Not sure if this is related to the recent DDoS attack, but I have noticed that user mentions look different than they used to. Now if I mention @jomaxro it appears to have a grey font color. Before, it would look like this: 
with black text.
Is this a side effect of the attack, or a feature change I just missed 
?
Not related, it was a recent change made.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/6d6d8842d234ecd1035e91693ee431eb1cb9a400
Ah, thanks. Any particular reason why (that you know of)?
No idea. I’m not a fan of it yet, as I find it harder to find where I am mentioned in a long topic now, but I need to give it more time. The contrast is now horrid for those with eye sight problems.
I tend to agree with you here. Yes, change is hard (for everyone), but I agree that it is tougher to see, and without knowing the reason the change was made it seems like change for the sake of change.
Yes, not everyone has good vision. For me it looks like a grey bar unless I move closer and squint. 
For me it isn’t so hard to read bolded
Or just drop the background altogether?
Actually I think the foreground should be dropped to #646464 which would match the username color used in the top of posts.
Current new combo fails http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ which is particularly painful on sections of text you need to read.
Many people have crappy monitors that do bad with problem contrast and many people have eyes that can not cope with it.
Probably fine, but #222 was too black.
Having trouble understanding the motivations here too. I’m finding the latest revision harder to read.
Maybe worth a closer look at what Slack does? @mentions that I’m not included on look like normal links. Ones that mention @me or @groups i’m in directly are highlighted in yellow.
@mcwumbly I just adjusted it to match the same color of the username in the post title. I think it is reasonable, perhaps we can play with bolding it as well to have a complete match.
I think that highlighting whe you are mentioned is a very interesting idea. First step is to get the class in, but its a bit tricky cause we would need to run a markdown postprocessor on every post we ever display.
UX wise I think its interesting that #ux link is considered “more” important than a mention, which is just an observation.
I kind of like it in bold 1px smaller.
It ties super cleanly with the way we display username in the topic title, so brain goes … ahh this is a username, right away.
@codinghorror should I make this change?
Sure bold would be consistent with category hash so that’s fine.
No? Just a decoratePost callback with this.$('.mention[href="/users/' + username + '"]').addClass('you-mention');