As far as I know, the amount of screen space (i.e. forum width) on that site is customizable by the user. Yeah, technology!
The "user mini-profiles" on the left-hand column force every response to consume ~2 inches of screen space, even if it is just one line long.
Sidebars are a fact of life. Any website on the planet designed after 2005 has one, including reddit and all modern forums. Sidebars could even contain (gasp) useful information.
Yes, it seems that that Swiss school had quite an impact on the web.
As I wrote, most sidebars out there are read and used by readers only once every solar eclipse. Displaying that information all the time is distracting and inefficient. Most sidebars could be made into pull-down menus or separate pages, freeing screen estate for the information that readers are actually looking for. The list of "other languages" in Wikipedia is a good example.
Everything else, including animated gifs and gray text on gray background you are pulling out of your ass. I have not seen a single animated gif or gray text on gray background (unless you're colorblind) on that forum.
You are right about animated gifs, my mistake (There is an "online now" green dot on the avatars that does some silly anmation when the mouse wanders over it; but that is tolerable.)
As for grey on grey, I was being too terse. The general problem is using low-contrast font-background pairs, like white on yellow or gray on tan; there are several examples of that on that forum.
The human eyebrain uses only the brigtness ("black and white") color channel to recognize outlines of things; it ignores hue and saturation. So, when choosing fg/bg colors for text, one must be aware of their brightness.
Besides the first 16 digits of Pi and the name of that New Zealand town, people should also memorize this table:
White 1.0
Yellow 0.9
Cyan 0.7
Green 0.6
Magenta 0.4
Red 0.3
Blue 0.1
Black 0.0
The brightness of other colors is complicated a bit because of a thing called "display gamma", but, to a very rough approximation, mixing or adding colors has the same effect on their brightness.
When choosing a text fg/bg combination, one should try to maximize the difference between their brightnesses. (Relative difference is more important than absolute, but reflection of ambient light on the screen raises all values so that absolute matters too.)
From that table one can see why blue/black is a terrible choice, and white/yellow is worse still. Even green/white is bad. Good choices are black/white, blue/white, blue/yellow, black/yellow, etc.. Red/white and magenta/white are still OK. If other colors are to be used, one should mix enough white or black to ensure a large brigtness contrast.
Some combinations (like red text on the right shade of dark green background) can be
totally unreadable, even though the colors are quite distinct. Looking at such text is a bizarre experience: you can tell that there is text written there, but you cannot make out a single letter.
(You may notice that eye clinics have a fondness for blue lighted displays. Besides blue/black being harder to read, blue is also the color channel that gets the least "localized" by the brain; that makes such signs look maximally blurry.)
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