New Dark Red Forum Skin

High-contrast alternative to the light skin

By PF Staff in Site News on Apr 25, 2012

For those of you who have been waiting for a darker theme on our forum, the wait is finally over!  We are happy to unveil our new dark red skin, which uses the same layout as our default skin, but has a dark background and white-on-gray color scheme with red links.

Together with this new skin, we've also launched a new style selector which will make it easier for you switch between our different skins on-the-fly.  Whenever you click on the "Style Selector" link at the bottom of the forum, you will see the following menu slide up:

(Click to enlarge)

Simply click on the icon corresponding to the skin you want to view, and it will be applied to the page you are currently on.  The new dark skin is the second icon from the left.  Note that if you are inside one of our Pentax equipment databases, you will be redirected to the forum homepage after choosing a new skin.

You can also permanently associate a skin preference with your account, so that you don't have to use the style selector every time to log on using a different computer or browser.  To do so, proceed to your User CP Options page, and select the skin you want from the dropdown menu, as shown below:

Together with the new skin we also launched three new smilies for the forum (bottom row in the screenshot), and redesigned the entire smilie set.

Special thanks go to Adam of PentaxForums.com and Sam of DigitalVB.com for undertaking this project.  We hope you enjoy the new color scheme and find it more readable if you were having trouble with the others!  If you end up using the dark skin, please consider donating to support similar projects in the future.  Your support is greatly appreciated!

Note that just like our default skin, this new dark skin will not work with antiquated browsers, namely Internet Explorer 7 and older.  Internet Explorer 8 does support the skin, although it will not look as good as in modern browsers.  We recommend browsing PentaxForums.com using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Internet Explorer 9+.  Internet Explorer 7 users will automatically be shown the classic red theme, which looks much more "square" than the default theme, but is more compatible with older browsers.

Update: more contrasty yellow and blue skins have also been added!