I’m using the “Dracula” theme right now (I haven’t settled on a theme I’m entirely happy with yet).
When I open up a topic that has new posts, there is a really bright and distracting fade effect on the new posts. I did some googling, and found an upstream discussion which showed how to disable the animation with CSS:
.highlighted {
animation: none !important;
}
There’s no concept of user-customizable CSS in Discourse that I know of, but using a browser extension like Stylus works just fine with the above.
I thought others might find it useful (or if enough people find the effect distracting maybe it’s worth asking @gwmngilfen about disabling it globally).
I’m not attached to it at all, I just couldn’t decide on a theme when I went through them and kind of stopped on this one.
I tend to prefer dark themes in general, yet at the same time I like the default light theme better than the standard dark variant, so I don’t know what I want - I think I stopped on Dracula because it’s somewhere in between.
All of the themes except Light are the Discourse defaults - I customised Light with our usual community Ansible colour codes, but that’s all. We could spend time in the future designing a custom DarkAnsible palette too
I’ve never seen this fade-in effect on any other Discourse forum (and I use at least a dozen). I’m currently using the ‘Dark’ theme, and I see this both when opening a topic (the first post in the topic gets the fade-in) and also when returning to the topic list (the topic which was previously displayed gets the fade-in).
So we are using the Material theme (note Discourse differentiates themes and colour schemes, “Dark” is the latter) rather than the Default theme, so I suspect it’s part of that (and would explain why sites on the Default theme, likely many, don’t do this).
I can enable the Default theme for users, but I haven’t tested our various theme components with it, so I’m slightly wary. There’s another topic (Site-wide reduced or disabled motion settings) about reducing the visual impact of various elements of the UI, it would be good to have another data point on whether that works for people. I’ll also see about testing the Default theme too, though it might be a few days before I can get to it.
@kpfleming I’ve enabled the “Default” theme as an option for users - although I’ve renamed it “Simple” because a default that isn’t the default is … wrong
Please give it a try and let me know if it helps, and if you see anything odd. @jillr I’d be interested to know if this affects your reduced-motion request too (I don’t expect so, but you never know).
Well now I feel silly… I can only find the Color Scheme selector in Preferences, not a Theme selector. Searching for this on Discourse Meta finds posts from before It was renamed to Color Scheme…
Ugh, this slipped off my radar, thanks for waiting.
@kpfleming I’ve added the Sidebar Theme Toggle to the site, which should also add a theme selector waaaaaay down in the bottom left-hand corner. Does that show up for you?
Weirdly, I don’t see that in the sidebar, but the ‘Theme’ selector has now appeared in Preferences->Interface, and I was able to select the ‘Simple’ them there. I have no idea why it started showing up now, but that allowed me to choose the proper theme. Thanks!
.
- I think I stopped on Dracula because it’s somewhere in between.
