Roundo: our new mobile-friendly theme, proposed to be set as default

[Laird]

Hi PQ crew,

This thread is to let you know about proposed theming changes, and to get your feedback on them.

Arguably, the main accessibility problem of our board has been the difficulty of browsing it on mobile devices with its default theme. We'd tried to offer solutions to ease this difficulty: access via the Tapatalk app as well as a mobile-friendly theme that we installed early on (at the same time as a bunch of other themes, to give members options).

The Tapatalk app mostly works fine and has seen some usage, but it's a bit of a hoop to expect members to jump through, and it doesn't help us to retain visiting guests on mobile devices who, being confronted with the default mobile-unfriendly theme, potentially don't bother to look further and stick around.

The custom mobile-friendly theme we'd installed was regularly used by at most one member: it wasn't an especially compelling choice.

After the last upgrade of our board's forum software, I decided to do something about this situation.

I started by deleting all of the additional themes we'd installed, including the custom mobile-friendly one. Why? Because the task of maintaining them - updating templates on every MyBB upgrade (or most upgrades anyway) - was so tedious that for several years I had only been performing it for the Default theme. Thus, all of the other themes were broken to at least some extent, potentially fatally, and potentially to the extent of constituting a security risk. Given that they had so few users, the cost of keeping them wasn't worth the negligible benefit.

This left only two themes: the MyBB Default theme which almost everybody uses, and the one descended from it which customises the posts font for Dave (of the Kam-ish rather than Bailey-ish variety).

I then installed a new mobile-friendly theme that I've been very impressed with since it was first released: Bitoony's Roundo Light.

After a fair bit of work to tailor it to our board and to enhance it with my ideas, aided and assisted by some great testing and feedback by @Typoz in particular, it's now ready for general use or at least general testing. I invite you to choose it via the Theme Selector bottom of page and see what you think. Let us know what you like, what you don't like, what works, what doesn't, and any suggestions, criticisms, and other feedback that you have. In particular, let us know how well it works for you on your mobile devices, and whether you endorse its being set as the default theme for our board, so that we finally have a default mobile-friendly theme that is (in my view) a compelling choice.

The current default theme would still be accessible, will still be maintained, and nobody would be forced to stop using it if they prefer it - Roundo would simply be the theme experienced by guests, and the theme set for new members at registration (who, too, would be free to switch if they preferred).

I'm pretty excited to share this theme with you all. Technically, it's been shared since I quietly installed it and began customising it three and a half weeks ago, but nobody seemed to have noticed or at least adopted it. This is, in a sense, then, its unveiling. I look forward to your reactions...

Hi PQ crew,

This thread is to let you know about proposed theming changes, and to get your feedback on them.

Arguably, the main accessibility problem of our board has been the difficulty of browsing it on mobile devices with its default theme. We'd tried to offer solutions to ease this difficulty: access via the Tapatalk app as well as a mobile-friendly theme that we installed early on (at the same time as a bunch of other themes, to give members options).

The Tapatalk app mostly works fine and has seen some usage, but it's a bit of a hoop to expect members to jump through, and it doesn't help us to retain visiting guests on mobile devices who, being confronted with the default mobile-unfriendly theme, potentially don't bother to look further and stick around.

The custom mobile-friendly theme we'd installed was regularly used by at most one member: it wasn't an especially compelling choice.

After the last upgrade of our board's forum software, I decided to do something about this situation.

I started by deleting all of the additional themes we'd installed, including the custom mobile-friendly one. Why? Because the task of maintaining them - updating templates on every MyBB upgrade (or most upgrades anyway) - was so tedious that for several years I had only been performing it for the Default theme. Thus, all of the other themes were broken to at least some extent, potentially fatally, and potentially to the extent of constituting a security risk. Given that they had so few users, the cost of keeping them wasn't worth the negligible benefit.

This left only two themes: the MyBB Default theme which almost everybody uses, and the one descended from it which customises the posts font for Dave (of the Kam-ish rather than Bailey-ish variety).

I then installed a new mobile-friendly theme that I've been very impressed with since it was first released: Bitoony's Roundo Light.

After a fair bit of work to tailor it to our board and to enhance it with my ideas, aided and assisted by some great testing and feedback by @Typoz in particular, it's now ready for general use or at least general testing. I invite you to choose it via the Theme Selector bottom of page and see what you think. Let us know what you like, what you don't like, what works, what doesn't, and any suggestions, criticisms, and other feedback that you have. In particular, let us know how well it works for you on your mobile devices, and whether you endorse its being set as the default theme for our board, so that we finally have a default mobile-friendly theme that is (in my view) a compelling choice.

The current default theme would still be accessible, will still be maintained, and nobody would be forced to stop using it if they prefer it - Roundo would simply be the theme experienced by guests, and the theme set for new members at registration (who, too, would be free to switch if they preferred).

I'm pretty excited to share this theme with you all. Technically, it's been shared since I quietly installed it and began customising it three and a half weeks ago, but nobody seemed to have noticed or at least adopted it. This is, in a sense, then, its unveiling. I look forward to your reactions...

Logged in and turned on the Roundo light... on my ipad, (I normally don't bother logging in, unless I want to post something)

In Roundo Light, I don't even know what I'm looking at, the site UI appears totally broken to me. What writing I can see is too small and too light for me to be able to read, everything I can see is very low contrast. There is enormous amounts of white space around everything thing, I mean pages worth of white space. I was able to navigate to the bottom of the site and restore default, so that I could reply.

I wonder if my cache needs clearing CSS... but if that's so, because I always arrive on the site not logged in, I always get the default CSS first, and then logging in I can set to Roundo. But clearing the cache would get me back to the default site again. So I can't see a way round that.

Note: Because of censorship, I mainly use Telegram, and other sites that can be somewhat dodgy. Therefore I only use my ipad in Apples new lockdown mode. This doesn't really affect me on any other sites I visit, they all render pretty much normally.

I tried logging in on my iphone instead, much of the excess white space disappears, but although I can see there is text, I can't actually read it, it's too small, but I think the main problem for me is that it's far too low contrast, the colour scheme seem to be set up to resemble very light coloured pastels. I was also unable to navigate the site ( possibly related to inability to read any text). If I expand the view to make the text larger, I can read it, but I have to do so at such a size that I can only see a few words at a time.

Logged in and turned on the Roundo light... on my ipad, (I normally don't bother logging in, unless I want to post something)

In Roundo Light, I don't even know what I'm looking at, the site UI appears totally broken to me. What writing I can see is too small and too light for me to be able to read, everything I can see is very low contrast. There is enormous amounts of white space around everything thing, I mean pages worth of white space. I was able to navigate to the bottom of the site and restore default, so that I could reply.

I wonder if my cache needs clearing CSS... but if that's so, because I always arrive on the site not logged in, I always get the default CSS first, and then logging in I can set to Roundo. But clearing the cache would get me back to the default site again. So I can't see a way round that.

Note: Because of censorship, I mainly use Telegram, and other sites that can be somewhat dodgy. Therefore I only use my ipad in Apples new lockdown mode. This doesn't really affect me on any other sites I visit, they all render pretty much normally.

I tried logging in on my iphone instead, much of the excess white space disappears, but although I can see there is text, I can't actually read it, it's too small, but I think the main problem for me is that it's far too low contrast, the colour scheme seem to be set up to resemble very light coloured pastels. I was also unable to navigate the site ( possibly related to inability to read any text). If I expand the view to make the text larger, I can read it, but I have to do so at such a size that I can only see a few words at a time.

This is a screenshot from my iPad

[Laird]

@Max_B, please try visiting the site with lockdown mode disabled (apparently, you can disable it per site, so if you don't want to disable it globally, disable it just for PQ). That's the only thing I can think of that might be causing your glitchy display. Otherwise, try clearing your iPad's browser cache, at least for PQ, or force-refresh the page when you're viewing PQ.

Re the low contrast, I think the best solution would be to install side-by-side the RoundoDarko version of the theme for those who do find the light version's contrast problematic, but that won't be immediate as it would require me to identify and then duplicate all of the customisations I've made to the light version of Roundo.

Re the small text on your phone, it  seems fairly comparable on my mobile phone to the size on other sites - albeit maybe a little smaller. Let's see whether others also report finding the font size problematically small on their mobile devices, and, if so, I can try to increase it without messing up the layout.

@Max_B, please try visiting the site with lockdown mode disabled (apparently, you can disable it per site, so if you don't want to disable it globally, disable it just for PQ). That's the only thing I can think of that might be causing your glitchy display. Otherwise, try clearing your iPad's browser cache, at least for PQ, or force-refresh the page when you're viewing PQ.

Re the low contrast, I think the best solution would be to install side-by-side the RoundoDarko version of the theme for those who do find the light version's contrast problematic, but that won't be immediate as it would require me to identify and then duplicate all of the customisations I've made to the light version of Roundo.

Re the small text on your phone, it  seems fairly comparable on my mobile phone to the size on other sites - albeit maybe a little smaller. Let's see whether others also report finding the font size problematically small on their mobile devices, and, if so, I can try to increase it without messing up the layout.

it looked to me like it had low contrast colours which were actually designed for use on a black background. So I guess roundo light will work well with a black, rather than white background, where the low contrast colours on white, will naturally be reversed as high contrast on a black background. I have never seen such low contrast text on a white background before on any site.

That said, the new responsive layout on my iphone (as opposed to my ipad) seems likely to be an improvement, were it not for the fact I'm struggling to read it. Where there is black text (in posts bodies) it's ok, as it's black, but it's quite a fine font face so is uncomfortable for me to read.

[Laird]

it looked to me like it had low contrast colours which were actually designed for use on a black background.

Which colours in particular? I assume you mean (mostly?) the colour of links - this colour?

it looked to me like it had low contrast colours which were actually designed for use on a black background. So I guess roundo light will work well with a black, rather than white background, where the low contrast colours on white, will naturally be reversed as high contrast on a black background. I have never seen such low contrast text on a white background before on any site.

That said, the new responsive layout on my iphone (as opposed to my ipad) seems likely to be an improvement, were it not for the fact I'm struggling to read it. Where there is black text (in posts bodies) it's ok, as it's black, but it's quite a fine font face so is uncomfortable for me to read.

I can confirm disabling lockdown mode for psiencequest on my iPad, fixed the glitchy layout.

[Laird]

I can confirm disabling lockdown mode for psiencequest on my iPad, fixed the glitchy layout.

Hooray. I'm glad about that. I'm not so glad that lockdown mode disrupts our site though. It'd love to fix it if possible, but working out why it's occurring without having an iPad myself is tricky. I might be able to borrow one.

Which colours in particular? I assume you mean (mostly?) the colour of links - this colour?

yep, it's that colour for the links, and on the list of forum threads, the member name etc uses a very fine font in the same colour, this is just a smudge of colour to me. Also the very light grey for navigation, for example the breadcrumb links.

[Laird]

yep, it's that colour for the links, and on the list of forum threads, the member name etc uses a very fine font in the same colour, this is just a smudge of colour to me. Also the very light grey for navigation, for example the breadcrumb links.

I get what you're saying. Do you have any suggested changes that we could make to these colours/fonts that would both improve readability and not degrade the look and feel?