I thought something you might consider offering to members is the ability to change from the bright white background with black text to something more morning-friendly, like a lapis background with soft grey text or whatever. Would that be a lot of trouble to do, or is it built in and just needs a flag set or something? I’m sure some people would just like the novelty, but others might have sensitive eyes and really benefit from it.
You can set your individual browser to display damn near any way you want, is this not true?
In Firefox, go to Tools -> Options -> Contents Tab -> Fonts & Colors. Choose your own colors and disable the option to let websites choose different colors.
[…shrug…] Don’t know. But I don’t want to change every website. Just this one. Some message boards offer this feature. If you can’t or won’t, I can just continue turning my brightness down to 2 when I read here.
If they’re having problems getting it to stay up at all, what color it is when it’s up is probably the least of their worries.
(Which, incidentally, is what she said)
[sub]see how I did that without cursing?[/sub]
Bright white? I see various shades of lightish grey. Then again, I tend to keep bright & contrast turned down to make viewing much easier on the eyeballs. And use Firefox, though I don’t know if that makes a difference.
I see black text on either white or very light blue. Liberal’s color scheme would be very difficult for me to read.
It’s definitely a light gray or blue. The surrounding areas are a bright white and the contrast is obvious.
Lib, what browser, settings, etc. do you use? I find it hard to imagine that most people see what you see.
Just whatever is the default in IE7. Now, the text box I’m typing in is grey. But the overall page is a blinding white. I’m fairly sensitive to light, so it may be completely my fault. But at other boards, where this feature is offered, I always select the darker ones with contrasting text. It’s no big huge deal, I guess. I’ll manage. But I did think it would be a good perk for members, and it’s standard fare at a lot of boards. I didn’t mean to put anyone out.
Here’s what I see (but smaller). And alternate colour schemes would be nice if possible.
Yep, that’s the same as mine. There’s a grey strip where the timestamp is, but other than trivial dividing bars and such, the rest is white.
To see just how white, I pasted a screen-cap into Macromedia’s Fireworks (an image editor). It’s eyedropper tool says that the color is #FFFFFF. That’s as white as it gets.
ETA:
Also, here’s the page’s Body tag from View Source.
{
background-color: #FFFFFF;
color: #000000;
font: 10pt Trebuchet MS, Arial, sans-serif;
border: 1px solid #E0E0E0;
}
Bright white background, black text, thin grey border. There’s no question that it’s white.
Liberal, would different skins be what you’re after? Because without ready-made templates, skins can be lots of work. Just ask umop ap!sdn. I think the SDMB prefer you try as many options on your end as possible before they go mucking about with the board on their side. Remember, the Straight Dope is a very simple board graphicswise and skins are not.
The suggested color scheme would be just about impossible for me to read. I want as much contrast between text and background as possible, not just on my computer screen, but on all my reading material. I vastly prefer black text on a white background, and in fact if I come across a site or book (generally it’s “graphic novels” that do this), then I won’t strain my eyes trying to read it unless it’s VERY interesting. The light grey against medium blue simply doesn’t provide enough contrast for me to read it. (I tried it.)
vB boards? Do you happen to know if it’s a hack? 'Cause I’ll tell you, even moderators can’t get hacks here. 
The .div class where the posts are is “alt2” if you look at the alt2 code, it’s
.alt2, .alt2Active
{
background-color: #F8F8F8;
color: #000000;
Which is Close, but no cigar. Photoshop confirms F8F8F8.
ETA: I believe “body” in your code would refer to the areas of the page to the right and left of the boxes in which messages are posted and to the space between the “header” (bar with “USER CP,” et al.) and the blue bar at the top of the first post (the area immediately around the “post reply” button"
Am I being whooshed? I see no discernable difference between FFFFFF and F8F8F8.
“You have to ask yourself, how much more white could it be? And the answer’s none. None more white.”
Try this,
Text in FFFFFF
THIS TEXT IS IN FFFFFF
Text in F8F8F8
THIS TEXT IS IN F8F8F8
Text in White
THIS TEXT IS IN WHITE
CMC fnord!
Nice visual aid.
Just to describe it from the POV of someone who sees the difference for the benefit of those who don’t:
After the “THIS TEXT IS IN FFFFFF” and “THIS TEXT IS IN WHITE” lines, there is another line of very large text, underlined, which reads “THIS TEXT IS IN” and then either “FFFFFF” or “WHITE” respectively. The corresponding line in F8F8F8 does not appear, since it is exactly the same as the background.
Also, I notice that looking at it with my laptop monitor tilted slightly back increases the contrast, while tilting it slightly forward decreases the contrast enough to render all three lines of text invisible. Perhaps if any of you are using LCD screens, you might tip them back slightly to see that the difference is indeed there.
Thanks.
You can change the text and background colors using JavaScript bookmarklets,
http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/look/index.phtml
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
unfortunately you have to run the JavaScript bookmarklet every time you load a page!
Home pages with lots more,
Bookmarklets
Subsimple Bookmarklets
Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site
there are some for Opera, and the ones for Netscape will sometimes work in Firefox too.
CMC fnord!