Lack of interest Reset All Users to Chosen Style

[imno007]

Would be nice to be able to reset everyone to a certain style, without having to disable all but the one, especially around the holidays, when you want all users to experience a style at least once. I know it's probably not feature in huge demand, but it's one of the little things I miss from SMF.

 

[Mike]

Why isn't the disable all but one option a good approach? I would argue that for your use case, it's better; when you re-enable the other styles, the users go back to using the one they actually had, not whatever is now set to the default.

 

[imno007]

Hi, Mike, thanks for taking the time to respond. You answered why I don't like the current approach yourself: because when you re-enable other styles, users go back to using the one they already had. If you have users who have vision problems or access your site on a certain device that's easier for them to navigate on one style than it is another, or in many cases just because they're old fuddy-duddies who hate any kind of change, inevitably they're going to complain if you disable all but the latest new shiny style that you're trying to "inflict" on them. In my experience, it usually takes less than 12 hours for the complaints to start to roll in. That means you have to re-enable all the old styles, and as a result a lot of your members never see the new style unless you put up an announcement saying, "Heh new style, you might want to check it out!" Without the announcement, some of them might eventually stumble on it on their own, but when it's a holiday style that you don't plan on keeping around year-round you're under a bit of a time constraint. In the past when I used SMF and could reset everyone to one style/theme, those who didn't like it knew they could easily change it back to their favorite on their own, now they know they have to start a thread complaining that they can't.

 

[Paul B]

In the past when I used SMF and could reset everyone to one style/theme, those who didn't like it knew they could easily change it back to their favorite on their own, now they know they have to start a thread complaining that they can't.

I'm not sure that argument stacks up.

If they know how to change from the default back to their preferred style then they should also know how to change from their preferred style to the default.

As a forum member, if the site owner arbitrarily changed the style I was using, forcing me to go back and select my preferred style again, I wouldn't be too pleased about it.

 

[imno007]

No offense, Brogan, but I'm not sure your argument stacks up, unless I'm missing something here. To use your own argument, aren't I "arbitrarily" changing the style and forcing you to use my own preferred style if I disable all but the one new style I want you to see, preventing you from changing styles? You seem to basically be making my own point, which is that if I do not disable all other styles I have to make some kind of announcement making users aware of the new style, otherwise many of them will never see it. And for the record, the only time I personally ever made such resets in the past was at holidays, I didn't change people's styles arbitrarily any time I felt like it, dozens of times every year. Furthermore, I don't think I ever received a single complaint about it. But if anyone wanted to complain about it, then I would deal with it, just as I have to deal with them now complaining that I've disabled their favorite style(s).

This is a real post I got within three hours of putting up a Christmas style yesterday and disabling all the others:

We now have the Christmas theme.:banghead:
The ability to deselect this theme in the lower left corner has vanished.
How can I change back to the default theme?

Anyway, I don't see the harm in having the reset feature, if it wouldn't be difficult to implement. People like yourself who prefer the current implementation could continue to handle it as you always have.

 

[Paul B]

If you want to change the style and leave the others selectable, run a query.

 

[imno007]

If you want to change the style and leave the others selectable, run a query.

Can you give me the exact syntax, please?

 

[Paul B]

UPDATE xf_user SET style_id = 1;

Change the value to suit.

Or set the new style as the default and use a value of 0.

 

[imno007]

Okay, thanks, Brogan, I appreciate that. Obviously I'd rather see such a feature in the admin, but I'll take what I can get.