Every couple of years, something gets under my skin and I cobble together a MyBB theme for roleplaying purposes. This usually starts with flipping through the custom themes already available and deciding none of them have the vibe I want, so I rip it all apart and start from scratch. And every time, the process of disassembling all the awful built-in tables and hacking everything into some level of responsiveness is a giant pain in the ass. I've wanted for ages to just make myself a very basic responsive theme that fits my aesthetic needs so that the next time I want to do up something fancier, I can start from that instead. I've procrastinated for a long time, thinking that MyBB might drag themselves into the modern era at some point, and they still might, but I finally sat myself down and did my own, and I'm sharing it for everybody who, like me, enjoys that good old Jcink vibe but wants to self-host.

This theme comes with

• Mobile-first, readable-first philosophy. Do you die a little when the very first thing you have to do after a site loads is zoom in 200% to read anything? Not with Playground! I took inspiration as much from long-form reading-centric websites as existing roleplaying forums, so text remains large and legible and the most important thing on any screen. Did you know that the ideal length of a line of text on a website is 45-80 characters? I've tried to maintain that for any significant blocks of text.
  
• No reliance on hovering over things to see information.
  
• Built in light and dark modes, defaulted to approved material design colors.
  
• Customizable Google material symbols for icons.
  
• A metric ton of commentary/explanation/rambling notes in the code, so you know what does what.
  
• Zero required plugins/code changes. There are a couple of optional php edits to include recent threads on the index and user info popups that you can read about in this post. They're very easy to implement and I haven't bothered to make a plugin out of them. Feel free to skip them and/or go find plugins with similar functionality.
  
• Some really stupid bells and whistles because I couldn't help myself. Toggles toggles everywhere. Chroma.js, so you can change the color scheme on demand! (You'll probably want to delete that if you have a more opinionated design in mind.)
  
• Content filter system: series of customizable checkboxes that users can check/uncheck to literally prevent themselves from seeing the posts in any of the objectionably prefixed threads. Just in case they accidentally click into one. This could be easily be edited to hide tagged threads from view completely, if you prefer.
  
• No terms of use. Playground is meant to be a jumping-off point for something prettier, not a final product. Take it. Use it. Change it. Break it. Bop it. Credit me me or don't, I don't care. In exchange, I make no guarantees of support or answering questions. My only request, which I know is in no way enforceable, is that you not attempt to profit off of anything you use this theme to build.
  

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Disclaimer: I'm not a professional coder or designer!! I just do this for fun and as an exercise to keep from forgetting my basic bitch frontend skills. I've kinda tried to sidle up close to decent UX and best code practices, but ultimately everything is just cobbled together with floss and chewing gum. Deploy at your own risk.