Go Dark/ Go Light

Just about every time I run a search on ATS the site changes from the dark setting to the Light setting. It's not a big deal, but it get's annoying after awhile.
At first I just thought it was a setting for searches, but it affects the recent topics page and any other pages I open.

Same thing happened to me tonight . . . I don't understand it either . . . Any Help???

Apparently the google spider will encode "colorshift=yes" into the URLs it indexes, when it's crawling over ATS pages. That's how the "go light" / "go dark" buttons are implemented.

So, when you do a search, the URLs in the results that are displayed sometimes have "colorshift=yes" in them, which causes your preference to change when you click-thru that result.

Since the light/dark buttons change a persistent preference, they really should be in the "MemCenter" page. I can only assume the reason they're on every page is to make the search feature even more annoying and unusable than it already is.

Here is how to work around it.

1. I have done a search for "silly". I want to go to the last item on the first page, which happens to look like this:

Funny Quotes From Silly People!, page 1
Discusion about Funny Quotes From Silly People! in the AboveTopSecret.com website alternative topics discussion forum General Chit Chat.
www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread124048/pg1&colorshift=yes&colorshift=yes

2. I notice the 'colorshift' in the URL, so I don't just click the link
3. I right-click on the link, and choose 'copy'
4. I open a new browser tab (ctrl+t in Firefox), and paste the url in the address bar (ctrl+v)
5. Before pressing enter to go to the page, I select the "&colorshift=yes&colorshift=yes" text and delete it.

That way the colorshift is avoided. Annoying to have to do that.


Edit to also add:
6. I am disappointed that the "Silly People" thread I found went no where, and repeat with other search results until my thirst for silliness is satiated.

[edit on 29-11-2008 by Ian McLean]

reply to post by Ian McLean


Ah, well that'll explain it, thank you. Definitely an annoying bug there.