The previous lighter text.
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We will continue to listen to your feedback. We do want to give these changes some time to settle and build out a new deployment process. In the meantime do continue the conversation here and let us know how you feel about it. If it is getting better, you can say that too.
I think for myself… it is those rounded gray backgrounds for the tags.
I think it is the tags themselves, the dark grey background and the bold text makes them dominate and distract from the thread title.
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I agree. The unread thread titles need to stand out as the most obvious thing on the page. Right now, the category tags and the purple “read” thread titles are fighting to be the most eye catching things on the page.
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I like the purple, and I think it was a good choice. We’ve been trained since the birth of the internet that visited links are purple. It’s a decision that makes sense to me.
We’ve been trained that visited links are purple when unvisited links are blue. That’s not what’s happening here.
You can’t adopt half of a usability guideline and expect the same result.
Blue vs purple is what we’ve been trained for. But it’s not what the new forum design has been using. 
I don’t have a problem with the purple. I have a problem with the purple combined with something other than blue. 
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I guess I don’t see it that way. In a lot of things, the links tend to match the text now - they’re just underlined. The blue isn’t even consistent across the board anymore. But visited links, in my experience, have always been purple.
Yes purple, but a purple designed to slightly fade into the background so that the unvisited links are more prominent.
Again, interface design isn’t about Any one person’s experience: at this point it is based on over a decade of research with literally hundreds of thousands of people to determine what color schemes and link indicators will work best for the majority of people visiting a site (and what indicators are needed for the rest).
We had a course on this in college. One of the early problems about 20 years ago was that most of the graphics designers were young people with young eyes. So you saw a lot of yellow text on black backgrounds. Which was very cool, but almost unreadable for people 50 and older who were doing a lot of the online shopping.
Over the years, with many many focus group studies, usability guidelines emerged. They put up cameras and watched how people’s eyes moved, and quizzed them after a session to see what they remembered.
In a forum like this, you want the unread messages to slightly pop relative to the ones that were already read in order to get the best results for the maximum number of people.
In the current color scheme, it’s the other way around.
If you’re interested in reading more on usability studies, there’s a lot of stuff available, from Books to web courses.
Here, for example, from the Nielsen/Norman Group, probably the most widely respected group doing usability studies:
Guidelines for Visualizing Links
- The color for unvisited links should be more vivid, bright, and saturated than the color for visited links, which should look “used” (dull and washed out).
And again, it’s not about how it looks to any one person. It’s about taking advantage of the information we’ve learned over many years from hundreds of thousands of people in thousands of hours of usability studies.
Submitted with respect.
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In one post Mr Roberts, you’ve said what I’ve tried in 6 posts (that the person making these forum graphic changes seems to be about 21 years old and eminently unqualified) but you did it more elegantly.
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Broken again!
Testing ordered list
1. Test 1
2. Test 2
3. Test 3
Testing ordered list
- Test 1
- Test 2
- Test 3
This is what shows on the editor (correctly)
This is what shows on the forum (too many spaces)
I think the grey bubble background on the Categories and tags is what is bugging me the most about reading the Latest page. After browsing the Wyze, inovelli and Sharptools forums, that seems to be the most glaring difference.
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and I’ll add that it’s hard to tell the purple text from the black/grey/whatever-color-that-is between read and unread topics.
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I’d like to add that after spending time on other communities where there is a dark mode and you hit this one its like looking directly at the sun. Ugh!!!
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That’s how discourse formats ordered lists. I just did the same kind of post on meta.discourse.com and
Unless you are talking about the upper and lower spacing?
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Let’s keep the discussion civil and focus on the areas that need attention. Ad hominems are not constuctive criticism.
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It’s appears to be fixed now. If you see my post I had included a screenshot of what it looked like at the time of posting with the red box around it.
Another vote for Dark Mode… +1
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Discourse has the ability to allow admins to offer community members a choice of themes. So you could have a light theme and a dark theme and let each person choose which works best for them, because I guarantee you, neither works best for everyone. 
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