Is there a way to change the appearance of the board?

I'm not sure if you guys have something like that here, some places weem to have it while others do not. I'm not sure if there is an appropriate term for it, but it would kind of be like a "skin" for your favorite program. Say instead of the green and cyan background i get right now, i could choose, say- black and white with green text (or whatever). I'm not sure if the reason I can't find it is because the option is not available, or because maybe i am looking in the wrong place. Thanks in advance!

-Bob

Nope.
You do have options for the way threads are displayed and how many posts per page.

vBulletin based systems do have the capability for user selectable skins, but it is really only feasible if you have a "plain vanilla" copy of the program running. The reason for this is because any custom modification you would do to the program would have to be done for each of the available skins, which would dramatically complicate things. Say, for instance, if my programmer charged me $200 to install a fairly complicated modification to my system as it is now. Well, if I had 6 skins, that would mean 6 modifications he would have to make, and that one mod would wind up costing me $1,200 instead of $200. That fact alone was enough to talk me out of allowing user selectable skins. Not to mention bug patches would also have to be applied to each of the skins as well. Or if I would want to do some minor layout change with the advertisements, I would then have to duplicate that change to ALL of the skins.

The other problem is that many people will design there advertising banner graphics around what looks good with the color scheme now in place here. If they ran the risk that their banner might look horrible, or nearly unreadable with one of the selectable skins, this could really complicate matters for them. Even with my yellow highlighted text ad area above, I would have to make sure that it would stand out in EVERY skin here to be effective.

Thanks, but no thanks. Although it may be a "cool" thing for some users, I feel that it would cause many more headaches then necessary. Not to mention that it would likely be wasted effort anyway, as many members would not even know how to use it.

ah, ok... i was just trying to see if i was missing because i was looking in the wrong place, or because it was simply unavailable... my main reason i was interested was because when I am at work the bright colors stand out like a sore thumb! (yeah, i know the simple solution is to not come on here while at work, but i am addicted to this place already, LOL!)...

i never thought about skins causing customizations more difficult, but now that i think of it, that does make sense... pretty much every board i have been to that has their own "tweaks" in place do not have skins. I don't take these things into account sometimes because as a certified computer geek (i've been programming since i was 5) I tend to not think of stuff like that.

I'll just tweak some things in IE and that should be fine for my purposes. Thanks for the info guys!

Originally Posted by dirty_harry

(i've been programming since i was 5)

Hey, you can retire pretty soon.

Maybe you missed the 1?


Rick

Originally Posted by crotalusadamanteus

Hey, you can retire pretty soon.

Maybe you missed the 1?


Rick

lol, no... 5 (five) and in an attempt to not venture too far off topic, i started when my dad brought home a computer when i was 5, and i've been a bona-fide nerd ever since The majority of programming until i was about 14 was for entertainment. Anything money i made after that was spent on college :eatpointe