Version 3.2 is a major change and caused problems for some of the members on my forum who are elderly or not IT savvy. Icons for buttons are no longer coded the same way. I'm not a techie. I taught myself simple website coding fifteen years ago so I could understand most of the coding in earlier versions of phpBB. The problem now has been that browsers needed to clear all the old version files from cache and download all the new ones because of the way images are coded has fundamentally changed and many members had never done that and didn't know how to do it. They saw large popup windows with text all over the display instead of tiny buttons.
The old versions of phpBB used composite images (sprites) as background images for most buttons. The main file combined 34 small icons or buttons in one composite image of only 7.85 KB and simple coding of perhaps twenty characters displayed only part of the composite background image at any position so that only one button of the 34 showed. Simple.
The new version of phpBB (the standard files coded by phpBB, not the style we use which was coded by someone else and is superimposed onto the standard phpBB coding) has made the button display much more complicated. They have to be downloaded from an external website called font-awesome
http://fontawesome.io/icons/ into our server, and then downloaded by the member.
Using CSS. Copy the entire font-awesome directory into your project. (675 icons). In addition to the simple positioning code there is an additional file called font-awesome.min.css with perhaps 1000 characters and another six files all required to process the background images.
That's progress, isn't it. There's probably a good reason why it's been made more complex, but I don't know what it is. One reason may be security as the images are now in eot, woff and other formats. If you open one of these files, it's all funny symbols, so you can't actually see the image from the file and copy it (though I suppose you can use print screen for a bad copy from the web page). If members have a very old browser it won't process the new formats.
