Combine the items in Senegoid’s post #3 with the items in Lantern2’s post here, and we’ll have a winner.
The row of avatars substitutes for items (a) and (b).
I just checked Sam’s – it shows the last poster’s name, but it shows time since last post, not time of last post.
About the only thing I don’t see listed here is the the poster’s join date on their posts.
I think this is probably been mentioned multiple times but I want less whitespace/padding on replies. There’s more scrolling than there really should be to read a post with just a few replies.
Also, I really want some better visual separation between replies. I dislike the “text bubble” approach that a lot of app use these days since that too adds a lot of whitespace, but something that uses a subtle alternating background color like the old board theme used would be ideal for me.
Another vote for a combination of Senegoid and Lantern2. Kill the useless avatars. Give us all the useful information possible. Cut down on the white space. Make the separator between posts more visible.
tl;dr Readability and information.
Straight Dope Dark is getting better by the hour - thanks for the mouseovers! The only thing that’s really missing is the Sam’s-Simple-style display of OP name and last poster, instead of the 5 or so avatars that I’m sure not everyone has memorised and associated with their owners. Maybe add join date to the posts… Thank you for so many quick fixes, though. It was really amazing to see hourly changes and fixes for the better. I love the little link previews!
As for pagination, I really don’t need it, the scrollbar is really much superior.
Also, initially fiddling around with some of the settings, I managed to remove my Guest tag after my user name, and now I can’t find the setting anymore - can anybody help me out?
Do y’all want “one theme to rule them all” or do you want “at least one theme with all the features you really care about”? Because I want the latter. And I sort of like the list of avatars. It’s a visually compact way to indicate who started and posted in a thread. I tend to be visually oriented, and generally DO recognize other people’s avatars. (as much as I recognize their names, which I don’t do all that well, either.)
I do want the mouse-over feature, though. I’m now using… I’m not sure, something with a white background and blue highlights, where the posts stand out because they have a white background and the page as a whole has a gray background. I am using it mostly for those two features — the color scheme is comfortable to me (no ugly orange) and it’s easy to see the delineations between posts. If I could keep those features and also get mouse-over I’d probably be pretty happy.
edited to add: I was using Discourse classic. I’ve just switched to Straight Dope light. I miss the delineation between posts. But I like th vastly improved 'Straight Dope" flag at the top of the page.
Also, where do y’all see mouse-over info? I switched to “Straight Dope” just to test that out, but can’t find it. I DO see user names when I mouse over avatars in that list, and I see the descriptions of the fora in mouse-over. But I don’t see any of the OP. 
I don’t see a distinction between these two statements.
I think what people (or me, whatever) want is 2 things:
- A unified set of features across all themes that combine the good things from VBulletin with the good things from Discourse. Generally all the themes should have the same feature set with the same information.
- A good “SDMB” specific theme (maybe 2 if we want light and dark) that gets us pretty close to what the old boards styling was to minimize the amount of change for folks.
After spending a little more time with the other stock themes I think I’d be really happy if the SDMB Light header was merged with either the Discourse-classic or Material themes Those are both really easy to read and apart from the terrible header they solve all the cosmetic problems I’m seeing in the SDMB themes right now.
Well, the difference is whether it makes sense to work on a range of themes, or fight over the details of one to get “the best”. I’m about the switch back to Discourse-Classic, which shows me the posts more gracefully, I think. But I will miss the nice header in the straight-dope-light theme. So I expect you and I would be happy with the same theme.
I think the problem is that the OP chose a entertaining but ultimately misleading title here.
People are making a lot of comments that are about missing or funky features, which is important to sort out but not actually part of the “theme”.
I don’t think anyone really wants to collapse down to only having a single theme available. One theme probably can’t serve everyone’s needs. But things like mouseover and last edited date need to work uniformly across all the themes.
But everyone’s going to have different preferences for the amount of whitespace, backgrounds, avatar styling, button placement, heading layout etc.
I’d be happy with Sam’s + mouseover. And a way to mute thread from the topic list. I don’t want to have to go into the thread to mute it.
Less whitespace would be nice. I’m finding the navigation bar superior to pagination.
Me too. I’m surprised.
Oooh, as of this evening, mouseover works in Discourse Classic. 
Maybe it’s changed over the past 10 hours, but I switched to Straight Dope Light and I can mouseover the thread names.
Good! They’re getting more of the best goodies in more of the themes.
My Most-Preferred Goodies, that I hope they will get into ALL the themes, are still:
(a) Threads List page shows OP and latest posters’ names in plain-text, along with time-stamp (as in Sam’s Theme).
(b) Mouse-over previews (as in SD themes and now, Discourse)
(c ) The SD version of the SDMB banner.
(d) Time stamps, wherever they appear, to show actual date and time.
And, of course: better delineation of the posts (box around each post or a clearly visible horizontal bar separating them), and less white space.
These still seem to be among the Most Preferred Goodies that a LOT of people are mentioning here, and I hope ALL the themes can get them.
Yes, this.
And I’ll add my vote to the others who have suggested each post should show the poster’s join date, post count, and location.
This is my biggest gripe too - all that wasted space at the side. I’ve settled on the Vincent theme at the moment (I like the font better than SD dark) and it’s exactly the same as SD in width for me - as long as my window is half the width of the screen, there’s no point in widening any further than that.
I never have my windows more than 2/3 the width of the screen, and my screen isn’t huge. I played around and was able to reproduce the “horizontal white space problem”, but it doesn’t affect me at all.
Yes, it would be nice if they made one or two “ultra wide” themes (maybe the SD themes) but I’m perfectly happy if they don’t do that to the others.
And the “how long ago was that posted” is growing on me. I think I think that better than absolute time. It’s what I usually want to know. Yes, sometimes it’s interesting to think “she posted that at 3 in the morning?”, but “4h” is more often the info I am interested in.
I think we all prefer the version of the SDMB banner that can be read. 
And yes, mouse-over previews rock.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind but, FWIW, the science is quite clear on the effect of line length on readability. When the text is more than about 70 characters wide, reading times go up and comprehension goes down. That’s why designers always want to limit the width of a text-heavy site.
Change is always hard though and getting used to a new design slows you down too. I predict that, in a few weeks, when all the problems are fixed, most people will decide that they actually quite like it here.
Design is always a trade off, of course. Narrower line lengths mean more scrolling. I always disliked the layout of the old site and find Discourse to be a vast improvement. I’m also very grateful to the administrators for working so hard to make everything right(er) for us.