Hey all, first off I want to thank the YaBBSE developers for all the hard work, it's a wonderful piece of software! I installed and converted my perl YaBB over the weekend, and it was easy and painless, the whole process took 15 minutes...
Anyway, after viewing the default install and template, I made a few changes to make things look a little cleaner, especially under mozilla/netscape6. All of these changes are simple steps and each change will take less than 5 minutes.
To reference the small changes I made, check out my forum topic list here:
http://forums.dee-nee.com/index.php?board=3 1) Make the message subjects bold in the message list - My old YaBB used bold threads, and I find them to be a bit easier to read and makes the most important area of the Message List stand out. To make the Messages/Topics/Threads appear bold, edit line 208 of MessageIndex.php under Sources. Put the bold tags <b> and </b> around $txt[70] and you are all set. This one is stricly a matter of personal taste and IMHO enhances the look in both IE and Mozilla...
2) Remove all instances of the <acronym> tag - The acronym tag is used in quite a few files, to bring up a little description on each member's name when you hover over their link. Unfortunately, the acronym tag underlines the link with dots on mozilla and netscap6, which looks terrible. Most of the links to member names will show these dots for mozilla/netscape users and they need to go. Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of which files used acronym but MessageIndex.php had a couple. Simply fire up your text editor, search for acronym and remove the opening and closing tags. It won't effect anything else, so don't worry about deleting them. Your mozilla users will thank you...
3) Change the date format for posted messages - With the default date format, the "Last Post" fields of the Message Lists are too long and wrap around, a lot of times to three lines. This will make the topics take up more vertical space and the "Last Post" field is overstuffed and looks inconsistent from topic-to-topic. To change the date format and go to the Admin Center and click on "Forums Preferences and Settings". Then, under "Default time format", change it to "%m/%d/%y, %I:%M %p" - this will show the date numerically and remove the seconds column. See the above link if you want a better look. The advantage to this is that all topics and the Last Post field take up a smaller amount of room and look the same.
I hope someone out there will find this of use. Thanks for reading and keep up the good work!
Author