Thanks folks. There was one week of behind the scenes development on the new design. Then, a screenshot was released to forum staff for comments and suggestions. However, there is only so much you can forsee and work with from a test environment. It then went live. And now we're going through a second week of fixing things up, tweaking things, changing things around as a result of member feedback and navigation patterns in our Apache logs.

We posted at the same time wizmonster Girly in the sense of "I thought 90% of techies were guys! This doesn't look like a down 'n' dirty techie hangout! I want those manly blues back This looks like a little girl's diary!"

Blues are boring! Bring on the purple! Purple - Gay pride! Its time some of these techies were dragged out of gray/blue boring 80'/90's into the cool sleak purple millenia

As long as it's just purple, it's all cool. But if you start putting rainbows in the corner, i'm outta here.

The purple is fine, and definitely not girly. Stick with it!

I think I speak for everyone that matters when I say: Get over it. The design is better than what we had before, and in the end it's the content of the forums that counts, not the pretty pictures.

Sure, it's a little girly. But that's a good thing. It'll keep annoying macho guys from spamming their neanderthal comments (like "It's too girly!" ) all over the place.

I've just signed up today and the first think that crossed my mind is that the navigation is unique to most vB boards. It took me 2minutes to find out my UserCP on the page. There's just so much content everywhere it's almost overbearing and confusing. Also as a registered member who was just logged out I was looking for a login box, not a login link at the top