The site masthead seems not to wrap on 1024x768 now. I've also collapsed down the userpicture in the top left to reclaim some vertical space. You know what you look like.

This black theme (albeit still work in progress) is total, absolute, complete and utter crap. Yet, it is waaay better than the standard theme.

Fixed.

I'm actually building my own custom .css to replace my old one in stylish for the site. The padding, margin, and font-size elements are by far my biggest complaints on the new site.

When I first started, I noticed lots of <div ... padding: 5px ... > <div ... margin-top=4px ... > < div ... height="way too much">content</div></div></div>. A few items had 20+ pixels of useless padding around blocks. The lines of text ads are one such offender.

Just pruning those down gives me a much more readable site. The white space bothered my eyes much more than the color scheme.

Can you let me know when you finish it? I'd be curious to at least try your new one once ur finished .

There is way too much contrast with all the hard blacks and whites on the screen as it is. There is a lot of eye strain for me. I don't know why 98% of the web insists on using the darkest and brightest possible shades all the time.

I think a theme should be based on neutral gray. It would work in both light and dark viewing conditions. Use a site like Kuler.Adobe.com to help come up with nice color schemes that are easy on the eye.

http://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/search?term=tag%3Agrey <-

I'm trying to address the column widths in the forum index with CSS rules... this is a bit hard because they don't really respect max-width on the TH elements, which seems to be the one place to easily set these.

Here's my best attempt so far, which relies on :nth-child since the views and replies columns don't have individual styles for me to latch onto -- something that can likely be fixed?

(Dropped into the top of black-theme.css)
th.col_f_topic {
width: 650px;
}
th.col_f_starter {
width: 140px;
}
th:nth-child(4) {
width: 50px;
}
th:nth-child(5) {
width: 50px;
}
th.col_f_post {
width: 270px;
}

This prevents a lot of columns from taking up multiple lines when they don't need to in the widest view. It's far from perfect, but I think it's an improvement. Handling it directly in the HTML might work better -- the actual column sizes don't seem to have a direct relationship to what I'm actually specifying. Works in Chrome. IE keeps crashing when trying to open the local copy of the gdnet page I'm testing it on though, not a good sign

EDIT: Before and After

EDIT: Another problematic area: The comments section of blogs is grey-on-grey. Example:
http://www.gamedev.net/blog/23/entry-2249112-48-hours-later-moving-forward/ (no CSS fix (yet?))

Ditto on leiavoia's eye strain comments! Another site I frequent, www.ocforums.com has this as the only skin and I can only be on the site for a few minutes at a time before the headaches start.
Thanks for making it optional, and I'll pass.

This CSS is definitely a godsend. The comments of Blogs definitely needs to be modified though (as mentioned before for http://www.gamedev.net/blog/23/entry-2249112-48-hours-later-moving-forward/ )

Ditto on leiavoia's eye strain comments! Another site I frequent, www.ocforums.com has this as the only skin and I can only be on the site for a few minutes at a time before the headaches start.
Thanks for making it optional, and I'll pass.

IT BURNS!

For the truly desperate, here's another tip:

If you use Firefox, you can View->PageStyle->NoStyle to completely disable server-provided stylesheets. On an unwieldy forum like this it may not be very useful, but for sites that make you want to rip your eyes out it makes it readable at least.

(edit by Gaiiden)
Please everyone if you notice issues with the black theme, do not use the Feedback tab, but report them here so everyone can see them, offer corrections and superpig can also have all issues in one place for making edits to the theme.

Oops sorry, didn't know there was a thread. :/

Front page news and journal comments are now readable.