The problem is that you assumed I have protanopia. I don’t. I see red just fine. There’s more than one type of colorblindness. I have trouble with greens, not reds.
See deuteranopia and deuteranomalous trichomacy. Hardly a secret, I’ve talked about it before on several threads.
Yep. I proofed the color under those too. Hardly a difference. It’s not that I don’t believe you’re colorblind in some manner, but I can’t imagine the contrast to plummet that low, as you claim for 1 out of every 10 people.
You do realize, of course, that there is no way to exactly replicate what I see on my monitor with *your *monitor and eyes, right? My demonstration was never intended as an exact one-to-one correspondence since there’s no way for either of us to truly perceive what the other sees while seated in front of the computer. I used a color that to me slightly over-represented the problem to make sure I got my point across. I was unaware of any sort of simulation I could run the text through. Even if I did, though, the problems of different monitors and visual systems remain.
By the way, your example yields two sentences for me - one is green. The other, to me, is not green at all, it is very distinctly brown. You claim it was a “muddy” green. Um… nope, not seeing any green there at all. Well, I guess that proves we don’t see the same thing, do we?
Suffice to say that to me there is a notable difference and green text is hard to read, to the point I either have to highlight everything or copy-and-paste then alter the color. Or I guess I could just squint real hard and for about 10 minutes a post. Is that my vision, my monitor, someone else’s font choice, or some combination at work? I suspect the last choice holds true, but then, I shouldn’t have to alter my monitor settings just to read someone’s post.
That’s why I said (and bolded) the word “politely”. It would be much nicer if someone just said something like “hey, we don’t do that sort of thing here”. Instead, what usually happens is people bitch angrily at the newbie for not knowing something that they really had no way of knowing in advance, and/or snap off a quick “reported!”, neither of which are particularly friendly or welcoming to the newbie.
If you say it in more of a “by the way we don’t do that here” type of way then it’s just informing them of board culture. If you say it more like “Don’t do that!”, implying that you have some authority over telling them what they can or cannot do, then that’s junior modding.
The main point I’m trying to get across here is that we can let new people know when they’ve done something that many folks around here will take offense at, in a way that isn’t so hostile and unfriendly, which is what happens all too often.
So if there’s something you do constantly as a poster, it’s not customary according to board culture, many people have asked you to stop but you won’t, and sometimes you even do it to mean “fuck you” because you know it bugs people, that’s being a jerk?
Regards,
Shodan
NEWBIE POSTER: “Hi everybody!”
POSTER A: “Hey, we don’t do that sort of thing around here.”
NEWBIE POSTER: “What sort of thing?”
POSTER A: “Post in different colours.”
POSTER B: “What are you talking about? That isn’t against the rules!”
POSTER A: “I know it isn’t against the rules, but it is against board culture.”
POSTER B: “Who decided that? Why are you junior modding? Stop picking on the new guy!”
POSTER A: "I didn’t decide that. It was talked about in an ATMB thread and I’m just following mod instructions.
POSTER B: “I don’t believe you. Posting in different colours is against board culture? I’ve been here since 2000 and I haven’t heard of such rubbish before. NEWBIE POSTER, ignore POSTER A, welcome to the boards and post in whatever colour you like!”
MODERATOR: “Can we please stop the hijack. NEWBIE POSTER, welcome to the boards. There isn’t a rule against…”
…“politeness” isn’t the problem. Assumptions about board culture is the problem. And giving posters licence to address issues of board culture is something that will lead to distracting hijacks.
It wasn’t until I read this thread that I discovered that apparently different coloured fonts were against board culture. I simply thought that people didn’t use different coloured fonts because it took time and effort to do.
And what other issues of board culture are we going to let posters police? We’ve got a member here who likes to go to the quarry and throw stuff down here, we’ve got another who ends every post with “regards”. In the famous Brightpenny series of threads, Brightpenny was told by several posters, including a current mod, that if she couldn’t handle the way we did things here that she should leave, that “snark” was simply a matter of board culture and if she didn’t like it she could find somewhere else to post.
I really don’t like the idea that posters should be given licence to “politely” police board culture because the reality is there is no board culture. “Board culture” is typically what the loudest and most prolific posters think it is. On another day in another thread a poster posting in a different colour wouldn’t have annoyed anyone. Either something should be against the rules or not. But I think that if someone thinks that someone else has crossed the line the correct thing to do is report them and let the mods deal with it and not to address it themselves.
I would hope that one would recognize the difference between an action that is not part of board culture–routine use of colored fonts–and an action in which many people engage–sigs at the end of posts–in which one poster’s choice is found irritating by some number of other posters.
Lots of posters use sigs, (few as relentlessly as your target), and the “offending” sig is not actually insulting or derogatory. I am well aware that a lot of people choose to be offended, but that is hardly an example of a general action that is outside board culture.
= = =
Of course, since your username is not Shodan, one might be tempted to consider your specific example as one intended to provoke a negative action. If we encountered you repeatedly using that specific sig, it would likely be regarded as trolling.
And yet, in contrast to a large percentage of message boards, one does not find examples of the routine use of colored fonts, here. How is that not an example of board culture? What would one consider board culture if not the overwhelming following of a particular practice?
…which message boards are those? I’m a member of at least 10 other boards, I’ve browsed hundreds more and the routine use of coloured fonts isn’t normal on other boards either.
And as I said: I always thought that the non-routine use of coloured fonts for every post was simply because that is the way the posting software is set up to operate by default. It has nothing at all to do with the way things are “expected to be done” here. The overwhelming use of the default settings of messageboard software really isn’t something that I would attribute to the culture of this place.
So, you have a green deficiency, yet you had no problem determining the green sentence? You do realize that’s the very same color Miss Spaulding was using? Yet you didn’t have any trouble reading it? Those two sentences are very close in color, and yet you could tell they were different? 
Also, I called it a muddy green (how someone with colorblindness would see the truly green sentence), but you could call it brown and still be correct. Closer to baby-poop.
(post shortened)
While your opinion is valuable, it’s still only your opinion. A few people can ask you to stop doing something, but lets face it, those people do not represent a majority opinion, or even significant minority. If the alleged offense isn’t against the rules, it’s still your choice as to whether you comply.
Is it considered customary board culture that other posters accede to your every request? Or that you accede to every other members requests? If that were the case, do you realize how many times you might have to go fuck yourself? You submit a request and you receive an answer. Life goes on.
This post has been refontacized by the Nefarious Refontitizer!
Bwahahahahahah!
OK, you’re over thinking this.
First, while I do not see green well I can, in fact, see the color green. Yes, I am aware it was the same color Ms. Spaulding was using, I never said it was invisible to me, just hard to read. It results in very poor contrast with the background but I am able to see it’s not a blank page. The fact I was able to reply to Ms. Spaulding when she was still using a green font should indicate that seeing what she was writing wasn’t impossible for me, just annoying.
And for me no, the two sentences were NOT close in color, they were distinctly different. One was the poorly contrasting green and the other was brown. That’s because my color perception is not the same as yours. I dunno, maybe it’s like how some camouflage color and pattern combinations easily fool the eyes of the color-normal but stand out like a sore thumb to the colorblind. Yes, I know you don’t see it, that is the point - we do NOT perceive colors in the same way.
By the way - the fact that a small tweak properly applied makes a significant difference in color perception is the way adaptive software for the colorblind actually works. That small difference made the brown lettering pop off the pages for me almost as well as black text does. Could you point me to whatever site you got that trick from? I might be able to make use of that in the future.
I’m not overthinking this. I’ve just worked with color, color theory and color reproduction for the last 20 years, and something isn’t adding up here.
I’m using the colorblindness proofing filters that come with Photoshop. It’s a fairly scientific process of simulating how the color spectrum appears to people with certain types of colorblindness.
I’m not sure what you have in that it requires squinting at the monitor for 10 minutes, adjusting its settings and all those other, frankly dubious :dubious:, remarks. But it doesn’t seem like color blindness. And even a deficiency in the greens shouldn’t make that huge of a difference in contrast.
Moderator Note
Colorblindness is a known issue with computer displays and colors (the company I work for actually does extensive product testing with different color layouts and different types of colorblindness). It’s been brought up as an issue related to the SDMB, and that’s fine. It is an issue.
Color theory and a particular individual’s colorblindness are generally not issues about the SDMB though, and, except for those aspects of these issues that pertain to the SDMB, should be discussed in a different thread in a more appropriate forum.
I’ve been a long-time lurker at SDMB (probably 14-15 years) and I don’t post often, but I find no fault in the idea that this can be dealt with without resorting to a hard-and-fast rule.
In the specific case that brought about this thread, I found Miss Spaulding’s color choice to be annoyingly low-contrast and it tended to be too much “work” to read it (and as far as I know, I have no color vision problems at all). I think the bigger issue, however, was the “Deal with it!” attitude toward comments made about her font choice.
Wow I hope Miss Spaulding’s pearls of wisdom are worth all the trouble people are taking to be sure they can read them.
Agreed. I just happen to see a pretty big parallel between the relatively benign but annoying-to-some practice of writing in green text and the relatively benign but annoying-to-some practice of using an inane signature. I don’t have any way of getting actual numbers, but I’d guess that signatures and colored text rank about the same if we ask “how common is this practice on this board?” But one is “being a jerk” because it’s against board culture. Why?
Valete,
Spinky
In my opinion, there is no difference between using green font with the knowledge that it annoys people (if you’re telling them to “deal with it” you’re acknowledging it annoys people) and using a sig with the knowledge it annoys people.
Maybe there’s a question of thresholds (just how many people are annoyed), but the actions themselves are not distinguishable.
This thread involves two questions, for me:
For me, 2 is true. If this is a community standard/enforceable restriction, being mod noted and told to cut it out is not unfair. It’s not a penalty, it’s a notice.
But 1. for me is much more tentative. Yes, it’s a community standard, but the way things get to be community standards is that someone is prevented from doing otherwise. The argument here is that the posting is annoying, but good god, half the people on this forum are annoying and need to be smacked. (I actually slap myself in the mirror each morning, as I deserve.) What makes posting in color over the line? I can’t think of anything. I do think it’s annoying, and I think the poster was fully aware people found it annoying. I find sigs annoying, and I know the posters who do that are fully aware people find it annoying. (In defense of the color font poster, I don’t think she was doing it because people found it annoying, just despite.)
My god, I just wrote more about “community standards” than I’m comfortable with, so I’ll stop now.
Okay, apparently I CAN’T stop talking about community standards. Bah.
Another example, very akin to green fonts, was a poster (or perhaps more than one) who did not use capitals to start sentences. I do not find this irritating, but a number of posters would complain to that poster every time he or she said anything, claiming it was “hard to read” and the like. As far as I know (and I could be mistaken) there was never any action or note or warning or mod prodding to get that poster to use capitals.
And, again, I didn’t find that posting style annoying, so I found the (what seemed to me to be) incessant complaints far more aggravating than the lack of capitals.