What a welcome surprise when I come back to DaniWeb after being absent for a couple of days.

My signature was destroyed. Instead of a slate-green color, it burns the eyes with a shocking red. I wouldn't have minded if it had been changed back to the default dark gray, but it is a little bit ridiculous to have something in my signature doing something that I have told others not to do.

The irony of this whole thing is that while Dani claims that colors are being abused, this change isn't going to fix anything. People can still use annoying color in their posts, and as long as they can do this, we will end up with annoying posts from people who see color as a novelty. Meanwhile, you're penalizing all those who actually used the colors correctly.

Myself, I don't use colors very often. However, I do like to have the choice of more than 2 colors which burn out my eyes when I'm emphasizing something. Especially when I'm highlighting code.

What colors do you recommend, taking into consideration that they need to stand out against black, cannot be a shade of purple (as that would clash with our site layout), and cannot be a shade of blue (as that is confusing with our links).

Regarding your signature being destroyed: I'm sorry about that. As mentioned in a previous post, I did take measures to ensure that older posts with different colors remained intact, unaffected. However, I didn't consider the fact that forum signatures might be affected because, for more than half a year now, color has not been allowed in forum signatures. (You were grandfathered in because you hadn't altered your signature in all that time).

Upon reflection, I stand by my decision in thinking that limiting users to red and blue was the right compromise - there are just as many people who want all colors as who want no colors, but I could have done with offering people more of a "heads up" or a longer period of discussing the issue, so I do apologize for that.

I'm serious though - for those of you who don't like red and green. If you had to pick your own two colors to highlight good or bad lines of code, and they couldn't be blue, purple, anything that isn't visible on a white background, or anything that can't easily be differentiated from black, what colors would you choose?

I went and changed the setting so if an invalid color is now specified, it defaults to green instead of red.

I never used blue in regular text, however, I was a big fan of it when I was highlighting code. Like Narue mentioned previously, it's commonly used to show "good" code, whereas red is for "bad" code. And links are rarely used inside code tags, so it's hard to say that would break the design.

As far as regular text goes, I prefer colors such as slate, dark colors, and of course a light gray. I don't depend on all of them, but at least one of them which doesn't stand out like Bright Red would be nice.

Not quite so sure about that. My latest signature I've only had for a few weeks. I'm aware of the fact that there wasn't color allowed for quite some time, but in the last few months color was re-enabled in the signature. Either that or there was some bug.

Speaking of bugs, how come the color palette still shows all the colors? Shouldn't you at least make people aware of their choices?

Programming is only a very small section of DaniWeb ... there's Windows/mac/linux technical support, and Internet marketing, and job offers, and a webmaster marketplace, etc. It's just not feasable to tell people "well you can select from these colors for code and these colors for non-code" ... So the colors that you allow you have to be prepared to allow whether in code or not. So while yes, links typically aren't going to appear in code, which is why they're one of the colors used to do syntax highlighting, it just isn't feasable to expect everyone to not use them outside of code if they're made available. Quite a few regular members come to mind who use blue for regular text.

As far as non-code colors, there really is no reason to use color. Color is here to assist in the comprehension of posts. Not using color in posts doesn't deter from their comprehension at all. You can emphasize your point just as well without it being in light grey ... it will just be a lot easier to read when not light grey If there's a particular word or phrase you want to emphasize, use bold. It's a whole lot less annoying to everyone who has a hard time reading multicolored text.

To quote tgreer, "A properly constructed, punctuated, grammatical sentence needs no additional formatting. No word in my above sentence needs to be bold-italic 15.5pt orange to make sense."

Moving on ...

> but in the last few months color was re-enabled in the signature
Actually, I had just forgotten to set the no color for sigs option for the Staff Writers usergroup, so when you were promoted to staff writer ... Even I haven't been able to add color to my signature in a very long time.

Also, not sure why you get the full color palette in the wysiwyg editor. What page is that on? You might be caching the JavaScript file.

Chalk up a vote for enabling color.

Correct color usage can greatly improve the clarity of a post, especially when one wants the post to appear simple. A good usage of color can often be found in the spyware section.

But again, does feedback even matter here anymore?

Well, I would assume that your DaniWeb code would automatically disable the extra colors in the palette for non-code forums. But whatever.

Can't your parser just change any blue that's not inside [code] tags into red or green?

Ever consider a time when you want to de-emphasize something? Edit "tags" come to mind. I don't want them to be obtrusive to the reader, so they're colored gray. But it should still be possible to see where something was changed.

Yes, but the people who actually use it to emphasize something don't "multicolor their posts". The irresponsible color taggers can still make their entire post bold red if they want. As long as that is still possible, we're never going to be rid of ugly posts. Guess what, if you have 40 colors, and you remove 38 of them, what is that person going to do? They're not going to stop using colors, they're going to use those 2 remaining colors!

Must have been the cache. Now it's displaying properly, except for the fact that the danged thing drops so far down on the page! It's been this way ever since your site revamp.

Hi,

Of course feedback is important - and it's what I primarily go by. But whose feedback do I take?

Do I listen to tgreer who thinks it's absurd that people need to use color to express themselves?
Do I listen to Ancient Dragon who says that any type of color in peopole's posts is too distracting?
Do I listen to Infarction and iamthwee and ~s.o.s.~ who agree color isn't necessary?
Do I listen to Narue who only wants color to represent good and bad code lines?

... Or do I listen to you, KevinADC, Dave S, and The Dude who want a full selection of colors?

There's no way I could let everyone have their way. It's just the nature of the beast. Therefore, in this particular instance, I faced a situation where myself and some regular members didn't want color at all to the point of really finding it distracting and obnoxious. And then there were other regular members who wanted full use of color, but primarily just to point out particular lines in code (like Dave S and Narue).

Therefore, I thought that the best compromise would be to allow everyone to select from two colors, therefore eliminating the rainbow effect that is just oh so distracting, and emphasizing the fact that colors should only be used when necessary, and not the way teens use in IM conversations (which was the direction we were headed in by providing the full color palette).

I think I made a mistake in not making this a public poll, but to give you an example of what I'm up against and how hard it is to please everyone:

People who don't want color include myself, Ancient Dragon, Infarction, tgreer, and s.o.s..

People who wouldn't mind choosing among a limited selection of colors (which is what we ended up doing) include Duki, jbennet, Rashakil Fol, and Sulley's Boo.

All far more than the number of people who do want a full range of all color choices.

And yet of those who want a full range of color, the general concensus is that you only want to be able to use two or three different colors, you just don't like my color choices.

So how am I not listening to feedback?