Lightmode theme

[Regenwasser]

@Uberdude

Or you don’t want to grow the cockpit.

I’d say don’t grow the cockpit.

[martin3141]

@sjrothsc

But to to justify annoying users like @square.defender I think you would need to have way more people saying they would like for this to change than the few people who have participated in this thread.

Do you find them annoying because they don’t agree with you?

I will say one advantage I see for a slightly darker background is that elements that are “closer” to the observer can have a lighter color, which creates a natural look imo (sortof like the background is in the shadow).

[Uberdude]

@sjrothsc

That being said, as I mentioned in the github message I don’t think we have consensus: while I suspect a majority of users would appreciate this change (or not notice it), there is a minority who likes things as they are.

With more votes a 70/30 split might still be reasonable to change the background color. At 7 votes though I don’t think there’s a sufficient case for merge here without more people chiming in.

I also suspect that the fraction of people who like dark mode is greater in the OGS forum userbase than the actual OGS server userbase, as my impression is dark mode tends to be more popular among “nerds” and “techies” and “internet netizens” who like talking on forums than Joe Public who just sees computers as a tool to play a game they like.

[Uberdude]

@martin3141

Do you find them annoying because they don’t agree with you?

It’s a verb not an adjective here

[martin3141]

Ooh … my bad. That’s easy to misunderstand though

[sjrothsc]

Yep! Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was saying “it would be irresponsible to make users angry without more data”. I appreciate people arguing for this on either side (or saying that they don’t have an opinion) since I think we do actually have a decent sense now that “this change should not go in as is”.

Looking at examples from around the web some sites do use quite a bit of #fff as the background color (though they have more variance in the navbar). I don’t particularly like this look, but it does exist on sites like github light mode. There’s another more common pattern where sites use off white as the background color and use white as a foreground color (facebook, lichess, linkedin, wikipedia, etc). I think that look can be really nice and is most of what I was looking at as it’s what happens with the nav when this change is implemented. But that’s not what this background change would do without additional changes to the layout of most OGS pages.

So I’m totally comfortable holding off on this until more of the page is restructured.

[Regenwasser]

@Regenwasser

I’d say don’t grow the cockpit.

I actually changed my opinion about this. I looked a little bit into this topic and now I tend towards adding another mode.

The very experienced UI/UX designer Andres Richero states:

Don’t use pure black or white, only near-black and near-white

Pure black looks unnatural on a screen, and pure white is too bright. Use a vey dark and very light grey, respectively. Any other references to “black” and “white” in these rules assume you’re following this rule.

Also yes there are many sites that do use pure white, like GitHub, Wikipedia or Discourse, but these are all pages that are focused towards reading large portions of text. Pure white is recommended for the use case of reading text.

But many other sites that are not text focus seem to be going with off-white:

• AI Sensei
• Lichess
• Gemini (Google’s AI), usually a good sign in web development when Google does something. The reason why they haven’t changed the search site might be brand recognition.
• Amazon (at least on their front page, they do switch to pure white when searching for products)
• Bilibili (is doing the reverse Amazon, having pure white on their front page, then switching to off-white on the subsites)
• Twitch
• Fandom
• Claude.ai (looking pretty close to Lichess actually, a little lighter I guess)

@sjrothsc

So I’m totally comfortable holding off on this until more of the page is restructured.

Or should we just do it and add an additional mode? GitHub e.g. offers 7 color modes plus an option for high contrast. Lichess offers dark, light, or picture background. So having more than two options isn’t unheard of. What do you think?

[sjrothsc]

My instinct would be still be to not.

I don’t know for sure, but scanning through the css it looks like light mode has gotten… a bit less attention than dark mode. Adding another theme is another theme to maintain and seems likely to me that either it will fall into disrepair, or light mode will get even less attention than it gets now.

I think for many of the sites you linked part of why they feel nice is that they do still use white in the foreground and use offwhite in the background. The one I know best is lichess. The home page uses exactly white for the nav dropdown and on card bodies below (I suspect the quick play tiles are also white with some transparency). But the other pages have even more white in the foreground and still look absolutely fine. Here’s the leaderboard page.

But when you go and change the OGS background to offwhite that’s not what it’s gonna look like. The nav will look great but the rest of the UI just doesn’t have the structure to lift parts of it forward. The play page is a clear example where its just a bunch of buttons on the background, but it’s definitely not the only example.

I’m generally optimistic that a change to an offwhite background will eventually be not-controversial and generally everyone would feel good about it, but it would have to be preceeded by adding a bit more structure and layout to lots of the pages on the site.

[Regenwasser]

@sjrothsc

I don’t know for sure, but scanning through the css it looks like light mode has gotten… a bit less attention than dark mode.

This sounds more like an argument for the change than against.

First, this shows that a theme can “survive” even with less attention.

But more importantly, second, the reason why that theme might have gotten less attention is because it’s probably less popular among contributors. If the two of us really like the new theme and tweak it accordingly then that sounds like a good start.

@sjrothsc

But when you go and change the OGS background to offwhite that’s not what it’s gonna look like.

True, but do you think you would like it less than the current light mode? Also we can always work on it.

@sjrothsc

eventually

Look bro. You seem to have put quite a lot of thought into your idea and quite a lot of effort into your PR. Why are you letting your work die in gote? Yeah, of course we will all be astronauts eventually but I think if it’s something we can get done today and we think it would be cool then we should go for it