How about having a color picker for the shoutbox? That's something several have mentioned to me. Maybe something so it's remembered.

Personally, as an admin, I'd really rather stay away from ubbcode/html/colors in the shoutbox, bright/ugly colors (for chat) would really take away from other places of the forum I'd rather have user attention (not to mention, it would definitely look ugly seeing several different colors of text (and names) scrolling by). If this sort of option was allowed, I'd definitely want to be able to have it disabled.

I would too. (As an admin). lol Like I said, the members want it.

A lot of the time users "want" something, and when it comes to be, they find it distracting and no longer want it lol...

So, that being the point. Why create skins with different colors? Why not just have them black and white?

Some people like softer colors, some like bolder colors, some like light colors and some like dark colors and most of the time they have options which they want to look at.

With the Columns there are no options to turn the off. On some sites the shout box can be very very active, here it is pretty calm. On a busy site I hate the shout box.

I have on a different site asked members to remove an image in their siggy line or avatar as there are people with seizure conditions that flashing stuff sets it off.

I try to please the masses but will make exceptions for things like seizure conditions. You aren't going to plase everyone, so I try for the majority.

Val

Well, skins are completely separate than allowing users to use any color they want to post in the shoutbox...

imagine, your theme is a blue and white theme, and you have member posting in fuchsia and pink in the sidebar which throws your colorscheme off... add to that ad islands where you WANT peoples attention and you're drawing your real estate to some meaningless random conversation versus content that would be where you want users to look...

I can see where you'd like it, I'm just providing reasons why it would be distracting to have... personally, if it's added, i'm just saying i want a way to remove it...

i tend to want to disable color selection even in the standard text editor.. Cyan text on one theme may be nice for the poster, but viewed on another theme might look horrid..

hence why i create custom BBCodes for things like [h1] [h2] [callout] etc...

then the style dictates what should look best

this goes for font size selection too..