I don’t mind too much of the current colors that this forum is made up of (hues of blue and grey), but if it’s possible, I would very much like to see a more original color scheme that sets this site apart from the rest of the “just another phpbb” sites. Perhaps a color scheme matching that corner picture of the five philosophers. Using hues of brown, black, and yellow, would bring a finer sense of age and style to this site. Certainly some extra art wouldn’t hurt either…
Are you volunteering some artwork? We’ve just got ourselves back on our feet. We do have another style called Dusty Green if you want to give it a go. Not sure it if still works, but it should. It might be more to your taste.
Well Pax…Dusty Green doesn’t sound too clean but I wouldn’t mind seeing what it looks like. As for artwork, I wouldn’t mind whipping something up in Photoshop. I think the homepage could look a little less condensed.
Mmm… Dusty Green, If you can still see this don’t run it, it wasn’t reinstalled after the hack. So I don’t think it’s an option anymore. While we have looked at different themes we never found anything that really hit us as a must have. If you know of any good ones drop the link and we’ll take a look.
Also you never saw the I Love Philosophy (White) Homepage. I’ll put it back on-line later today when I get home for work. It’s a much clearner looking homepage, but overall the current was perfered to it.
If I find anything, I’ll drop 'em here…and I look foward to seeing the other homepage… 
Okay, I looked at http://www.phpbb.com/styles/ and took a look at most of the style templates they have. I saw Dusty Green and found it kinda cool, but techie-look’in. Other templates I saw that looked cool:
AdInfinitum
ChunkStyle
ClanzDarkness
DarkSky
exposion_dark
NoseBleed
subBlack
Of all the ones I saw, I thought ClanzDarkness was most suitable for ILP. Not because of the gothic-style motif, but because the background images show some buildings that look as if they would house books or knowledge. DarkSky would get my second vote mainly because it holds the same mysterious darkness, but has no images in the background. I thought if you wanted a new look, but didn’t want to change much, I’d suggest subBlack with its groovy night-time look.
Mmm… some of those are nice… The one I liked most was, SmoothBlue. I don’t like themes that have bright colours on dark backgrounds. I find after you read on them for about 5 minutes and look away I can still see an imprint of what I was reading. They seem to be burning my eyes. 
Also here’s the link to the other homepage… but it still has a rendering layout bug, so it looks all over the place, but you can get the idea.
Hah…indeed. That green hue on the alternate homepage seems to work well with the DustyGreen template. It’s always best to think about which template would work the best with the homepage, to give the sense of unity with everything. It’s not like you want to have pages of complimentary colors confusing everyone.
I get the idea of the kind of template you’re interested in. Mainly white backgrounds with cooler colors accenting, kind of like what we have now, which is why I think ChunkStyle, Eos, and myApple do fair justice. However, if you wanted to go with DustyGreen, that wouldn’t be too shabby, but my vote is definitely for ClanzDarkness - that building in the background with the columns looks like some library or something.
Whatever you choose in the end is fine with me anyway, it’s your site, heh. 
ChunkStyle:
Pro, It’s very nice’n’cool.
Con, It wastes space by being in the center, it also has a small font.
Eos:
Pro, It’s also very nice good colours. Fonts are a good size.
Con, It wastes space,
myApple:
Pro, Very nice great artwork.
Con, It wastes space.
I can’t stand any web forums that are fixed width. The whole point of a web browser is you can change the size of the window. As for what will we install, Ben is the main man, it’s up to him what templates get added. But I’m ensure if enough people what a style it will be added.
hey, if you guys are really serious…
I can help out a bit in installing and adjusting skins & modifications (known as “mods”, and are avalible from PHPBB’s website) on bulliten-boards. I’m also fairly good with using MySQL databases, etc, etc.
just letting you know in case you ever need any help sometime in the future.
I’d love to see people who can help jump in because I like this forum and really would like to see it have a polished profesional look.
What I’m most interested in is increasing the kilobyte size of the avatars. I think alot of people are suffering because the avatars they’d like to put up aren’t small enough. I had to slave over Photoshop just to get the right calibrations so the image would be just under 6k.
hehe, Black & White PNG… Wow that must have taken a while
This is ‘I Love Philosophy’ not ‘I Love Slow Downloads’. We try to make this site work with 56Kbit users in mind. I know it would be great to have 20KB for an avater but it would only take 5 replys and you have 100KB download on your hands and it would be 4 seconds per avatar. Alot can be done with 6KB!
sagesound: try converting your avatar to a .gif file format. I think .gif compresses better than .png. Besides, I highly doubt you will lose any color from your avatar if you convert it to .gif, since your avatar’s only colors are black and white…
…I really dunno, but it’s just an idea…
It used to be a JPG that was many times the size it is now…and being a vector-based image made it quite large. I sized it down and tried saving it as BMP and GIF, but eventually, the compression of a PNG allowed it to be just under 6k.
I understand that this site is trying to be helpful to 56k users, but eventually you have to think about the future…seriously, how many people who actively post daily have a 56k modem? I don’t know if the server can log that kind of information, but it would be a good question for the polls.
There’s a point in time when popular websites move from being practical to being aesthetically pleasing. Just like a religion, you must incorporate more to draw more in.
I have a 56k modem, and nothing but a 56k modem. And post here actively.
Well I’ve started a poll, let see what the people have.
It just occured to me…that everyone can customize the forum’s look to their liking. This is done by downscrolling the “board styles” in the profile section. Unfortunately, the only available style is subSilver.
So…would it be so bad for ben or whoever to upload a bunch of templates into the site so people could have a wide range of styles to choose from? That way you Pax could have SmoothBlue, and I could delve into ClanzDarkness…
[size=150]The question is…why hasn’t this been done already, or is there a complication that can’t be overcome?[/size]
Because so far most people are interested in the content! Not the pretty colours!
But the colors DO help!
DustyGreen was good but there is some kind of error with it. Often when I submit a post I get kicked off. While with subSilver this never happens.
More variety on templates can’t hurt, if anything it will help. Who knows how many smart people we lost because they are simply tired of seeing the same old colors for phpbb boards. All of us get aversions of this sort some time in our lives, it has nothing to do with whether people are interested in the content or not. Don’t get me wrong, the content should be primary, my only claim is that these templates are a nice addition.
What’s your take?