bboard

td.side > div.smallFonts > img {
  max-width: 45px !important;
  max-height: 45px;
  border-radius: 50%;
  clip: rect(0px,6px,20px,0px);
}
td.side > div.smallFonts:nth-child(1) {
font-size:0;
}
*{
background:none !important;
background-color:#fff !important;
color:#000 !important;
  border-left:none !important;
  border-right:none !important;
  border-top:none !important;
  border-bottom-color:#ccc !important;
  box-shadow:none !important;
}
table.post td.side,
table.post td.post{  
  border-bottom-left-radius:0 !important;
  border-bottom-right-radius:0 !important;
}
td.userlink > a > span{color:#222 !important;}

td.post{
  word-wrap: break-word;
line-height: 1.4;
  font-size:14px;
}

Posted by sureanem

Whenever you ask people about this, the answer is that the websites have to look good. But this is a complete non-sequitur! I mean, it would not be difficult to re-theme this board to look exactly like Discourse, with circular avatars and all. There is no intrinsic difference between them, just that one of them consumes massive amounts of RAM, works like garbage, and fails at the most basic of tasks. Why does it have to be slow, just because it's "modern"?

Posted by wertigon
That, and they want on-the-fly JS loading stuff. For instance, I tend to frequent the Level1 forums these days. They have a lot of cool stuff like an auto-updating editor that shows an automatic preview of what your post will look like, entirely JS driven. Not to mention these fancy scroll-down-for-more-content-loading thingie. Or links loading either previews or, in case of sites like Youtube, loads the movie frame.

The most sane thing I ever designed was a PHP mechanism that allowed me to load parts of a website. Basically, each template had a choice to either render in full, or only render the relevant parts. If you clicked the link with a JSON-call, it only loaded the relevant part. If you did not, you reloaded the entire site. This required a slightly ugly quirk for every template to be like this:

if ($minimal) {
  render_content();
  exit;
}

render_header();
render_content();
render_footer();

But otherwise worked like a charm. Of course, a JSON-driven JavaScript loader would have been even better but...

Posted by Kawa
Just FYI, wertigon's silly thing is now in the theme list, along with a marginally less eye-searing variant.