How Do I Make The Fugly Go Away?

August 12, 2005 7:51 AM

Making a personal stylesheet to override a forum?

A group I am a member of is trying to transfer from an email list communication to a web forum. Their web forum design, is, quite frankly, fugly. It's neon pink, yellow and orange on black, with tons of spinning gifs all over the place. They like their branding so much, they've turned off the alternate template option in the forum software. Nobody so far has been able to get "the colorful and flashy design is not work-friendly and makes it hard to post" to parse as anything other than "you have no taste and everything you do is ugly". We'd like to stay friends with the owners, so we're letting it drop.

I'd also like to be able to use the boards without being blinded, and AdBlock can only do so much. They're using SMF 1.0.5., and I am using Firefox. I have some vague idea that I can do a stylesheet override from my personal system, but I've never been clear on how to do that in a site-specific setup. A quick google search turned up how for an administrator to change the style, but not a user. I suspect I'd also need a forum software specific css sheet as a starting point?

Is there a reasonably straightforward way of doing a user override, or do I just have to suck it up?

posted by Karmakaze to computers & internet (4 answers total)

I haven't used it myself, but it can be probably done with the Firefox extension Greasemonkey.
posted by cactus at 8:31 AM on August 12, 2005

I think the security issues with Greasemonkey for Firefox have been cleared up. You can get Platypus which will give you a GUI for generating Greasemonkey scripts. Once in the Platypus GUI you should be able to highlight an element(Ad, Banner whatever) and delete it out right, move it where you want it and change the background/foreground colors to black & white or whatever.
posted by mnology at 8:33 AM on August 12, 2005

Apply User Stylesheet (CSS) rules on a site-by-site basis
posted by misterbrandt at 8:36 AM on August 12, 2005

The Firefox Extension "Web Developer Toolbar" allows you to disable page colors, page stylesheets, and oh so much more.
posted by matildaben at 8:41 AM on August 12, 2005