Greetings.

As I mentioned in a Tumblr post to help out newer users, I'm reposting some critiques of the site themes here. I have seen a bit about how there won't be more site themes until some sort of revamp is finished, and being a late night user, I'm guessing that has something to do with the changes I've been seeing to the user interface around 3 AM...but I figure I'll bring it up anyway since it's about current site themes.

Nearly all of the site themes have a major problem when it comes to the heading bars that display when you select an item from your inventory; these same bars may appear on other parts of the site, but I primarily am citing this spot because it was where I noticed it first and one of the major places everyone ends up when using Subeta. Every single theme except for Arctic Frost has some sort of darker colour background for the heading and black text, which is really hard to read.

Riverside Valley uses black on cobalt blue, which is probably one of the better ones, but still harder to read. Masquerade uses black on dark green here, which is super hard to read. Delphi Beach has black on a different shade of dark blue, and is still a bit hard to read. Shadowglen is black on a different dark green than Masquerade, and more readable due to the different hue...but still hard to read. Darkside was just difficult to use in general. The orange links need to be bolded at least on the sidebar, and then it would work better, but it also has the dark black text on a maroon colour and ends up doing odd things to the eyes while reading.

Arctic Frost, which is what I ended up using to get around the black text on dark colours problem, has it's own issue with the sidebar header titles being links that are only just barely darker than the header bars...but those are static, so the trade off kinda works. If they were bolded or just slightly darker, it likely wouldn't even be an issue and that theme would be perfect. But really, it's the easiest to read theme on the site overall.

As cited in the Tumblr post, this wouldn't be as huge a deal if there weren't certain information that wasn't 100% static. When reading books to pets, alchemy point gains pop up here, and those would still be easy to miss with the colours being as they are. And again, I'm sure there's other places on the site where the issue arises because it uses the same formatting (the pet gym comes to mind, but I'd need to switch again to double check).

My guess is that everything uses some CSS that's unified somewhere, which is why all those field have black text, even though it doesn't work well with the theme. Something could be inserted into the theme's CSS to override that, and make things easier to read. If that's all being fixed after the general user interface upgrades, that'll be great, but perhaps for now in order to help people out, have the default theme be Arctic Frost?

Otherwise, good luck with the user interface upgrades. They always come with a lot of conflict, no matter what you do - just ask Facebook~. =)

I can't use the Arctic Frost theme at all. It's too pale - everything is either white, very pale blue, or slightly darker blue - and I can't read anything. Isn't there a 'Welcome to Subeta' theme that's default anyway?