Not really, it's not like Terry is the first (or last) person to make use of fonts and colors. GH.com is probably one of the only messageboards I've ever used that lets you change the color of the text displayed and one of only a few that lets you alter the font size and face. A lot of other messageboards let you customize what you want all posts to show up as, so you can specify your own font size and font face to ensure good readability on your own monitor.

I've noticed many times some posts show up in a font size one range larger or smaller than the rest, probably without the person making the post realizing that they've changed fonts at all. All of that could be eliminated in favor of consistent readability if every post is displayed with the font face and size specified in your own control panel.

 

Hi Tom:

Amen

Terry

 

No-Comment

Terry

 

Can't believe I'm adding even my pesos to this thread but here goes. Tom, I do agree with you on how I'd have handled it were it me who was severely bothered.

Coming from a background in journalism, literture, and the human history of print, I'd offer that when a prosist overuses a craft to the extreme, be it diction, punctuations (!!!) or even use of color/font variations from the norm, it tends to have a hugely diminishing effect on the relative significance of that usage. It's like the boy who cried wolf. Shout it out in colors and 36 point bold and exclamations two or three times out of a hundred or so posts and we know you are really trying to exude some enthusiasm on the topic. Do it seventy times and we're all kinda like, "eh, who cares anymore." The topic isn't exciting to us when we all just assume the author is excitable.

 

No-Comment

Terry

 

Right...
_Forget about enabling larger text for some of us old farts with bad eyesight...
_and while we are at it, why don't we demand disabling the silly Smilies, signatures with lame sayings, and those annoying Avatars [especially the ones that are animated - sooo distracting].
_Then make rules that you cannot use any personalized styles what-so-ever, like symbols at the beginning of every paragraph or sign-off sayings.
_Oh yeah, almost forgot, then re-define GreenHybrid as only including hybrids getting 40MPG or better.
_Could go on with others, like only certain political views tolerated here, but what's the point?

_Good Luck...

 

Check out Anger Management at Blockbuster. Either that or go to a forum with most of your suggestions - www.insightcentral.net ....

 

Gillman,

Actually, nearly every one of your requests can be achieved through the user preferences control panel - but not on this messageboard. If you're a member of vwvortex or thecarlounge.net, you'll see that you can enforce a manual override of the front size to whatever you like (I too like large text since I run 1600x1200 screen resolution) disable the display of avatars, disable the display of signatures, and disable smilies in posts too. Some boards even let you block the display of posts by certain users, which would achieve your goal of not having to read posts by people you don't like. I think you were being sarcastic, but the really high end messageboard software does everything you asked for already.

 

I obviously was being sarcastic with the frivolous requests that this board be restricted to mundane post settings, "eliminated in favor of consistent readability", squashing any individuality in posts. Apparently you didn't get the point about how silly your initial request read to others (and hurtful to some). If you think different type colors are too distracting, then why don't you take your own advice and use GH Ignore List. Or do the more sensible suggestion by Tom and send PM to person(s) with style that bothers you, since it seems only a couple are in violation of your aesthetics tolerance.

Personally one of the reasons I like the GH website so much is because Jason has done an excellent job of programming this graphic-rich environment, where people may use Rich Text formatting for individual flare and Avatar images (some of which make me LOL daily - Hot_Georgia's for example is very entertaining). XCEL has found an individual style that falls within your old DOS BBS guideline and I think his is excellent also, and did not use it as an example to slam the style rather used to drive home the point.

Point Being - GH is a high end message board for a reason and individuality in posts, both in style and context, is what makes it so interesting.

 

I'm content with things as they are at www.greenhybrid.com. I'm not a believer in punishing an entire group because a few go to excess. I mentioned another forum that IMHO, is too tight because it does the things you suggested.

It seems like the rainbow text issue has been resolved and perhaps overkilled. I have not seen it.