salad has been my workbench for web toys since day one, which is why you get things like the Arena, Mega Tact, Brood, and more, including several you don't know about. This has largely meant that the forums themselves have received little of my attention over the years, but my name is still attached to the site, and outside of the front page, this is what visitors are most likely to see when they come by. So there's a professional interest for me to have it looking good, and it's also good RWD* practice.
Speaking of RWD, there's another reason: most forums are nearly unusable on the phone. Slime Salad is very much desktop-driven, since it is home to hundreds of desktop-only games, but browsing on-the-go is a real thing that people do, and so it's something I wanted to make easier along with cleaning up the forums.
What happened to gamelist tags?
Game tagging is still coming! Revamping the interface was not a necessary prerequisite to tagging, but it does make it easier for me to make interface changes such as tagging in the future. I hasten to add that I will not be maintaining the other themes -- only this new one will support tags.
I found a broken thing and/or I have a suggestion. What do I do?
I've been using the new theme for a little while now, which is enough for me to conclude that it provides basic usability. However, the way I use the forums is not necessarily the same as how you use the forums (not to mention that there were some features that I was unable to fully test). Please report any bugs or suggestions here.
I hate the new theme, much like I hate you, the other forumgoers, and existence itself. Can I change back?
Yes -- the option is in your profile settings -- but I'd really rather you tell me what you'd like to see changed.
*Responsive web design. I could explain this, but it'll be quicker if you just resize your browser window.
