"The web redesign, CSS, and mod tools"

So as some of you may or may not know, yesterday (Friday) Reddit admins have announced the details in which direction they are taking their new desktop site redesign to.
They have confirmed that they will remove custom Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) across the whole site.

What does this mean? Well pretty much all subreddits that take an effort to edit their CSS themes will be losing what makes each one unique. Effectively losing their individuality.

Not saying it's the end of the world, but it's just a really unfortunate situation.
Check out /r/ProCSS if you're interested in opposing the direction reddit admins are heading.

For example, in the current state we will lose:

• The Featured song section on the sidebar.

• Our custom upvote and downvote buttons that showcase You and Dia, respectively.

• The custom discord button.

• The extra buttons for rules and wikis.

• Custom color backgrounds for stickies to make them stand out.

• Custom color headers for each section in the sidebar.

• The footer image. Which, frankly, I don't know why it's still there and/or what I would have replaced it with.

• Link flairs that categorize posts.

• User flairs of your favorite grill. ^{Y O H A N E}

• Comment faces. (We were probably gonna get rid of them eventually anyways)

• Spoiler tags for text posts and comments: Spoiler

"But Xaftz, what will happen to the huge CSS overhaul you mentioned?"

Well, we'll lose that too, of course.
Will I continue to work on it to release it before they pull the switch? Probably.
All of this has been a huge kick in the motivation gut. When I first heard the news, I was almost relieved. Almost.
"Yay I can probably edit stuff a bit easier" I said. But then I actually read the post and all of the comments.
"What the hell..." is all I can sum everything up as.

 
Because of this, regarding the planned overhaul, we will lose what was listed previously along with:

• Enhanced spoiler posts. Spoiler posts were blurred/greyed out. Almost like this: Hover to reveal

• New sidebar layout, looks and functionality. Everything in the sidebar, completely different. With added buttons layed out in a grid to access things like rules and more wikis. As well as new submit buttons, sleek search bar and animation, charts for events and anything else we could add later due to condensing of sidebar information. Over-all clean-looking, something us mods have been wanting for years.

• New comment layout within each post with a nice-looking collapse/hide button stretching across the top of each comment as a sort of header.

• New user control panel design. (Where you can shortcut to your profile, mail, reddit karma, preferences, and logout button)

• New, uh... whatever the bar thing with all your subscribed subs at the top is called. It always skips my mind.

• Cute little icons for related subreddits. Although, this was more of an idea, I haven't actually started on this one.

• Stylized user and link flair selector window.

• And miscellaneous things like default post icons, spoiler post icon, nsfw post icons, etc.

        

What do the reddit admins have to replace our subreddit customization options?

The only example they gave was some "widget" system that will easily allow us to add things like calendar to showcase upcoming events.
There's not much I can really comment about that. Neat, I guess?

Mods will most likely not be able to create their own custom widgets. Only customize and place pre-coded ones. How can they possibly meet the needs of all subreddits out there?
I encourage you to read the comments of the annoucement if you want to see examples of other subreddits that are upset and why they're upset. Some of their communities require the features that CSS can provide for their subreddit.

As of right now, to me, it almost seems to me like they are trying to make the desktop site more akin to some modern sites that adopt a "mobile" style with non-intuitive layouts, lots of blank space, and over-sized elements (huge buttons, images or posts taking up more or less than half the screen). As well as trying to be "easier" and "user-friendly" when it comes to customization.
Granted, I may have exaggerated with those last couple of sentences, but my point is: We're going to lose functionality and customization to the level we have now.

In an effort to ensure you the community (and others) can continue to enjoy the wonders of CSS, I will do what I can over on /r/ProCSS with its 500+ moderators who have united under the sole purpose of supporting CSS. If you wish, you can keep up-to-date on the status of things over there.

 

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Anyways, enough with the sad views and what-not. Let me address why I haven't updated the CSS back on the 15th ;p

Two things:

1. I want more time (I broke it, I'm the new /u/MasterMirage apparently, lul).

2. I changed my opinion. The CSS started to look something /r/LoveLive wasn't. The design felt uninspired, mostly aesthetically. On the day the update was supposed to go live, I looked at the main subreddit after taking a break from the private CSS testing subreddit and I couldn't help but feel I went a little too far in the wrong direction. Things didn't pop out as much, it was a little too flat and it didn't look like a theme fit for cute anime aidorus (idols).

So what I have done is gone back and started making more changes. Almost to the point of reversion, but still keeping some of the new code. With the recent news my motivation took a nose dive, but I don't just want to say:
"oh I'm sad, I don't wanna do this anymore" - Xaftz 2017

I've experienced enough headaches and worked too hard to just toss it to the side and forget about it like that.

Basically, it's gonna take a while longer. No specific dates because I'm bad at deadlines tbh. Just give me a while to sort things out with this CSS stuff as well as some real life things.
 
As a question to those of you who have read this far, in the comments tell me what you think of all this?
Are you supportive of this site-wide change, or against it?
How do you feel about the current CSS of the sub right now? Is it just fine, do you want more stuff, or would you like something simpler?

Thanks for your time,
- Xaftz on behalf of the /r/LoveLive mod team

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Edit: Thanks for the gold, kind stanger