I posted a thread about this over in the Community Center in the hope that there was an existing way to do this, but it doesn't look like there is, so I thought I'd come over here and write a suggestion.

What I'm ultimately wanting is to be able to customize the color of the "new message" icons in the forums. I'm partly color blind, and I have trouble distinguishing the gray star from the (Orange? Yellow? Whatever color #EBB744 is) one. I have even more trouble with announcements, because of the thin lines of the circle and exclamation point.

I had some different ideas for implementing this:

Create a selection of icons that we could choose from; possibly the current set, a starkly contrasting set, and a black and white set maybe. For this option, we'd have a code in our profile that would indicate which icon set we use, and the forum pages would be modified to point to the alternate icon set.

Perhaps there would be a way for us to choose the color we want for new versus old, and the icons could be generated on the fly. I'm sure that's a lot more programming, but I expect there's several PHP-friendly widgets already out there that can generate PNG files from a template.

Another idea would be to let us upload our own icons, the way we upload our avatars. The icons could be limited in file size and dimensions to save on space. The forum pages would be modified to point to the set we uploaded, or the default set for users that don't upload an alternate.

If changing the icons isn't workable, perhaps we could get access via style sheet to the cell when the new icon is going to be displayed. If we had a style cheet code for table cells that are showing the new message icon, then I could change the color that way, and it wouldn't be disturbing to anyone else.

Hopefully one of those is an option that's not too much of a problem with respect to disk space/bandwidth/programming.

Anyhow, that's my suggestion.
 

Thanks for the suggestion CJ

I'll get this added to the list so we can discuss it at our meetings :)

~Jani

Renderosity Community Admin
---------------------------------------

Thank you very much, I do surely appreciate it. :biggrin:

I'll just add that if the table cells with "new" stars and "old" stars had different style classes, the current user stylesheet could be customised appropriately by those that need a better differentiation between them without disturbing things for anybody else.