Or at least, I wanted to, in order for us to have a fresh default for XMB 1.10.00. I have a rather good idea of what I want to do in my head as a matter of fact. However I am struggling to get good results

So I guess to ask, are there any opensource resources for things like the buttons and tiling backgrounds? I was going to look for some stuff but with things like that I don't want to be infringing on intellectual property/reuse etc so I want to be careful...

I use Pinta for image editing, which is like paint.net 3.x (even being written in C#), but actually FOSS

Also, I'd like to use PNGs rather than GIFs in most cases (since they're much smaller, and using GIFs is more or less a remant from IE6 not properly supporting the alpha channel), so perhaps it's worth looking into being able to support more flexibility with things like images. webP is of course a thing.

Being able to make themes without certain named labels, like the new thread icon etc, is also a fairly reasonable idea, perhaps being handled simply by falling back to rendering as a text link if the file does not exist. Caching this information will of course be a priority.

If you are finding GIF format lock-in, write up something in the bug tracker and include as many examples as you can find.

I recently added an issue for GIF filenames appearing in the English.lang.php file which is like theme problems squared.

poll bar
And wait, it already accepts non-GIF formats with the same filename? I didn't try messing around with it yet, I just assumed the filenames were hardcoded, since every other theme uses GIFs exclusively

Also, I see you finally fixed the quick reply box. Nice! (By the way, the post text seems to have a weirdly large margin when no post subject is entered)

Yeah the quick reply was driving me crazy. I didn't even know there was a separate table just for the checkboxes. I had to delete that table just to find the real problem.

I don't think the post text has a margin. It's like space always reserved for the subject. Probably an easy fix but not something I've got the patience for at the moment.

Something else to consider: Many of the GIFs are being used as buttons. The modern perspective on this is ... well ... unnecessary. Maybe those button GIFs should be fully eliminated and replaced by CSS styled buttons. Then if a theme developer wants to insert a background image for the button, that can be a theme customization.

Pretty much this.

Any refreshing of the theming system to make it easier and more flexible to customise the board is welcome. Buttons are also really easy to make with CSS and we use them in the admin panel already now (I saw that change, thank you)

Userlinks are also not applied consistently, such as in the forum lastpost thingy. Is this intentional behaviour (due to the whole "allowing guests to post"? XMB certainly does have an... interesting way of handling user profiles, it rarely seems to use the user ID

eg the param for the profile url is member.php?action=viewpro&member=dorpydorp, rather than say member.php?action=viewpro&member=322

I will take a look at this later today. I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out if we can include the whole UTF-8 migration with any remaining schema changes. It's too much work for this milestone. As much as I hate this old 'latin1' schema, it's going to be better to release the reorganized code and make all the other changes first. That will give us time to plan the huge schema rewrite, the translation system overhaul, and some other odds and ends without rushing or pushing the captcha changes into next year.

We already use buttons for the new reply/preview post, and it'd be fairly trivial to convert existing icon-based buttons to reasonable looking CSS, IMO.