@MartinScharrer I was going to argue that we don't need a whole Stack Exchange site to find people who believe in ghosts - with about a third of Americans believing in ghosts. I hoped to reference that stastistic, and ended up here ti find a delightful infographic from many sources, which would have us believe:

34% (of Americans) believe in ghosts, but 56% believe ghosts are the spirits of the dead, so at least 12% believe they don't exist AND know what they are.

(Only 7% claim no such thing, while 2% claim they are hallucinations which is surely a more specific way of saying the same thing?)

37% believe houses can be haunted, so at least 3% believe houses can be haunted by non-existent ghosts.

@Oddthinking Interesting statistic. I would like to see a comparison to European and other countries. I have the feeling that in central Europe the number of ghost believers is much lower.

Found another one: nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/fig07-22.htm, also for USA but shows three different years.

There is even a wikipedia listing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal#Belief_polls

@Christofian I saw that. I've been instructed to fix bug reports. It's difficult to make a creative case against a group of skeptics. In general the case here is "We don't like it." I can go around and cite more current information - say than a study of 3660 Germans in 1967, by a 62 year old guy. The bottom line is there is a small group that hates yellow and is making their case against and they are mods. The most outspoken of the site.

There is no such thing as a bad color. Colors don't actually mean anything. Any study is fairly ridiculous as it only offers insight into current culture from a hand selected small group. It doesn't take into account semiotics, and most color studies are constantly evolving. what is in one year as cool and refreshing is out the next.

@SeanGallagher My main argument against yellow is not the color itself, but the pretty extreme contrast with black and that yellow can't be used as highlight color for links, user names, ... which leads to the main content area looking pretty much monochrome. Black/Yellow is a very intense color scheme, and we mods look at the site more than most users, so our reaction is likely to be stronger.

I've been instructed to fix bugs for now. I'm not trying to get sucked into arguments, and other debates. I'd like the community to be happy. If change makes the community happy - then I'm sure we will work it out.

@RonMaimon References aren't just used by academics. I can understand you might get the wrong idea from the word "reference", it does have a somewhat academic connotation to it.

@RonMaimon However, the reason for insisting on having references is that it allows the rest of us to trace where the information has come from. They don't need to be formal references to scientific studies, but at least some source that we can use to determine if the information is reliable or not.

@RonMaimon Also, I'm a bit confused from your strongly negative attitude to references after you yourself asked "Can you provide the reference"... If it's the case that you don't like to use references, can you elaborate on why you still want a reference? Because that could very well be the same resason we want references from you.

@SeanGallagher 70% of the users is not "just the mods", Sean (meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1548/…)

You make us sound like we're being petty. We are not. We just want our identity respected - if SEI does want to force their dress on our community, fine enough. I don't really see any point in that.

but +1 for the rest :-)

@SeanGallagher I'm more of a casual user of se and skeptics.se, and I'm not a mod. However, I would appreciate it if you would use a lighter background and a darker link color: it would really improve the sites usability for me. Right now the black and yellow is too intense for me to read the site easily.

@Sklivvz sean toned down the yellow quite a bit, and i have done more over the weekend. do you still find it overwhelming?