My personal thoughts:

I think the general idea of having custom themes to give communities a more personal feel can offer some level of benefit. I think it also introduces many moderation concerns and sometimes causes pages to be of low visual quality.

Functionality: 1: Upload box art

• This is basic functionality. 2: Custom table colors
• Interferes with username colors quite often. 3: Custom text color for categories/sidebar
• Does this offer major benefit? 4: Customize Speedrun.com logo 5: Custom background
• Gives page a visual association with the game. 6: Possibly custom trophies in the future.
• Can be cool.

Moderation Options: 1: No themes 2: All themes must be approved by a full moderator or above (~8 people currently can perform general site moderation) 3: Full moderators adjust games as they see necessary

In the most generic sense, I think if we choose to support themes, they should at least follow some basic guidelines.

General theme guidelines:

• Should improve the quality of the board for the general public.
• Should make sense associated with the game for the average user.
• The main focus of the page is the data. The theme should not detract from that.

While the site currently has issues on mobile, in the long term we'd naturally like for it to be usable in this manner. This creates a need to limit higher intensity issues on the page.

High intensity features: 1: Animated images 2: High resolution/large files 3: Scrolling

Scrolling may or may not be okay, not sure how intensive it is.

I can offer discussion of an option to maintain these items whereby users must opt-in, but I think it is not worth the hassle to maintain these high intensity features. If it's off by default is it really worth moderating?

I don't really like the transparent tables over images. It makes things hard to read. I would probably recommend making all tables with images behind them solid, personally.

I expect that the disable themes option will be available for users to remove colors and images regardless. My personal minimalist approach would be an approved medium resolution non-animated background with no transparency in the table and approved trophies only.

What functionality is good, what is bad and distracting? If there is good functionality, how should we moderate it?

Remember this is all as it pertains to the average user. If you personally dislike it, the option exists to remove it. If you feel that parts of it detract more from the data than they improve the personal feel for each board, that is what I want to know.

(I might revise this a bit later, want to get discussion started though.)

Just some observations after messing around with 1 game's theme. I'm not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination.

Backgrounds and foregrounds should be designed for tiling. A 1920x1080 (for example) background will take a while to load, not look how it should on many screens, not convey anything useful on mobile, etc.

Scrolling is really cool, and I wanted to use it. Then I checked the CPU usage and realized it was wasting CPU time simply to have a leaderboard up in your browser.

Translucency in the tables can look ok with a dark background, but I understand the point. The key if it is allowed is to not bring it down too far. Make sure it's opaque enough to read the text.

I learned lessons in all those areas from making this theme http://www.speedrun.com/castle_of_illusion_sms

Which is nothing special.

My thoughts:

Functionality: 2. Maybe username colors should all be the same on leaderboards so they don't conflict with the themes 3. It can be useful to match the colors to the rest of the themes 4. Seems strange to be able to customize the logo

Moderation options:

1. People seem to like having game themes, so probably not
2. Seems annoying to both game mods and global mods for little benefit
3. Seems best to me, allow freedom while removing anything too unpleasant

If usability/design is a concern, game themes could be default invisible unless a user has an account/enables themes.

High intensity features:

1. Seems really distracting, not sure if there's a use for it that doesn't take away from the leaderboards
2. Seems fine as long as it's not completely absurd
3. Scrolling of backgrounds seems distracting and resource intensive for no real gain. Scrolling in front of backgrounds (like the Animal Crossing theme) has some benefits but is only a bit less resource intensive, so I'm not sure it's worth the cost in usability.

When I have a game page with scrolling open, it gradually increases in memory usage from 50k to 550k or so and uses 15-20% cpu (other sites usually use about 50-100k and less than 2% cpu). This seems a bit excessive to me, though it might be a programming issue.

I think transparent tables look nice over most backgrounds and are easily readable as long as the opacity of the table isn't too low.

The "themes off by default, enabled in user settings" solution would help with a lot of issues in my opinion. How do other people feel about that?

Would be nice to get a little bit more feedback on this, especially: [quote]The "themes off by default, enabled in user settings" solution would help with a lot of issues in my opinion. How do other people feel about that?[/quote]

I think themes off by default is a good thing.

Bumping this thread for more discussion.

[quote]The "themes off by default, enabled in user settings" solution would help with a lot of issues in my opinion. How do other people feel about that?[/quote]

I would like to get some idea of a relatively general policy regarding themes, and that is dependent on what defaults are given to non-users and what options are available for users.

Honestly, I don't think there'd be much of a point to having themes if they're off by default. A lot of people check this website without logging in and I don't think everyone is going to check the settings when they sign in for the first time. It's a really cool feature and I think it'd be lost to the majority if it was off by default. Maybe there should be a message at the top of every page with a custom theme telling everyone that the page has a custom theme and that it can be turned off? CrystalChaos mentioned the username thing which I think should be brought up, a lot of leaderboards have a colour that can't really be read on that leaderboard. Black, for example, doesn't work on the YHTWTG leaderboards, but I don't really want to change it because black is the background colour for the entire game.

My main concern is that a reasonably sized group of people seem to dislike overly flashy layouts, meme themes, gifs, and images that take to long to load. Not to mention that many of these things eat up mobile data (though the site is not optimized at all for mobile currently).

Having to get an account to mitigate this issue is not at all the ideal solution. The default view of the site for non-users should be the most presentable. I am all for options for users, but non-users/first time visitors are forced with the option chosen.

I think there are many good themes. I think there are many bad themes. I would like to get a solution that allows non-users to not be stuck with bad themes. Possible solutions include tighter moderation on themes in general, manually selecting only certain really good themes to appear by default, or turning off custom themes for non-users.

We can move people to the settings menu on first sign in, if desired.

I think transparency on the board layer often causes readability issues. We tried standardizing the name colors a while back, but it looks really bland. There is probably a way to design it to look better with standardized names showing. I think it just makes more sense to not use transparency, personally.

A couple of things:

Mobile behaviour can (and should) be handled separately from non-mobile. Of course as you mentioned the site isn't optimized for mobile anyway, but changing features everywhere just for mobile is not necessary either.

Disallowing gifs to be used for themes is not something I expect many people to have many issues with, afaik there are no themes that are better because they use gifs and a lot of themes that are worse because of it.

Having opacity go from 50-100% instead of 0-100% seems reasonable to still offer the main functionality, but reduce readability issues.

While it is true that large image sizes are a problem for some themes, this can largely be negated by implementing better compression.

For transparent board layers: Everything below 80% transparency seems to hurt the readability of text. So, i would suggest to only add 2 options in total: Solid and transparent, where the second one is equal to the current 80% transparency.

I disagree, there are plenty of themes that are still very readable at 70% transparency at least. Honestly in my opinion, leaving it fully customisable is the best option, with the possibility of a "report theme" button for those that are unreadable.

Yeah having themes off by default is really no fun.

Treat games with bad themes the same as you'd treat games with a backlog of runs to verify: contact the mods first. :)