[TygerTyger]

Ok, a few people have been asking how I did the fuzz effect on my forum category and banners, which doesn't actually require you to add the effect to every image.

What you do is use the category icons template modification which is listed about 20 times here and instead set the category icon as the table background, then lay an image with a fuzzed transparent centre over the top of the background. Since IE6 and below can't handle the effect, it instead just uses the background image for those browsers.

Open your forumhome_forumbit_level1/2_nopost templates.

FIND:

<td><img src="$stylevar[imgdir_statusicon]/forum_$forum[statusicon].gif" alt="" border="0" id="forum_statusicon_$forum[forumid]" /></td>
			<td><img src="$vboptions[cleargifurl]" alt="" width="9" height="1" border="0" /></td>

REPLACE WITH:

<if condition="is_browser('ie') AND !is_browser('ie', 7)">
				<td class="alt1" id="f$forum[forumid]">
					<img src="images/forumicons/$forum[forumid].png" alt="" border="0" id="forum_statusicon_$forum[forumid]" <if condition="$forum[statusicon] != 'new'">class="inlineimg fog"</if> />
				</td>
			<else />
				<td style="background:transparent url(images/forumicons/$forum[forumid].png) center center no-repeat;" class="alt1 inlineimg<if condition="$forum[statusicon] != 'new'"> fog"</if> id="f$forum[forumid]">
					<img src="$stylevar[imgdir_misc]/iconmask.png" alt="" border="0" id="forum_statusicon_$forum[forumid]" />
				</td>
			</if>

Then all you have to do is create an ordinary 50px x 50px picture for each forum section, give it the same name as the ID of the forum (so if your forum category has the ID 30, name the icon 30.png and then put all your icons in a directory called images/forumicons.

And you're done! If you want to make the icons fade out when there are no new posts like I've done, just add the following to your additional CSS definitions:

.fog { opacity: 0.4; filter: alpha(opacity=40); -moz-opacity: 0.40; }