Hi! I recently upgraded our site to “Discourse v2026.5.0-latest — Commits · discourse/discourse · GitHub — Ember v6.10.1”. It has lots of cool improvements. However, I noticed that it has also started showing the blue dots splash screen on page load:
I can’t find the setting to disable this anymore. I feel like I used to be able to disable this earlier. Now, the only setting I see is “splash_screen_image”. Should I upload an empty SVG here to disable it?
Wow. This was added in 2022, nearly 4 years ago now. You should really be better about updating your site, generally healthy sites are updated every 2-3 weeks…
Regardless, no, it cannot be disabled. However, you can customize it with the setting you mentioned. I suppose you can use an empty SVG but the dots will appear anyways unless the SVG is animated. I don’t see why you would want to hide them anyways, they’re harmless and go away in less than half of a second for most people.
Hi @darkpixlz I update my forum every four weeks 
It’s a little unexpected. Maybe I’m just noticing the Discourse Splash now or it is showing for longer in recent days.
I would still like to hide the dots, because they make the site look slower even if nothing’s changed. I’m wondering if editing the theme CSS is the right way to achieve this. I’m not sure if the theme CSS will be applied at that early loading stage.
This setting is to replace the blue dots with a cistom loading animations. You could tecnically replace it with something empty, but it might then not provide any indication that the page is loading to your users.
Yes, we recently removed the setting to disable this splash screen.
The setting was originally added when the feature was experimental, but it’s been stable for years now. Disabling the splash screen actually can result in a worse core web vitals score (a factor in Google rankings), so it was a bit dangerous if you were disabling it and were unaware of this.
As mentioned, you can now upload a custom image using the Splash screen image site setting. When you upload a static image, the dots will still appear below it… but if you upload an animated SVG it will replace the default dots completely.
It might be worth experimenting with this and seeing if there’s a loading image that works well for your site, but if you’d still prefer the blank page you can upload a transparent animated SVG (though note this might also result in a worse core web vital score, Google may ignore transparent images)
Here’s a zip containing a transparent animated SVG, if it’s helpful blank-animated.svg.zip (1 KB)
Oh good idea!
I’d say generally healthy sites are updated when the dashboard emoji becomes red 
