Has there been an ATS site colour change?

Is it just me or has the whole back ground colour to the site gone a bit wierd?
The boards are all like a light grey colour and its not very easy on the eye.

The links are now in a red colour rather than their old blue. If its my computer Im sorry but if its not and it is a new lay out, Id like to say I liked the old layout better.

Hit the "go dark" button at the very top of the page.

You've gone "light". Up at the top of your screen is a button that says "go dark". Hit it and it'll go back to normal.

Wow

i havent noticed anything different at all it's the same as always so i dont think its ATS

sorry but i cant really help you out much there just giving my 2 cents

edit : ah see the 2 posts above

[edit on 8/2/2009 by Anti - Government]

Thanks. Not sure how I went light there but thanks for that info. I had no idea you could do that! Ive had to put up with that for 2 days , next time I will just push go dark!!

This seems to happen because the google indexing bot, which crawls the ATS site, delves into the 'go light' and 'go dark' button links, and provides the resulting pages as search results.

So, when you use the search feature, you will occasionally find URLs that have "&colorshift=yes" encoded in them, and if you follow those, it will not only take you to the page you requested, but change your color scheme as well.

The problem is that there is no standard way to tell web spiders not to do this, because the standard specification for the 'robots.txt' file doesn't support a feature called 'wildcard matching'. Check out the ATS robots.txt:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

However, the googlebot does support wildcard matching, so if the ATS site admins would replace their robots.txt file with this, it would solve the problem:

sitemap: www.abovetopsecret.com...

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /forum/single/
Disallow: /forum/mem/
Disallow: /forum/cc.php
Disallow: /tags/
Disallow: /forum/thread*&colorshift=yes

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/single/
Disallow: /forum/mem/
Disallow: /forum/cc.php
Disallow: /tags/

(Note: I have not verified this solution, of course)

mmm well you lost me there! . I have no idea what a google indexing bot or a web spider is so I'll just have to keep re-setting it but thanks for that.

reply to post by Mr Green


Yes that was more a rant to the site admins that specific advice to you; the previous posts have pretty much covered it: click the 'go dark' button.

But maybe another little bit of advice, when you do a web search for ATS threads, either with google or the little google box on each ATS page. Before you click a link, hover the mouse over the link and look at the status bar at the bottom of the page. If you see "&colorshift=yes" at the end of the address that is displayed, don't click on the link. Instead, right-click on it and choose "copy link", then double-click on the address bar at the top of the browser, right-click and choose "paste". Then, press backspace to delete the "&colorshift=yes", and press enter.

That will avoid the problem when following search links.