Coming soon to Meta 🌑 DARKNESS 🌑

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

User based themes are totally out of scope, we may get to them one day but not for this release.

[Tom_Newsom]

@sdaugherty

The dark theme seems to be a clear winner so far in this respect, as far as discoverability and usability of the UI.

I find it distracting. The dark theme feels much more busy and I have a harder time picking out the actual content.

[sdaugherty (Stephanie Daugherty)]

@Tom_Newsom

find it distracting. The dark theme feels much more busy and I have a harder time picking out the actual content.

Low contrast is a bad way to reduce distractions though, because it disproportionately affects users with vision impairment. What is “subdued” to a user with normal vision becomes illegible or even invisible with mild to moderate vision impairment. I have to wave my mouse all over the screen on the default theme just to find the buttons

Besides that, “greyed out” in user interfaces has traditionally meant, “this is where this thing would normally be but you can’t do that right now”. There’s something to be said for familiarity and consistency between applications.

[Daniel_M]

Seeing the bar graphs would be nice.
Side note: hide results doesn’t work for me (Chrome on iPhone).

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I think we have 1 color missing, I added it via a customization, but there is no way of specifying a color for main-outlet vs general background, the effect here looks quite good, but I needed to add a css rule.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

The logo looks hideous now. I am embarrassed to be associated with this site.

I hope we can fix up all the dark theme issues and switch back quickly. I am now counting the hours and seconds until we can make it happen…

[sdaugherty (Stephanie Daugherty)]

I predict a dark theme version of the logo turns up before all the issues are worked through

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@sdaugherty

I have to wave my mouse all over the screen on the default theme just to find the buttons

I have super bad halo issues with white-on-black text. There’s a reason books are black-on-white…

What you cite as a “feature” of super bright white post action buttons is in fact a bug as I mentioned earlier. Right now the buttons are brighter than the post text!

[sdaugherty (Stephanie Daugherty)]

@codinghorror

What you cite as a “feature” of super bright white buttons is in fact a bug as I mentioned earlier. Right now the buttons are brighter than the post text!

Yeah, they are definitely too bright right now, but at least I can SEE them. I have to stumble around for them on the light theme, that’s arguably a worse situation.

[watchmanmonitor (Allen Hancock)]

Looking at my bookmarks pages… feeling bad for @techAPJ and @codinghorror 's avatars… Arpit’s is totally gone.

Thinking about this as a site owner, I’d have to have to give guidance to users on what will, or won’t work in an avatar.

[Yuun (Sam)]

Hah, this is a fun thread.

Well, as someone using (and preferring ) a darker theme, thank you Discourse team for putting yourselves through this ordeal to smooth things out for users such as myself.

If I can do so, I’ll review my CSS fixes and see if there’s anything I can add here to help. I know dropdown text was basically unreadable in a dark theme at first (e.g. badge admin page, new category edit permissions box, etc), might be a couple other things I can pull out. They were fairly obvious though, you guys might already have gotten them - my forum updates are waiting for the ember stuff to smooth out so I’m not fully up to date.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Yeah I really want us off dark theme by Friday. It’s f**king awful.

(but it should work, and we need to get the bugs out – and making ourselves suffer is the only way to effectively make that happen)

[geoff777]

I get the need to do this.
I think a delicate texture on some of the solid colours would help.

The grey in the quote box for example.
It’s the same grey that is around the reply box.
It doesn’t look great.
Texturise?

[PabloC]

It’s beautiful. I’m in love with this theme. Thank you guys.

[AlexAB (SketchUp Community Manager)]

Can users choose to turn ON and OFF the darkness theme? If so, then I am full steam ahead because after a quick poll - some of our users wanted it and some didn’t. So allowing each user the flexibility to choose would be great.

[sdaugherty (Stephanie Daugherty)]

@AlexAB it looks like not yet, maybe someday:

Coming soon to Meta DARKNESS

User based themes are totally out of scope, we may get to them one day but not for this release.

[Chili]

The way we get around this is to share the link to the available additional theme and encourage any users that want to use it to save that link as their bookmark so the alternative theme loads whenever they visit the page. Also they need to add “&sticky=true” to the end of the link.

[purldator (mountain)]

When I click on ‘profile’ in the hamburger menu and allow my profile to load, it shows a lighter grey that disappears once everything is loaded into the viewport.

Should be darker, methinks. Stands out too much.

I don’t consider this a detail as a personal taste.

[uwe_keim]

Black category (“dev”) doesn’t look too good on black background.

Maybe some thin border?

[will_io]

I can’t get enough of the darkness! I love the freakin’ darkness like I love chop suey!

Edit: In 5 months can you do “Ice”? Discourse could become like Google’s Doodles except with themes.