Oh gross, Trooper. Don't make this personal with talk of "the same people". Having not commented on our new palette, I'll say no one's bitching about the maintenance simplification. That's what saves Apophis significant time (which I'm sure everyone's thrilled about, given the boost Apophis' presence on the other team gives anyone's KD!), not presenting a gray background color over a tan one.

We're talking browser rendering of background and foreground colors and image URLs here. 2003 stuff. Stuff that sufficiently-savvy webinauts (laff. surely that word exists.) reasonably expect to control for themselves in 2007.

It's apparent after speaking with Apophis that vBulletin too-tightly bundles the appearance of UI objects with their functionality. I'm amazed, really. For being so impressed by the model by which they allow their license owners to extend the functional experience (which, of course, should require server access), I'm very disappointed that the vBulletin application designers make it so difficult to customize the aesthetic experience (which, today, should NOT require server access) of whatever functionality the server-side configuration dictates.

I'm all for the server-residing resources defining default simple aesthetics values, but they should do so with today's methodologies which facilitate client-side personalization of those values. A template should define that there's a space, to the left of a thread title, that I can click on to go to the oldest unread post in the thread. And a template should define a default image URL to display in that space. I just want it to render that space to my browser using contemporary conventions which allow an end-user to personalize it. I want to change its color. Someone mentioned earlier in this thread changing its size. Changing when the space appears at all might justify server-side modifications. That's functionality. Easily changing its aesthetics properties if and when it displays shouldn't. That's pure cosmetics.

I wouldn't be surprised if the good folks at vBulletin move in that direction, and maybe even create motivation for third-party template publishers to do the same, with future releases. I realize that slapping a customized style definition on a dymanic web application is harder than sprucing up your Geocities homepage, but I'm pretty well accustomed to being impressed with the innovations vBulletin include (and/or create) in their releases, and them improving on their client-side aesthetics customization options would certainly impress me.