Oh, good find, we should definitely fix that! cc @sam
6 Likes
Thanks for this! I like it, much easier on the eyes.
The only thing I haven’t seen anyone else mention is that it doesn’t seem to be saving as a preference. After I close my browser, the next time I open it up and log back in everything is white again and the Preferences page has the theme set back to Default. Once I set it, it lasts for the session across tabs and pages, but I have to set it again on the next session.
1 Like
Hmm interesting any thoughts on that @sam?
Thank you @sam!!!
bOINGbOING is literally the only black on white site or software I use. Great to have it finally go dark!
For optimum readability and minimum eyestrain, you can’t beat amber text on black, but green on black’s pretty good too. My cow-orkers claim that all my computer screens look like Halloween.
7 Likes
Where do I request a Hot Dog Stand theme?
4 Likes
Hey! Cow-orking is illegal in 49 states!
5 Likes
Lemme guess. The outlier is Ohio?
4 Likes
Awesome! But could you make this an automatic day night switch? 
This is great! Thanks @sam.
(now in the correct topic, excuses)
1 Like
According to Architectural Digest, the most popular white is White Dove:
But Bone White is a lot warmer:
1 Like
Odd, it really is a persistent cookie, did you click “save” after you changed the theme?
Head here: https://discuss.samsaffron.com
3 Likes
Did not disappoint.
2 Likes
@codinghorror/@sam, have you tried using the dark theme on the iPad Safari? Topic titles have a really ugly and hard to read dark brown hue. I don’t see this on my iPhone – titles have a light gray color.
ETA: Actually this all looks really bad on Desktop Chrome too.
Titles have a medium gray background and dark gray text.
Edit boxes have a light blue foreground and the same medium gray background. Also very hard to read:
ETA2: While this is a completely personal preference and doesn’t break accessibility or anything I’d love to see the regular text color bumped up to be a smidge brighter (like instead of today’s #BDBDBD maybe something more #CCCCCC-ish. I suppose I can always use a CSS modifier to do this but as this is new I figure I may as well use this opportunity to nitpick.
ETA3: It looks like the @mentions also could use some more contrast between foreground and background:
5 Likes
I like it lots. Thank you @sam!
4 Likes
… and in case I didn’t mention it already, despite all of my nitpicking (I complain because I love Discourse and I care) thank you so much for doing this @sam!
Having a dark theme option is wonderful and I wish more web sites allowed for this.
6 Likes
Oh man this is so much better!
1 Like
Oh, that’s my fault then, I need to look at my options for automatically cleaning up client-side storage and figure out how to whitelist it. Thanks!
1 Like
Is there going to be any effort to improve the contrast with some of the dark theme elements? There’s too many places with largely unreadable black on dark gray and other things are just too dark.
I spent about 5 minutes using a CSS editor to prototype improving the colors and I think it’s much better.
Before:
After:
You can see I fixed the “black text on dark gray” issue on the top with the title, category, search, and hamburger menus. I also bumped up the whiteness on the text, poster, reply to, and message text. Finally I bumped up the white value on the like/heart/link/"…". The “1 reply” text is still way too dark and I need to bump that up some.
I think it’s all far more readable than before. I have decent enough eyesight and I often find the current Dark incarnation way too damn hard to read. It must be largely unusable for someone with bad eyesight.
I’m happy to spend some more time on improving this and submit a PR if @codinghorror or @sam would be open to this.
5 Likes
High contrast accessibility isn’t really the goal; dark backgrounds are for style.
Also beware extreme contrast, it’s actually worse for readability.
From these results, one can say that contrast affects legibility, but unfortunately, it does not seem to be as simple as high contrast being better than low contrast. In the main experiment, Green on Yellow had the fastest RT’s, and in the control experiment, medium gray, and dark gray had the fastest RT’s. In neither experiment did the Black on White condition show the fastest RT’s. These results show that these participants had faster response times when more median contrasts were used. These results supported Powell (1990), who suggested avoiding sharp contrasts, but did not fully support Rivlen et al (1990), who suggested maintaining high contrast.
I get the style argument but there’s many places where things are just illegible. I also realize things are to bright in my prototype. It was mainly a proof of concept.
1 Like
