Some themes on Meta look too similar suddenly?

AI-generated summary

Users on Meta reported that the Grey Amber theme no longer appears as expected, instead displaying a dark, Material Design-like look. merefield and Canapin observed the issue across browsers and devices, with Canapin identifying that setting ‘Dark mode’ to ‘Dark’ in user preferences overrides the Grey Amber theme. david confirmed that a recent change enabling a default dark mode color scheme on Meta causes this behavior, as themes like Grey Amber are not designed for dark mode. awesomerobot resolved the issue by reverting site settings and clarified that ‘Dark’ and ‘The Darkness’ themes were duplicates, with one now removed. The discussion highlights a need for a better solution to handle theme compatibility in dark mode.

Grey Amber no longer looks correct. Dark, Material Design look too similar? What is going on with the Themes on Meta? Grey Amber colour scheme gone?

Tested on Safari, Chrome & Firefox on desktop. Both logged in (for me) and anon.

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I don’t encounter this issue.

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It’s odd, I can repro it as anon even on desktop in Safari, Chrome or Firefox where Grey Amber is no longer … grey and amber, but my iPad seems fine.

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Here’s Grey Amber on Chrome on my computer:

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On mine:

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I encounter the issue as a visitor :+1:
And it doesn’t affect all the themes, as you described in your first post.


Edit: I changed a bit my theme settings in https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/interface, and I’m now encountering the same issue as @merefield logged in as well.


Could it be related to the “Dark mode” setting in our preference? If set to “Dark”, then the regular Grey Amber won’t be applied :man_shrugging:?

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Oooh if I change it to “Same as Regular” that solves it for time being. :+1: Perhaps Grey Amber does not have a “Dark mode” I guess?

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Thanks for the reports!

We enabled the “default dark mode color scheme id” here on Meta, which now means that all themes will use a single dark color scheme if your browser, or your user preferences, request dark mode.

Obviously not ideal that clicking something like ‘grey amber’ does nothing if you’re in dark mode… so we’ll need work out a solution for that. :eyes:

(Gonna move this to Contribute > Site feedback since we now know it’s specifically about Meta)

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While we’re here, what’s the difference between “Dark” and “The Darkness”? Couldn’t find any at first glance.

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I had changed some site settings while we were troubleshooting a commit that broke dark mode, and I’ve now switched those back… so things should be back to how they were.

No difference, I’ve deleted one.

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