User Title Colours (ALL)

[Lex]

We should all discuss this then poll the options that are suggested.

IMO all mod staff should stick to one colour and all site staff should stick to another (different) colour. I went with TLS green for site staff because it's TLS green, but it's a bit fugly with other colours and it's also the same colour as Staff Emeritus.

If we're going to go for a forum-wide colour change, now would be the time what with restructuring and whatnot. Post suggestions/ reasons here then we can poll the options and I can make the changes.

fwiw, I do like the mod/admin blue but I will say that "Administrator" is quite difficult to read on the default forum background.

 

[Ⓐaron]

I noticed the new usergroups you created weren't bolded, so I fixed that. I'm not sure what colours if any should be used for the usernames in those usergroups. I'm also not sure if people who have donated want that or their new site staff usergroups to be their display usergroups, so I've left those as is. I altered Shademp's display usergroup to his Compilation of FFVII Editor group though because seeing him without a bold username just looked wrong.

 

[Flintlock]

My view: the colours themselves don't really matter, but we might as well try to a) simplify things, b) improve our accessibility (many of our colours fail WCAG guidelines at the moment) and c) minimise disruption by changing no more than is necessary. In other words: we pick one easy-to-read colour for each user group (exception: a choice of a few for donators), and stick to the colour that already dominates each group where possible.

Analysis of our current user title colours:

Moderators: 1x #6996AD, 1x #1569C7
Administrators: 4x #0000FF
Community Manager: 1x #E9AB17
Compilation of FFVII Manager: 1x #7C8C99
Donators: 18x #E9AB17, 9x #6996AD, 5x #1569C7, 4x #38E897, 4x #FFC0CB, 2x #7C8C99, 2x #0000FF, 2x #329555, 1x #000000, 1x #FFD700, 1x #66FF66
Fan Works Editor: 1x #E9AB17
Final Fantasy Editor: 1x #E9AB17
S-E Affiliated Admins: 7x #98FB98
Site Author: 4x #7C8C99, 1x #98FB98, 1x #1569C7, 1x #0000FF, 1x #6996AD
Site Developer: 1x #6996AD
Site Director: 1x #FFD700
Staff Emeritus: 12x #38E897, 1x #6996AD
Super Moderators: 5x #1569C7, 1x #FFD700

Notes:

• #7C8C99 is the default user colour. I find it strange that people in "privileged" user groups still have it.
• There's a lot of overlap there, and much of it is redundant. For example: all forum staff members can access the Donator's Domain already, I believe, so they don't need to be in the Donators group.
• A lot of those colours are too similar to each other to be easily distinguishable. One such group is #66FF66, #38E897 and #98FB98.
• The colours which don't have enough contrast from our background to pass accessibility tests are #1569C7, #0000FF and #000000. The first two are for super moderators and administrators respectively, while the last is Looneymoon's custom colour.

I'll try to come up with a suggestion for a new colour scheme. For now I just thought I'd share that information in case anyone else had any ideas.

 

[Ⓐaron]

The donator usergroup ensures the donator title will show up. If staff aren't in it, they won't be listed as donators on their postbit. Other group overlaps are similar in purpose.

The colour similarities aren't that great in a lot of cases. I can easily tell the difference between the usergroups, anyway.

 

[Flintlock]

The donator usergroup ensures the donator title will show up. If staff aren't in it, they won't be listed as donators on their postbit.

Do they need to be? I certainly wouldn't mind if my donator status didn't show up, for example. People know that I contribute to TLS in other ways, and the same will go for all other staff once we have our minimum requirements in place.

 

[Ⓐaron]

I certainly appreciate having the title.

 

[Flintlock]

Fair enough. Is there any reason why Ryu is currently in the moderators and super moderators groups, though?

 

[Ⓐaron]

Probably a relic of the time when he was mod of only the final fantasy sections. That can probably be changed. He probably doesn't need to be listed as mod of those sections anymore, either.

 

[Lex]

Done, I hadn't noticed that.

Flint I feel like you might be conflating user title colours with username colour a bit. Username colour and most colours on the postbit are in general set by the user - custom colours that a person can set in their own CP. I'm talking about just the colour of the user title (i.e. Admin, Site Developer etc).

Options can be set so that all with a specific user title also have their username coloured, but this can be overridden by custom options on the CP and I don't want to force people into not using those options. This is why some people have the default colour and others don't. If I set the user titles to change username colour, this only functions on those who have not specified their own colour already (and are using the default).

Since most of us actually choose our own colour, I didn't see the point in doing this. The end result would be Avec, Force and Shademp all being the same colour that's different from the rest of us. You and Lic's colours are gold because you're set to default and "Donator (Gold)" overrides the default.

There's a simpler way to explain what I just said probably, but yeah.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Well, all those colours Flint listed are actual usergroup colours. But CK explicitly asked for his exact colour (so did looney for that matter) and the SE affiliated admins are in italics so I don't know if we need to change any of those.

 

[Lex]

No they're not, because

Site Author: 4x #7C8C99, 1x #98FB98, 1x #1569C7, 1x #0000FF, 1x #6996AD
Site Developer: 1x #6996AD
Site Director: 1x #FFD700

Is incorrect. What he's listing there is username colour, not user title colour. All of those titles are #98FB98. As are Community Manager, Fan Works Editor, Final Fantasy Editor and Compilation of FFVII Editor.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Oh. I see what you mean. I think I missed a sentence in your post.

 

[Lex]

I knew my explanation was shit

To summarise again, the point of this thread is to discuss the colour of user titles (Such as Administrator, Super Moderator, Site Director, Site Programmer). User titles have no direct bearing on the colour of a person's username unless they're using default colours and haven't set their own, which most of us have. A person's username can be set to match the colour of the user title, but if people have custom colours set on their profile, the custom colours will override any options I choose in the backend, so I didn't bother.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Well, my dog's been waking me up before I intended to wake up several of the last days, so your explanation may not have been shit. I may just be sleep deprived.

 

[Flintlock]

Okay, I misunderstood. I thought those colours were all either the default for their respective groups or had been explicitly requested.

Could one of you post what all the user group colours actually are, then? I don't see the forum in the same way as most other people, as I have a load of custom stuff switched off in my settings. For example, when I'm logged out I see:

But when I'm logged in it's:

I'm guessing the blue of "The Man" in the second image is the default colour for Administrators because it matches the "Administrator" text colour? Or is it that the green of "The Man" in the first picture is the default colour for Donators because it matches the "Donator" text colour, which also happens to be the same as Lex's "Site Director" text colour? It's all very confusing to me.

 

[Lex]

Aaron has simply set a custom colour for his username which happens to match the colour of the Donator user title.

The user title colours are all as they appear to everyone, even if you switch to vBulletin default. Great old one is always red, no matter what. Administrator is always dark blue. Super moderator is always a lighter blue. Site staff's colour is green (right now) no matter what options you choose.

The only one that changes is Donator, because people who donated requested different colours.

If I'm in the settings for one of these groups, I can set it so that a person's username matches the colour of the usergroup, but I chose not to. So usernames are entirely independent of user titles in general. Flint, your username is gold because the Donator (Gold) usergroup is set to make your username appear gold. You can at any time go into your user CP and set your custom username colour. If you have custom colours turned off for everyone, you'll see gold even if you set your username colour to be white.

tl;dr, stop looking at the username right now, the colour of that is variable depending on a person's custom settings. Other user titles are not variable unless they're custom or default colour. (User titles that have been set up and haven't been given a colour either appear as the default forum colour or the colour a person chooses in their control panel).

EDIT: To explain further, there are about 10 different Donator usergroups. A new usergroup has to be created for a person have a specific colour to be independent of the custom colours they choose at the left of the postbit.

Using my postbit as an example:

Username is gold because I set it to Gold in my User CP
Site Director is green because I set the entire usergroup to appear as green in the forum backend
Donator is gold because I belong to the Donator (Gold) usergroup
Super Moderator is royal blue because the entire SMod usergroup is royal blue
Legendary Member is light blue because it's automatically the forum default and I specified that "text on left of postbit" appear as light blue in my User CP. The same goes for the rest of the text on my postbit. I assume all of that appears as the default grey when you're not logged in.

 

[Ⓐaron]

I'm using #38e897 as my custom username colour, which happens to be the same as the staff emeritus colour because I was using it as the colour for my links long before it was introduced as the staff emeritus colour. So I can see where that would be a source of confusion, but basically just disregard it as Lex said

Also Lex you're in a special usergroup that has bold gold as its default colour, so you're a special case and don't actually show up as the usual blue of super mods.

 

[Lex]

^Yeah, it all gets a bit more complicated with some usergroups because of certain things.

Admin for example are bold and italicised. Originally the site director usergroup was bold and default colours, but I missed my gold colour so I asked Aaron to change it back at the time, which caused problems with Donator not appearing as gold, which I recently fixed.

Then when I became SMod my default username colour became the SMod blue, which I overrode myself in my User CP.

The colour your username appears as in thanked posts depends on which display usergroup you belong to. There's primary usergroup, display usergroup, then checkboxes so you can have more than this. This is why even though I'm an SMod my thanks still appear gold, because my Display Usergroup is site director which has gold as the default colour.

 

[Cthulhu]

Can I just say that you guys take your username colours really fucking serious?

 

[Ⓐaron]

Username colours are serious business

 

[Flintlock]

Right, I think I'm on board now.

If we're going to change the group colours, we should establish a group hierarchy first. As the overlaps apparently serve a purpose, users can continue to belong to multiple groups, but their default user name colour will be determined by the highest group they are in. My idea of the hierarchy and the new colours would be:

1. Administrator
2. Site Director
3. Super Moderator
4. Site Editor
5. Moderator
6. Site Author
7. Staff Emeritus

Note: "Site Editor" is just an umbrella term for Compilation of FFVII Editor, Final Fantasy Editor, Site Developer and the rest of the new roles.

This more or less reflects the actual hierarchy we are using here, in that everyone has the privileges of their own group as well as those of the groups below them, but not of those above them. For example, Site Director is above Super Moderator because Lex can do everything an S-Mod can do, but the other S-Mods can't do all the stuff he can. Same goes for Site Editor and Moderator, as editors will be able to moderate the forums that match up with their areas of responsibility. I've left off Donator for two reasons: firstly, it wouldn't really fit in - it would have to go under Site Author, but I don't think we're going to give all authors automatic access to the donator's domain (might be a way of encouraging non-financial contributions if we did, though); and secondly, there are already a shitload of colours in that group. Also, I got rid of the S-E Affiliated Admins group. None of the members of that group has so much as logged in for over two years anyway. They can be put in Staff Emeritus.

As for the colours, forum staff have #3077FF, which is the closest accessible colour I could find to the existing colour. Site staff have a lighter hue, #7DA9FF. I wanted to use similar colours to highlight the fact that we're going to be working closer together. The only problem is that #6996AD, one of the standard donator colours, is pretty similar. Unfortunately, our background colour does not have a huge range of other colours that look good on it, so there was bound to be at least one clash. If people don't want to give it up then we could just phase it out by not giving it to any new donators. Finally, I didn't change the Staff Emeritus colour, as that's pretty well established and already has a good contrast ratio.

Bold and italics means that a person is at their top of their "branch" (forum or front page) and bold means that they are one step down.

 

[Ⓐaron]

That looks good but one possible problem is that the colour you selected for site staff is pretty similar to the default link colour on The Lifestream Blue (which I'm using right now). In fact I couldn't even tell there was a difference at first, although I'm sure if I saw them next to each other the difference would be obvious.

One thing about the bold and italics is that people usually associate it with administrators due to the fact that it's a vBulletin default setting but I guess Lex technically is an admin in some ways. Idk.

 

[Flintlock]

That looks good but one possible problem is that the colour you selected for site staff is pretty similar to the default link colour on The Lifestream Blue (which I'm using right now). In fact I couldn't even tell there was a difference at first, although I'm sure if I saw them next to each other the difference would be obvious.

You're right, but if you want to go through every skin and find colours which don't clash with any of them... see you in 2015

I was thinking about using #FFB830 for site staff as it's the complementary colour of the forum staff colour (and we complement each other so well), but it's very similar to the existing donator "gold" colour, which is far and away the most popular colour amongst our donators, and I don't want to force so many people to change.

Edit: also, someone should probably fix the Lifestream Xmas Edition skin before December. It's quite hilarious at the moment, but not intentionally

 

[Ⓐaron]

Well, fair enough. If there are no objections I'll go through and update all the usergroups in a few hours.

I think I may also give moderators and site authors italics so they are still distinguished from regular users and donators. That'll help eliminate some of the confusion too. So the ranks would be:

• Administrator
• Site Director
• Super Moderator
• Site Editor
• Moderator
• Site Author
• Staff Emeritus

 

[Flintlock]

Well, fair enough. If there are no objections I'll go through and update all the usergroups in a few hours.

Lex did say this earlier:

We should all discuss this then poll the options that are suggested.

Also:

I think I may also give moderators and site staff italics so they are still distinguished from regular users and donators. That'll help eliminate some of the confusion too.

That might not be a bad idea.