I hope that I don't hurt anyone's feelings but that old brown look was not very attractive.
Don't worry - saying that doesn't hurt my feelings because I didn't design it.
After we discovered that the Lightning theme worked with every browser except IE (
), I simply took that theme directly from the choices that were readily available from SMF's site. It was about the only one that worked that also seemed compatible with DS. But because some of the design was questionable (to say the least
), I did make a few changes that were documented on the Testing board at the time, but they were minor. And from the outset that theme was intended to be temporary - but it took me much longer than I might have hoped to get around to designing something new. That was mostly because I wanted any new theme design to be able to be used with SMF 2.0 as well as SMF 1.1.5 (our current system) so that the forum wouldn't have to begin from scratch when we upgrade once a perfected version of SMF 2.0 is released.