Seeking volunteers for Beta-Testing the Dark-Theme

[Mercury01]

I updated the permissions, and also set your theme to be dark theme (style=12). I hope it works for you now.

I worked for me and I...uhh... Maybe it's because I'm so used to the way the light theme looks (and how the site is formatted), but the site's new dark-themed design spooked me. 
It looks good, but it's gonna take awhile for me to get used to it. I was kinda hoping it would have the same design as the light theme, but darker. 

As an aside, what's with the Studio Ghibli looking anime characters everywhere? They're making it harder to see the Thread Icons.

haha, yeah. Give an engineer access to image generation, and he'll overdo it. That's me.  Depending on what the others report, a healthy deal of redesign of the dark theme might be needed.

I just asked ChatGPT for a mock-up, but I don't quite like it, it looks to simple in my eyes:


Probably you got a better idea. Please feel welcome to come up with a sketch or mock-up on your own, if you got a good idea.

I'm fairly happy with the forum's original design. It's a bit plain and old-fashioned perhaps, but it's straight-forward and functional. I can tell at a glance if there are any new posts or threads as I scroll down the page. I'd like a dark-themed version of that design, to make reading easier on my eyes.

I agree! Simpler is better. The layout and design was intuitive before, even if it was barebones. 

Some more thoughts:

• I feel like the animated banner is a bit much. Maybe we could go back to just having a regular rotation of Futa artwork as the banner, if possible.
  
• I could do without the "Latest Activity" section being diagonal. It's a bit distracting.
  
• I had to click around the menus to find the "View New Posts" option. I preferred that to be out in the open.
  
• I don't think we need every section to have a picture with the text overlaid. A unique banner for each section, or even just an icon by the title, to denote the purpose of the section would be sufficient.
  

There's a LOT of dead space between sections, as you can see:


If you could tighten that up, or even just stack everything vertically, that worked better and felt more intuitive. Another forum I frequent has the "latest activity" section in a narrow column on the right-hand side of the forum, with all the widgets and such at the top row. Here, I drew a mockup:



Thank you for letting us beta test this, and I hope these suggestions help.