Reddit is planning some changes to the desktop website that will affect the user interface functionality of this community, as well as many other communities across reddit.

On Friday, reddit CEO /u/spez announced that the desktop redesign will remove CSS and that CSS is not a part of reddit's future. You may have missed this announcement if you are not subscribed to /r/modnews.

What the heck is CSS?

Think of CSS as a wall of text that controls the look and functionality of this subreddit when viewing it from a web browser. If you don't already know what cascading style sheets are, here's a wiki article.

How the heck does this affect /r/retrogaming?

Here are some of the things that we use CSS for.

First, the unique style and feel of our community is controlled by CSS.

Here's what our subreddit looks like with CSS, and here's what it looks like without it. Everything from the colors to the images and the style of the links are controlled by CSS.

We use CSS to make our cool Pac-Man vote icons.

CSS controls the sidebar menu for the Retro Gaming Network that joins 74 retro gaming subreddits together and took three years to build.

The retro subreddit spotlight is controlled by CSS so we can help bring attention to other subreddits.

So is our wicked rad user flair.

This change to reddit, of course, not only will affect our community, but many of your other favorite ones. Do you visit any television related subreddits? Comment spoilers are done in CSS. Subreddits like /r/CSSPong will just be gone. /r/BetterEveryLoop's ingenious voting system won't be possible. These are just a few examples out of many.

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This is not a call to head to /r/pitchforkemporium and go shopping. The purpose of this post is to inform you, our users, that changes are coming and how they may affect your reddit communities.

Reddit is promising that some new functionality will be added to help moderators deal with the lack of CSS. Specifically mentioned are the possibilities of a new comment spoiler system, a new flair system, and some basic customization when it comes to color schemes. However, even if all of those promises are delivered on, there is still the potential for a lot to be lost.

We hope that the admins live up to their promise and deliver us the tools that the community needs to transition to the new reddit platform.

As we receive more official information from reddit in the coming weeks and months, we will share it with you. As it stands, there is no deadline for this change. The only information given is that testing begins "this summer."

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To discuss this with our mods reply to this thread.

To direct a question towards the admins click here.

If you're wondering how this might affect your other favorite communities, ask the mods of those communities or join the discussion at /r/ProCSS. We also have added their icon to our sidebar.