Hi everyone,
Since the update of Discourse, it’s felt the appearance is somewhat lacking. I’m open to suggestions of new themes and appearance tweaks that could be installed to improve everyone’s experience of using this instance of Discourse.
Anyone is welcome to reply or get in touch with me privately if they wish 
Please add a dark mode, please!
Oh my eyes thank you on the dark themeing.
These comments are more a cumulative frustration than anything. Nothing against you.
A view, TT
It looks like the font for the forum now defaults to “NotoSansJP”. It would be nice to select from a few more familiar fonts like Arial or Verdana and maybe a serif font or two. I have already done this with a uBlock filter, but a native option would be helpful.
There seems to be no direct setting, that defines custom fonts at the moment. NotoSansJP seems to be a possibility to cover a wide range of possibilities, without causing UI styling problems.
Loading a page like this one, only loads about 26kByte of font files. So it is no performance problem at all.
I’ll just say for my part that I like all the new themes, and want to thanks you for the tasteful selection! I ended up with Sam’s Simple Theme. It is a massive step up from the previous theme. Finally, a light theme that avoids most of the mistakes of 2010s designs with overly low contrast everywhere.
@StS … I think this comes from the theme you use atm.
I use the Default theme which does this: Dark text for unread topics and muted for read ones.
Which theme do you use atm. May be we have a possibility to change some CSS settings with latest Discourse too. As far as I can remember the “old” Discourse version had a possibility.
I moved this paragraph from the end of the post to the top
Create a TiddlyWiki flavoured Markdown syntax that would be incompatible with the current TW syntax, but would be compatible enough for prose text only. So we could copy text back and forth between here and a wiki.
It would make us compatible (enough) with the rest of the world, while keeping our features.
I can not speak for other TW core devs, but I do not speak “Ruby”, which is the backend language, that Discourse software uses.
There are some threads at Discourse about themes and Components, but they are quite old.
This can be good or bad. If Discourse is similar to TW about backwards compatibility it’s good. So the “old” info still stands and works. Or it is completely outdated and you run against walls using this info. We would need to find out first.
The second component Discourse uses is a heavy Javascript frontend. If you load this thread. It loads:
scattered over about 100 files (including assets) with mainly machine created names that are not very readable for humans.
Just to get the a little bit of context.
For reading mode the markdown post content is rendered server side.
For edit mode, the frontend seems to do markdown rendering on the fly, probably using an existing markdown library.
So to make TW syntax going, we would need to dig deep, into the rendering internals of the server, even if it uses a standard JS library to create the html output.
Even in times of support from “programming bots” this would be a huge endeavour.
If we would have the resources to implement that, we could significantly speed up the development of our own code base. Which imo would make a 100 times more sense.
