Customization = good, but I think you picked a bad example. The themes are functional. hubski is essentially a forum, and I've never been on a forum that benefited from too much thought about its skins. (See: livejournal.) I've spent time on a thousand forums, and basically every time I tried some skins and defaulted to basic out of sheer necessity. What other kind of customization do you want? Usage changes? Specific UI stuff? I think I'm stuck in the reddit mindset where I can't see a reason for everyone's hubski to be slightly different.
I'm not saying I want to change the way Hubski looks to you. I'm saying I want to change the way Hubski looks to me. UI is important, and UI is personal. With Livejournal, you're impacting what everyone else sees (see also: Myspace). The reason Facebook won that one is that by forcing conformity on everyone, it set certain standards for legibility. (well obviously there was more to it than that, but still). However, if you take a look at Protopage, you can tweak it any way you want - it's just a UI that allows you to arrange things to your liking. I've been playing The Last Story pretty heavily and damned if I don't spend nearly as much time fucking with peoples' wardrobes as I do fighting monsters. And you know what? They built that in, and they incentivized it. And what it equals is more gameplay for less effort and - as previously discussed, The Ikea Effect. Customization counts.
Right, but how? hubski is a basic forum. The rule of function over form applies here, I think. Like you say, we have certain standards for legibility, and this is good. Anything else seems a bit superfluous. If our admins here spent all their time on this and were paid and so on then yeah, maybe I'd look for some behind the scenes customizability, but hell, a forum's a forum. We're here to read text and follow links.I'm saying I want to change the way Hubski looks to me.
Colors, fonts, etc. Then why are there six presets? The discussion, already in progress, is "messing with the look." The "admins" are, as previously stated, spending time on it already. My argument, if you'll read back, is that I'd much rather have the customization in my hands than theirs because then I'll get what I want without having to worry about anyone else's notions. Notions such as how "dark" is actually "asphalt."Right, but how?
hubski is a basic forum. The rule of function over form applies here, I think.
If our admins here spent all their time on this and were paid and so on then yeah, maybe I'd look for some behind the scenes customizability, but hell, a forum's a forum.
Okay. Now that I think about I guess I'd like some more markup. Hex color palettes maybe. Some cleaner menus (mk, the domains followed popup is messy as hell -- sorry to keep bugging you about insignificant shit but hey). I've only ever used one but I sort of assumed all that changed was the background color ... as in they all have the same function over form aspect. From here it just sounded like you were advocating for extremely personalizable CSS stuff, impacting where things were on the site, menus etc. -- what I would consider overkill for a forum. Maybe because I'm unfamiliar with wordpress I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Either way. I'm happy with what we have and would probably continue to be happy with whatever we ended up with.Colors, fonts, etc.
Then why are there six presets?