hey there! I (@vogon) was gonna do a more playful post about this, but this bit from @amydentata and @aune is funnier than anything I could've posted anyway.
https://cohost.org/aune/post/3603446-span-style-color
you can now change the post box to be darker to make the site less glaring -- particularly on mobile devices, where the post box takes up almost all of your screen and people made a fair point that our "dark" theme isn't particularly dark in practice.
we had a couple of weird goals we wanted to achieve in shipping this:
- despite the fact that people can restyle their posts pretty arbitrarily with CSS, we wanted to make sure that it was possible for everyone to see every post as it was intended, even the ones that predated this feature; this is why the meatball ("...") menu in the top right of each post lets you invert the auto-assigned colors on it.
- jae, aidan, and I all use dark mode because we don't like bathing in LCD backlight all day. but we all also have astigmatism; light text on a dark background gets blurry and difficult for us to read, and we find doing focused reading of dark-on-light text substantially easier than light-on-dark, to the point where we didn't consider it shippable to force a dark post box on the dark theme.
this morning, we shipped with only "always light" and "always dark" settings, but folks including @blep pointed out the utility -- especially for folks who have their system theme change based on the time of day -- of adding a third option which has it follow your system theme, like the color scheme of the rest of the site. this was an idea that didn't occur to us at all in development, but is so good we stole it from them (with permission) and made it the new default, effective as of a couple minutes ago.
on the way to releasing this, we also rethemed a few minor parts of the post box in general: the big one is that avatars and the the left rail on the comments view are now narrower to slightly alleviate the space crunch in long threads, but we also changed some other stuff, either to make both themes more consistent1, or because keeping them the same created really obnoxious CSS issues2.
there's one known open bug right now: the filtered CWs and filtered tags settings in the user settings page only look right if your chosen post box theme is "always dark-on-light" rather than "always light-on-dark" or "follows system theme"; you can change it temporarily to update your filters, then change it back. we'll fix that bug as soon as possible, probably by tomorrow morning at the latest. edit: this bug is now fixed. (thanks to jae for volunteering to do a 7pm code review.)
anyway! we hope you like it. thanks for using cohost!
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this is why the background of the line displaying the display name and handle of the page which made a particular post in a long thread changed
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this is why the hairlines at the top and bottom of a post go all the way across now, instead of stopping 12 pixels short
)
