It must be a part of the hack somewhere because it was not there before and the blue is only behind the comments field, which indicates some code in the template pulling that up.

Which template would I edit for this area?

You have to edit the CSS. Go to Style Manager -> All Style Options. Scroll down to page background, and make sure that matches the rest of your site. I try to keep a lot of my backgrounds transparent, so that there's never a conflict with something underneath. If you have the time, I would recommend going through the CSS and doing this where you can. It will keep your style simpler and much easier to manage.

Please see attached. Its not my css at all.

The color (blue) in comments background area is:

#B7BCE2

The only time this is mentioned in the Main CSS is body background color

I'm 100% sure its something obviously in the mod's template somewhere

If you tell me which template it is, I will copy/paste it even though I reverted all

In template SHOWNEWS, find and remove:
Find and remove:
In templates shownews_similararticles and news_comments, find and remove:
Find and remove:
Some of those had been added to make all the tables the same size on your forum. Hopefully removing the ones that were there already will bypass the earlier problem.

New version released. Added the BB-Codes you wanted. Also got rid of the unnecessary $spacer_open/$spacer_close (mentioned in last post). Enjoy it.

Upgraded to the latest version but now get

Fatal error: Call to a member function parse() on a non-object in C:\xampplite\htdocs\news.php on line 893

When entering any forum that is news enabled.

I also found a bug in the old release (not sure if its addressed in this one) where f you soft delete an article it remains visiable on the front page of the news with the read more tag. However clicking the readmore tag brings up the "this thread in invalid" error box.

UPdate: De-installed the product and re-installed, resetting my settings. The news functioned as it should then until i added a Limit News Preview to How Many Words? option and then the same error as above came up.

Okay, I tried to fix the soft-delete bug you found. Not sure if it worked, since I only ever hard-delete, so let me know. The fatal error should also be gone. It was a result of copy & paste from a plugin to hard-coding it, and some class references had changed in the process.

Thanks that got it for the php error.

However soft delete still persists to display after the fix.

I am not getting an "invalid thread id" error after soft-delete. I can still access the thread normally.

I'm pretty sure I fixed the soft-delete this time. Had to modify two queries and add a conditional. Added some overdue and new phrases.