Does anyone else dislike light gray foreground on the white background?

I personally like light themes, @Yuval convinced me at some point that it is better for my eyes … However light gray on the white background feels like too much. It hurts my eyes just browsing different categories and seeing a bunch of gray/read titles.

We want dark mode!

Leonid_Shlyapnikov:

light gray

Can you give an example of the specific things affecting you here? Also would you prefer they just be a darker color? We can make a second (or third) theme to accommodate I think.

@georg Should be able to do this but I’m not seeing the option to select a custom theme on my preferences page. Will investigate.

@anthony, e.g. the first 3 topics below… I would prefer them to be a bit darker + Topic header is also light gray. But that is my personal preference.

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reddit.com also uses light gray for the visited topics… that is probably why I don’t go there too often

Seems this one isn’t controlled by the themes so I’ll need to try out some things, will update you tomorrow.

Thanks. However if it does not really bother anyone else, do not spend much time on this.

Changed to purple, does this work better for you?

Also learned from Jennifer that the color I was using there (and others elsewhere) do not have enough contrast as per a variety of standards so I’ve updated it.

I like purple better. I knew something was wrong with the original color

I have an issue with purple. This particular shade of purple has been used to mean “visited” since time immemorial (and is still the default color for visited links in browsers). It’s screwing with my head.

If we’re going to use purple, can we pick a lighter shade?

On my mobile I used to be able to differentiate between read and unread in the suggested topics. Now everything is just purple. I actually liked the light and darker gray to distinguish.

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georg:

Now everything is just purple

Is it possible that you have viewed all topics?

Yes, but the purple is a really irritating color to indicate that (imo). I vote for getting gray back

So the problem with light gray is it’s not high enough contrast and some people will have difficulty reading it so blue/purple is more appropriate at the moment.

I’m working on multiple theme support but for some odd reason Discourse isn’t letting people select the alternative themes. Once that’s fixed people can choose freely

That’s good to hear, thanks for all the effort you’re putting in to make this slick! Fwiw, I don’t perceive the purple/blue combo necessarily to be of much higher contrast.

Of course, and I appreciate all the feedback, it’s definitely making the forum better.

I’m not an expert in color science but these things are defined mathematically in a variety of standards.

https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=711771&bcolor=FFFFFF

Lastly the Neutral theme with velvety smooth gray link colors is now available so feel free to switch to it on your preference page

Ugh, renamed it to “Regular Visibilty” because of a Discourse bug.

There is a dark theme installed by default I believe:

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@anthony are you able to let us enable it in preferences?

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Do it!

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Dark theme is now available. Let me know if there’s any visual problems.