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D-FENS on 27 May 2009
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I know I'm probably beating a dead horse here, because site administration has already made it clear that if an issue affects 10% or less of the site's users it's acceptable. (I'm not saying they don't care, but the attitude seems to be "we're moving forward, if there are some casualties it's unfortunate, but we're going ahead.")

But, the current color scheme of dark colors on a dark background is nearly impossible for color blind users to read. The red on black is especially bad, but even the orange on black is difficult for me (red/green color blind).

Now, CB affects some 7-10% of men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Prevalence

And while gaming demographics are reaching an equilibrium of male to female ratio, the majority are still male. (I'd also wager that the userbase of this site is even moreso predominantly male.)

So, even if we take the low end of the %, halve it, then round it up a bit to compensate for the male/female ratio, I'd say we're looking at at least 4% of users who are colorblind.

Now, I may be in a further minority because my eyes are very bad, but a change in website design that renders the site unreadable to even 1 or 2% of the userbase is not only poor web design (this is not the 90's, webmasters should know a little bit more, and care a little bit more, about ergonomics), but also representative of a very cavalier and condescending attitude when the site adminstrators basically say "so what? These are the changes and we're sticking to them."

I understand the idea of color coding headlines to make it easier to tell what forum/system they belong to, but is it really that hard to figure out? Couldn't there be other ways to present this information? Could you maybe, set up a customizable front page where hot forum and news topics could be sorted by system, or presented in different "boxes" depending on what the individual user wanted to see? (Maybe I want to see hot topics in three categories: Wii, 360, and PS3, but don't want to bother with handheld articles?)

One more note: I'm a horrible speller, and I can no longer see the underlined highlight on misspelled words in firefox (dark highlight on a dark background), a new annoyance of the new site that I just now discovered.