Microcosm Feature Suggestions

Assuming you're using a laptop, have you tried flux?

http://www.ampercent.com/adjust-screen-brightness-temperature-automatically-flux/8862/

Yeah, I've got f.lux on my laptop and Cyanogenmod on my phone with LiveDisplay (similar idea).

It'd be nice to have the option of not having a white background for LFGSS though, even though f.lux and livedisplay do temper it a bit.

I tested a dark mode quite a few times, it looks terrible.

It looks bad because all images, avatars and other media assume that the background is white. When the background is black (or dark), transparencies are obvious, edges in .gifs are obvious, videos look too dark, and it all gets unusable really quickly.

I would like a dark theme, but I've never made one work with the content so I have never shipped one. I removed support for it after the pointlessness was too obvious to me. I could create another, but I don't feel web content has moved on enough to make it work yet.

OK, thanks for explaining why it wouldn't work. Bit of a shame but if it was an abomination that's a pretty good reason to avoid.

I hope you consider trying it again in future though, on mobile everything that I can switch to dark theme I do, just so much easier on the eyes (and on the battery if using an AMOLED screen).

Cheers!

I do want to do it. But only when it looks good.

The theory behind why is that different devices have a different default colour for the background.

• Kindle = White
  
• CRT = Black
  
• Mobile phone LCD = White
  
• Mobile phone OLED = Black
  
• LCD = White
  
• Financial Times = Salmon Pink
  
• Apple Watch = Black
  
  

Basically, ignoring the FT, devices have a default background colour of black or white. If text is shown as the contrast to that, then the text is more readable and the experience nicer., i.e. white text on the default black background, or black text on the default white background.

So for all the devices listed above that are default "Black" background, those in theory would be much nicer to use if web sites like LFGSS offered a theme that embraced the device default background colour and, in those cases, showed the text in white on a dark background.

The problems are many:

• I can't find out using CSS what the default background colour is
  
• I need UI to show the alternate style
  
• The preference needs to be saved per-device, not per-user (sounds like a cookie to me)
  
  

But the thing that has fundamentally blocked me:

• All of the content on the web defaults to background "White"... and so it looks terrible when presented on a dark background
  
  

Even though the content is really bad and it looks terrible, the theory of readability is solid and so I'll keep coming back to it. I want dark stylesheets to work.

I always browse by using the Firefox function to change display colours, usually to light green on dark green. I'd prefer green on black, but it gets annoying because so many input boxes on web-sites have black text as default, which is then displayed on a black background. Green on black was the default on the first computer I used, and apart from giving me a nostalgic tingle, I find it easiest on the eyes. The only thing that I can see that really doesn't work is that it also affects images (presumably those enclosed in colour tags? no idea why), so sometimes I have to switch over to default colours (increasingly rarely, though, it seems).

Tried to insert gif. Failed.

matrix.gif

Sounds like a fun way to view the internet anyway. 'I don't even seen the code, just arrospok, foffa, brklz'

Pah, green on black, give me orange on black any day! ;)

In classifieds, it would be good to be able to sort the items for sale in order of which ads were posted most recently, instead of which ads were commented on most recently.

I realise that there is little active dev at the moment, but an idea popped into my head:

Google maps now has those "busy times" graphs for places. Lets you see graphically when a restaurant or library or whatever is busy.

It would be cool to see that for threads or members. "@mashton is usually active late at night and all day on Thursdays".

Maybe a privacy concern but the data is all publically available.

Please do not do this. It seems a good idea but if it led to just one slacker losing their job as a result that would be one too many.

Heh, true. But I am pretty sure that they way people get fired for internet use at work is via internal traffic monitoring.

It's already trivial to search for a user's posts and see the timestamps against them.

http://www.lfgss.com/search/?type=comment&authorId=56287

Simple Machines Forum had this about 10 years ago. I haven't seen many other forum packages implement this feature.

Is it possible that a user could get a notification when there is no recipient to a PM they are sending?

A couple of times I have left a conversation (unfollowed and deleted) and it has subsequently transpired that the other party has continued to reply.

Google maps now has those "busy times" graphs for places. Lets you see graphically when a restaurant or library or whatever is busy.

It would be cool to see that for threads or members. "@mashton is usually active late at night and all day on Thursdays".

in a similar vein to that back in the early/mid 90's when i got my first pentium pc I used to dial into a local Bulletin Board System and browse newsgroups as the real internet was still pretty barren at the time, the sysadmin once told me he checked the monthly usage stats and I had clocked up more hours in the month than every single other user combined (and it was a popular BBS).

could the 'Today' section include the possibility to filter-out the classifieds?!

If you are signed-in, you can ignore the Classifieds forums. This will totally exclude them from the Today list.

You can view the things you have ignored here: https://www.lfgss.com/ignored/ and then unignore it if you need to buy/sell.

To add it to your ignore list go here...

Oh. Have we lost the ignore button and I have been blind? I can't see it. I thought it was in the right hand bar.

We still have it :)

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Thanks.

I suspect it's me. I think if you create the forum you get an edit button instead.

@velocio can links work in quotes please?

www.google.com

example

You can

The quoting copies text only so you have to edit it before posting.

https://www.lfgss.com/profiles/?top=true

another column for count of comments?

Not a bad idea, I don't have that in the API today as I wanted the profile information to be cached for a long time. But I could probably achieve both with some trickery.