• The site has now migrated to Xenforo 2. If you see any issues with the forum operation, please post them in the feedback thread.
  • Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com. Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
  • For prospective new members, a word of warning: don't use common names like Dennis, Simon, or Kenny if you decide to create an account. Spammers have used them all before you and gotten those names flagged in the anti-spam databases. Your account registration will be rejected because of it.
  • Since it has happened MULTIPLE times now, I want to be very clear about this. You do not get to abandon an account and create a new one. You do not get to pass an account to someone else and create a new one. If you do so anyway, you will be banned for creating sockpuppets.
  • Due to the actions of particularly persistent spammers and trolls, we will be banning disposable email addresses from today onward.
  • The rules regarding NSFW links have been updated. See here for details.

Soliciting style requests

Blackened High Contrast is almost perfect. ALMOST.
If the contrasting colors of different UI elements were set in the same pattern as the SB default theme it would be perfect. As-is, the way it's implemented is distracting and forcing me to look twice at specific elements to make sure I saw what I saw.
 
Please bring back blackened high contrast orange it was my default option for as long as I can remember because it was easy on my fucked up eyes.
Came here just to say the exact same thing. Black and Orange went really well together.
Yeah I love the Blackened High Contrast but the blue isn't pleasant. A lot of us really loved the orange and I hope they bring it back soon.
I'd be fine if all the current theme colors were high-contrast.

Green is my priority, and I'd like it to look more like the older Blackened Green theme (with a serif font for post body text but default san-serif for buttons etc.).
For those inclined to make use of custom userstyles (user-defined CSS to override a site's styles) while waiting for more changes on QQ's side, I have what I think is a fairly complete version over here. It's designed to be used with the Stylus extension, where you can enable or disable any of the specific userstyles with a simple click. Two of them are specifically designed to toggle serif fonts and high contrast (vs basic contrast) dark backgrounds. And a third one is designed to provide the accent color you want to use. The one I put up for demo is orange, since a lot of people seem to want that.

Basically, choose a basic style (I choose Blackened for the layout and red-colored badges), and then enable the userstyles: Final Settings, Basic Background, and Orange Accent. Optionally enable High Contrast and Serif Fonts. I believe this will be close to what people are looking for.

Note: I didn't use the old orange theme, so the colors chosen may not be an exact match for what people expect, but it's very easy to tweak. And of course you can change it to whatever accent color you want. There are only four color values to set, and they then get applied by the Final Settings userstyle. You don't have to know where everything needs to go, or what to modify on the page.
 
Please just fix dark mode so that it's actually possible to read on it. can't use light mode due to eye sensitivity, so I would apreciate being able to read on this site again. the blackened styles give me aheadache.

just make the background of dark mode darker or the same color of old qq and change the color of the font so that it isin't invisible to my eyes. Please.
 
Please just fix dark mode so that it's actually possible to read on it. can't use light mode due to eye sensitivity, so I would apreciate being able to read on this site again. the blackened styles give me aheadache.

just make the background of dark mode darker or the same color of old qq and change the color of the font so that it isin't invisible to my eyes. Please.

Have you tried the new "Blackened High Contrast" version yet?
 
Have you tried the new "Blackened High Contrast" version yet?

I have, the font is too high contrast to the point I have to lower the brightness of my phone considerably to read, and that also makes it a headache to read. I found the previous contrast of old QQ was perfect for my eyes, blackened high contrast is too much, even on laptop, and on phone is much worse.
 
I have, the font is too high contrast to the point I have to lower the brightness of my phone considerably to read, and that also makes it a headache to read. I found the previous contrast of old QQ was perfect for my eyes, blackened high contrast is too much, even on laptop, and on phone is much worse.
Have you tried regular non-high contrast Blackened then?
 
I have, the font is too high contrast to the point I have to lower the brightness of my phone considerably to read, and that also makes it a headache to read. I found the previous contrast of old QQ was perfect for my eyes, blackened high contrast is too much, even on laptop, and on phone is much worse.

I'm using a browser addon called "Dark Reader" which seems to support some phones, and it has brightness & contrast sliders which let me set the site to a range which is comfortable for myself.

It's very convenient for Firefox, hopefully it supports your browser too?
 
I'm using a browser addon called "Dark Reader" which seems to support some phones, and it has brightness & contrast sliders which let me set the site to a range which is comfortable for myself.

It's very convenient for Firefox, hopefully it supports your browser too?

Honestly, it would probably be easier to get used to the Blackened green, which I am currently using, than get used to Firefox.

My main issue is that the text blends too much to the background, and the worst part is that the UI, like threadmarks and such are basically invisible and completely blend with things like likes and such.
 
Is there anyway to undo the whole forumn settup to make it look like the old version. I honestly completely hate the new layout on mobile, it's just a shitty reskin of Sufficientvelocity and spacebattles now.

I'm considering completely dropping QQ because of the layout change.
 
Is there anyway to undo the whole forumn settup to make it look like the old version. I honestly completely hate the new layout on mobile, it's just a shitty reskin of Sufficientvelocity and spacebattles now.

I'm considering completely dropping QQ because of the layout change.
No, those styles are gone forever. They're not 'secretly hiding somewhere', this isn't a special overlay or something that can be turned off. This is an entirely new edition of the forums- Super Mario 64 compared to Super Mario 3. You can't just toggle a button in options to make it 2D.

Which is why so many of us are lurking here being annoyed that there was rather quick implementation of some of the colored styles but we're still waiting on ORANGE
 
Currently using "Blackened Purple", and saw a story using inline spoilers, and noticed that the 'hidden' inline spoilers are almost the exact same shade as the text box itself, which is... incredibly annoying.

Can we get that changed to like... dark black or something? Something other than the single-slight-shade-away-from-the-background that it is now?

vvv Example Inline Spoiler vvv vvv Example Inline Spoiler vvv vvv Example Inline Spoiler vvv
INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER
^^^ Example Inline Spoiler ^^^ ^^^ Example Inline Spoiler ^^^ ^^^ Example Inline Spoiler ^^^

Or it's just an issue for me. Added one of them just above this to see if anyone else is having the same issue.

As-is, it's honestly worse than invisitext. Because while the little eye icon on posts can reveal that the post has it, it's easy to miss that icon, and VERY easy to miss the text itself since it's hidden behind a spoiler of near-exact same shade as the background. My invistext revealer can catch transparent text easy, but inline spoiler'd stuff isn't revealed, and is downright impossible to see atm.
 
Currently using "Blackened Purple", and saw a story using inline spoilers, and noticed that the 'hidden' inline spoilers are almost the exact same shade as the text box itself, which is... incredibly annoying.

Can we get that changed to like... dark black or something? Something other than the single-slight-shade-away-from-the-background that it is now?

vvv Example Inline Spoiler vvv vvv Example Inline Spoiler vvv vvv Example Inline Spoiler vvv
INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER INLINE SPOILER
^^^ Example Inline Spoiler ^^^ ^^^ Example Inline Spoiler ^^^ ^^^ Example Inline Spoiler ^^^

Or it's just an issue for me. Added one of them just above this to see if anyone else is having the same issue.

As-is, it's honestly worse than invisitext. Because while the little eye icon on posts can reveal that the post has it, it's easy to miss that icon, and VERY easy to miss the text itself since it's hidden behind a spoiler of near-exact same shade as the background. My invistext revealer can catch transparent text easy, but inline spoiler'd stuff isn't revealed, and is downright impossible to see atm.
It's just you, they're pretty visible on the Blackened themes for me, not as visible as on High Contrast but still easily visible at a glance.
 
It's just you, they're pretty visible on the Blackened themes for me, not as visible as on High Contrast but still easily visible at a glance.
I agree with @Vanbers — They're nearly indistinguishable from the background color. See: screenshot from the basic Blackened theme.

I haven't had an issue with it personally, though, because my own userstyle has increased the contrast by darkening the post background. See: screenshot.

All the current dark themes have contrast issues that would not take much to fix, but I'm not sure how complicated it is to modify the theme files themselves.
 
I agree with @Vanbers — They're nearly indistinguishable from the background color. See: screenshot from the basic Blackened theme.

To reiterate what it looks like:

qq-example-inline.png

It's damn near invisible for me, yeah.

Not sure how hard it'd be to fix, but it'd be real nice if it was a solid black, and not one-shade-more-gray-than-the-background. I have no idea why the dark themes have such comically glaring contrast issues tbh. They're all so "smooth", in a bad way.
 
Last edited:
Are new styles still being added? Because there hasn't been one in a while. Just checking because while Blackened high contrast is great, it's still blue, and a lot of us miss that proper QQ orange lol.
 
Are new styles still being added? Because there hasn't been one in a while. Just checking because while Blackened high contrast is great, it's still blue, and a lot of us miss that proper QQ orange lol.

Same, but Green for me.

It'd be cool if we could separate the contrast from the highlight color somehow -- set "Blue" or "Orange" or "Green" in another part of the preferences, and set style to "High Contrast Dark" in the style chooser -- and similarly set post body text to Serif / Sanserif / MS Comic Sans / etc. in a third option.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jao
Something I've been noticing recently is that with Blackened High Contrast the blue of the link colour is perhaps a bit too dark - this makes it harder to read than it should be for a high contrast style. Case in point, I just had to highlight a link to be able to read it clearly, and the names of stories in notifications can be a bit annoyingly hard to read sometimes. Any chance of a tweak to this style?
 
Something I've been noticing recently is that with Blackened High Contrast the blue of the link colour is perhaps a bit too dark - this makes it harder to read than it should be for a high contrast style. Case in point, I just had to highlight a link to be able to read it clearly, and the names of stories in notifications can be a bit annoyingly hard to read sometimes. Any chance of a tweak to this style?
I think you may just have a contrast issue with your monitor. It's plenty distinct on all of mine.
 
I think you may just have a contrast issue with your monitor. It's plenty distinct on all of mine.
It's mainly an issue in quotes and the notification dropdown, where the background is a dark grey instead of the black in normal messages. But given that I don't have the same issue on my phone, it's possible it's related to my display.
(I'm looking vaguely at Stylus, but I'll probably need to mess with its settings first given how tiny the UI features of it are by default.)
Edit: yeah, also annoying on the phone screen.
 
Last edited:
It's mainly an issue in quotes and the notification dropdown, where the background is a dark grey instead of the black in normal messages. But given that I don't have the same issue on my phone, it's possible it's related to my display.

Some computers change the blue ratio during "night" hours. This can make blue text very difficult to read.

It's part of why I want a non-blue high-contrast theme.
 
Some computers change the blue ratio during "night" hours. This can make blue text very difficult to read.

It's part of why I want a non-blue high-contrast theme.
After playing around with my display's settings (changing the gamma curve and turning on dynamic contrast to high helped the readability of the blue text at the expense of colours in other contexts just looking wrong), and messing with Stylus a little, I think changing the background from the dark grey to either an even darker grey or a pure black improves things on my display. I've changed the link text to #b0b0f0 with visited and hover at #a0c0d0 and #b0d0f0 respectively (not what I'll leave them at long term - still needs tweaking), and the background colour of div.contentRow to black, and it's much more readable.

The current high contrast theme looks mostly ok on my phone (insert rant about the what's new button taking up valuable screen space with the phone in profile view, and still being in an annoying spot in landscape view), which I use more often on the site these days, but I'd still prefer more black background where practical on a phone's oled screen instead of the dark grey.

Edit: yeah, the lack of contrast is also an issue on the phone.
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure if this would go here or as a separate suggestion with it's own thread.

In Spacebattles, quotes that mention you have a highlighted header that makes them stand out.

For example in spacebattles default view the quote's header is a light blue.
But the color for those that quote you are light green to immediately jump out to you if you're quoted.

Is there a chance we can implement that on QQ?
It makes it easy to find where people responded to you, especially when the browser jumps you somewhere else for some reason.
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure if this would go here or as a separate suggestion with it's own thread.

In Spacebattles, quotes that mention you have a highlighted header that makes them stand out.

For example in spacebattles default view the quote's header is a light blue.
But the color for those that quote you are light green to immediately jump out to you if you're quoted.

Is there a chance we can implement that on QQ?
It makes it easy to find where people responded to you, especially when the browser jumps you somewhere else for some reason.

Seconding this, it'd be pretty useful honestly, particularly in cases where people are responding to many people, and one of like 50 quotes there is yours, so you have to take a second to dig through it.
 
I'm not sure if this would go here or as a separate suggestion with it's own thread.

In Spacebattles, quotes that mention you have a highlighted header that makes them stand out.

For example in spacebattles default view the quote's header is a light blue.
But the color for those that quote you are light green to immediately jump out to you if you're quoted.

Is there a chance we can implement that on QQ?
It makes it easy to find where people responded to you, especially when the browser jumps you somewhere else for some reason.
That might be an addon that would cost money to get here. I don't think it's been a thing over there for very long, relatively speaking. But it's definitely useful and worth the ask. @alethiophile @ultima333 you guys are the admins, is this one feasible? And while we're at it, whatever happened to making the boundary between post and signature more visible on the default Light style? It's been months.
 
That might be an addon that would cost money to get here. I don't think it's been a thing over there for very long, relatively speaking. But it's definitely useful and worth the ask. @alethiophile @ultima333 you guys are the admins, is this one feasible? And while we're at it, whatever happened to making the boundary between post and signature more visible on the default Light style? It's been months.
They've had it on SB for several years, at least. I remember filing a bug report on it not being colored properly on the default theme quite a while ago. Searching... November 2019.

It basically comes down to adding an attribute to quote elements if the user reference is you, and then a bit of CSS in all the themes for ".bbCodeBlock--selfQuote .bbCodeBlock-title".

I don't know if it requires a paid plugin, but I know the CSS doesn't appear to be active if I insert the class into the HTML, so the themes would have to be updated to match. That's slightly more work.
 
Some computers change the blue ratio during "night" hours. This can make blue text very difficult to read.

It's part of why I want a non-blue high-contrast theme.

Back again to once again speak up for the large majority of readers who want the old QQ orange back in blackened high contrast. I don't even know if they're still adding themes, but it's been killing me for months. QQ is just wrong without the orange.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top