feeling lost in the forums / reading difficulty

[Michael Horvath]

This is a difficult topic.

Now that we have switched to the new forum software, and now that some months have passed since that,
I find myself in the situation that I feel completely lost inside it.
I very much appreciate all the features it has, but I find its current skin containing too much distracting stuff,
too many buttons, too many things on the screen.
also, in the design there is "too much air".
in the previous software, I was able to mentally keep track of various threads, and I found it easy to jump
back and forth between them. today, whenever I go to my "home link" for the forum,
http://forums.ldraw.org/search.php?actio...ly&days=14
, I just see a long, confusing list
and do feel so lost inside our forums that I
(a) do not read much there anymore
(b) lose track of discussions going on
© lose track of my own posts

I wonder how this could be solved. My first request would be if it would be possible to get a much, much simplified skin,
with all the bells and whistles reduced to a bare minimum.
for example, in the link mentioned above, I would like a view which has 1 line per post.
it should not cite the contents, and not use 2 lines for showing the thread topic and the post topic, just the post.


does anybody feel the same?

A darker or grayer skin might make the forum more readable. Right now the white on white theme is kind of garish and hurts the eyes.

Here are some skins: https://mods.mybb.com/themes

I like this one a lot because I don't like round corners and edges:



Also it would be cool to have the LUGNET feature of being able to preview older and newer posts in a thread at the bottom of the screen. But that I know that is unlikely.