Typically I only do a light and dark variant of one style, but I've got one that's a smaller forum, but it has a style in the colours of every team in the NHL, because the members are all hockey fans and it was just a nice little touch for them. Pointless, perhaps, but they enjoy it. I wouldn't do that on most forums, however, it's unnecessary.
Two themes are the max, dark, light then default. That's free however it's disabled in most cases for most people. I rather have one theme with the option to change dark or light in that one single theme that you can have nowadays. It's not cheap to have running paid themes and also more work on updating the themes if you have more than one.
But the end of the day it's about members and what they like and or dislike.
On Christianity Haven we started off with a default style and then added one for a member who wanted a specific font used but he was the only member using that so when he disappeared so did his style 😉 I don't like going crazy having too many different styles so a light and dark one offered are a plus and any others are not essential.
I'm on Proboards & themes are so popular. I have 13 for them to choose from but only 'cos it was requested. I would only have a handful as that is easier on me to change coding. But it's expected to have several to choose from & to change them up like for holidays, seasons, etc. I just stick with the one for my own use personally.
I prefer one solid style. That being said, if I’m developing something new, I allow the users to choose between the two for a period of time before the old style is archived. If enough people make a big deal about it, I’ll leave it as a style to choose from. That said, it’s never really been that much of an issue.
I find that it us is better to have a few themes to choose from because every members needs are different. Some have poor eyesight like me. I can't handle dark themes or themes that are too bright. It has to be just right. Call me Goldilocks.
I have my main theme (usually a light style) as well as a dark theme (but not always), and then I offer the default theme that comes with the forum software.
At my movies forum I only have a couple of versions and a few seasonal ones (Only implemented during those holiday periods), but it is a small forum that has been only been going since November 2020.
At my Transformers forum however, at almost 19 years; I have a whole variety of different themes. These may have to be sacrificed and saved to my computer however when the next upcoming version of ProBoards comes out - depending on what they do with the software and notably themes. From there on it might only be the main, 1 other and the holiday/seasonal themes if possible - and only those.
Yeah wow, that's a lot of themes. But it could work if you don't need to customize every single theme, and if your forum software doesn't get any upgrades that often that breaks every single theme.
It can work if the forum/site doesn't have updates, Yet they do 🙂 IPB has updated all the time and each small to big update has many CSS changes, and having 10 themes will take time to edited and update the theme time.
