: Know what else doesn’t? HBO. That’s good, and then sometimes that’s bad.
: Here, we’re gonna’ talk about one of those bad things, and that’s the fact
: that the site hasn’t changed as far as I can tell for more than a decade.
: The last major stylesheet updates as far as I can tell come from 2002.
: Probably the most substantial change to the homepage in as long as I've
: lurked has been Claude taking pity on us mobile users and adding an extra
: space to avoid accidental button mashing (which I believe we owe to Levi,
: who knows when.) There's a lot of useful stuff that's mostly historical at
: this point, meaning that it drowns out the actually regularly-used stuff.

: But it's 2016! And have you looked at the page source for the front page?
: It's tables, man!

: And then we get to the forum page. At this point, our "arcane" and
: "hard to understand" forum setup seems like as fundamental as
: breathing, but that doesn't mean it couldn't use a facelift. It's still
: advertising Halo 2. As an Xbox exclusive. Coming soon.

: So my question is—what's the feasibility of giving (at least the front page
: and/or forums) an overhaul?

: Since I hadn't dug into HTML and CSS in any major way for years, I took a
: stab at a sample of what a pretty minimal update might look like. You can
: see a live demo on my web site (note that it's a straight rip of the front
: page, so navigating away from the page will take you to live stuff on the
: site now.)

: http://davidhfuchs.com/hbo/hbo_redesign_v1.4.html

: Nothing drastic is going on here—it's still pretty much the exact same color
: scheme—but the site goes from being just 650px wide to supporting multiple
: display widths, with a top-level navigation that would send a lot of old
: Halo 1 and Halo 2 stuff to the "Archive" heading, and on small
: screen sizes degrades down to a mobile-friendly stacked display. None of
: the images have really changed, although if things were getting updated it
: would probably be a good idea to throw in code for @2x retina display
: sizes for the old logo and misc. integral graphics. None of the CSS and
: HTML is validated either, so there's possibly some wonky stuff, so that's
: my caveat. All this stuff should work with IE7 and up, and certainly look
: fine on any modern browsers and going forward.

The biggest problem with this sort of overhaul is that we're not just talking about the front page - we're talking about EVERY page (except the forum). I've looked at the idea of updating in the past, several times... but the work involved has always made me say "eh, maybe next month".

It's possible, I suppose, to simply pour the existing content into a new CSS-based template and hope for the best... but sooner or later the same complaints that caused you to post this in the first place would surface, for some other section. And we're talking literally THOUSANDS of pages. Like I said, some would import fine into the new template... others, not so much.

I'm actually not averse to setting up a test - we could leave the content as-is, and display different headers/footers/stylesheets depending on which domain we're talking about, thereby testing the new code with the existing pages just to see how bad the problem actually is. I'm not sure when that could happen - these next few weeks are pretty crazy-busy here, with non-web stuff, so it might not be right away. But it could be interesting!

The forum, unfortunately, is an entirely different subject. There's no easy way to move that to ANY other system - posts for WebBBS are stored as individual files, not database entries. So moving elsewhere requires some pretty drastic back-end work. (It's been attempted, more than once. Never successfully.)