COLOR bbCode dead?

[tekuno]

It looks as though Flexodus (or somebody acting on our host's behalf) has shut off support for the "COLOR" bbCode tag. This means that there will be no more posts which hurt the eyes to read if you are using a different display theme than the person who posted it. To which I say: hooray! Thank you, Flexodus! Since white-on-black text hurts my eyes, I use the vBulletin default theme, and the occasional post with white or light gray text is practically impossible to read.

Nevertheless, it can be important to add some sort of notification to a section of text in order to draw the eye, and without color that's a bit tricky. Just to make sure people know that it exists: you can do this quite effectively using the HIGHLIGHT tag.

For example:

[HIGHLIGHT]OMG The aliens are here to abduct you! Run![/HIGHLIGHT]

will be rendered as

OMG The aliens are here to abduct you! Run!

(It seems to show up as red bold text in both of the currently available themes, which is reasonably legible.)

[TheMM]

Well with Flex0dus getting rid of bot accounts and preventing people from joining, he might've altered some other things temporarily.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by TheMM

Well with Flex0dus getting rid of bot accounts and preventing people from joining, he might've altered some other things temporarily.

I hope it's permanent. Colored text needs to die; it serves no purpose that "highlight" doesn't take care of, and it frequently gets in the way. (The only unpleasant side effect is that, at least for the moment, it looks like all those un-parsed COLOR tags are being left in the text of posts which had them.)

[tekuno]

Now that the [COLOR] tag is (thank goodness) finally no longer rendering many posts unreadable, there is a secondary problem: many posts still have "[COLOR=somethingorother]" and "[/COLOR]" tags in them, which makes them hard to read. Most likely a permanent technical solution will be found at some point (and some authors will fix the text themselves) but in the meanwhile, here's a handy trick to get rid of the mess yourself: a bookmarklet.

This will remove the color tags from the text of the first post in a thread display window. Theoretically, it should leave everything else untouched.

I have tested this in Mac Safari 6.0.2 and Firefox 19.0.2, and it works in both places, which suggests that it ought to work in any browser where bookmarklets work.

What you need to do is make a new bookmark and them replace the URL it points to with the following (which should be on one line with no spaces -- unfortunately, it seems that vBulletin automatically inserts spaces every so often, apparently more or less at random, so you'll need to remove them):

javascript:(function(){var%20x=(document.getElemen tById(%27posts%27)).innerHTML;x=(x.match(%2F%3C!--%20post%20#(\d+)%20--%3E%2Fi))%5B1%5D;x=document.getElementById(%27post _message_%27+x);var%20y=new%20String(x.innerHTML); y=((y.replace(%2F%5C%5Bcolor=%22?%5Cw+%22?%5C%5D%2 Fgim,%27%27)).replace(%2F%5C%5B%5C%2Fcolor%5C%5D%2 Fgim,%27%27));x.innerHTML=y;})();

If you put that in your bookmarks bar, then after you load a story with color tags, clicking on the bookmark will remove those tags, and nothing else.

(For the curious, but too lazy to decode the escaped text: this script finds the post number of the first post on the page by digging up the comment which appears right inside the table cell ID "posts" and pulling the number out using a regular expression. Then it looks for the div with the ID "post_message_X" where X is the post number. It takes the content of that div and uses regular expressions to remove the color tags, and then sets the content of the div to the clean version. If vBulletin were more complex, then using the innerHTML mechanism to modify page content would be somewhat problematic, but fortunately vBulletin produces very simple pages so tinkering after the fact seems to be okay.)