In a discussion titled “Meta should use worldwide defaults,” jidanni proposes that meta.discourse.org should run the 100% vanilla version of Discourse without any tweaks, arguing that if Discourse is truly great, it shouldn’t need customization — and changes should be global to avoid confusion. HAWK disagrees, emphasizing that communities have different needs and that Discourse’s flexibility is one of its strengths. Heliosurge agrees with HAWK and questions whether users can view the default vanilla interface via the theme creator. Moin clarifies that the theme creator uses a special “tc-theme” by default, but users can manually select “default” in settings or preview a blank theme; they also note that the recent change from “defer” to “mark unread” is a global update, soon to roll out to all Discourse instances via this PR. Finally, merefield humorously defends the Meta-specific “Grey Amber” theme, refusing to let it go. The thread highlights tension between standardization and customization, with most participants valuing tailored experiences over strict vanilla conformity.
Just the other day, actually today, I was reading
When the thought occurred to me that later that meta.discourse.org should use the 100% vanilla version of Discourse that is distributed worldwide, with no tweaks.
Reasons:
If Discourse is so wonderful, then you shouldn’t need to change it, or if you do change it, change it for everybody worldwide.
One can say “See what happened,” without needing to go to a different vanilla test machine to show what happened…
I don’t agree. No two communities are identical or have the same needs. There is a tonne of tooling that we don’t use here on Meta because it’s not necessary for our use case and on the flip side, there are things that we do need that other’s don’t. That’s the beauty of Discourse - flexibility.
Agreed. Though I might be mistaken. Couldn’t a user load theme creator without a previewed theme to see default vanilla discourse?
I think then you will see the special theme creator theme. But you can choose “default” in the sidebar theme toggle or your interface settings here at meta, or you create a new theme at theme creator and preview it without any changes.
@jidanni the change from “defer” to “mark unread” is is global change. You just have to wait for the next update of other Discourse forums.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/26468/files
You are can take the (meta) Grey Amber theme from my cold dead hands!