With a view to keeping pupils unshrunken so that shadow details in inline images can be seen, what about switching to a dark grey-based colour theme here at Discourse?
I run a small Discourse site so could have a play and share a suggestion if you like.
I like white background. 
Me too, light is reader-friendly. I also agree about having dark backgrounds for photos. In this case, what would work is if an embedded image could be contained in a div which stretches from the left to the right edge of the screen and has a #161616 background.
Example:
I suppose the horizontal band does help a bit (especially if it were to have a decent amount of vertical padding above and below the image), but all that surrounding white still results in constricted pupils. Still, maybe that’s the best balance if most prefer a lighter background. At least when an image is clicked to show a larger version the background is dark. Maybe the white could be toned down just a little?
Ideally, Discourse would allow user selection of colour themes, but I don’t think it does.
I’ve had a play with my own Discourse installation and I might keep the dark background. I don’t find reading light on dark hard.
Turns out clicking on the image loads it in a lightbox with a dark background - that’s enough for me. I didn’t notice this before because I use the Imagus extension which loads the image full-screen on mouse hover.
@DavidOliver
User style sheets (CSS) can control how websites appear. See userstyles.org for browser add-ons to do it automatically.
Any embedded images that are larger than 690px wide will be embedded as a thumbnail, and will trigger a lightbox if clicked in a post (that has a dark background #0b0b0b).
While I understand your desire to have a dark overall background on the entire site, I feel the dark on white is more legible/readable. (Coming from a guy whose personal blog looks like this… 
).
If discourse upstream offers a user-defined option to implement different themes, I’ll gladly look into it!
@patdavid, Discourse allows for theme selection now.
Would it be possible to look into enabling a dark theme for selection at some point please? I’d be happy to help with setting colours if a good-looking dark colours entry doesn’t already exist.
our discourse instance currently only has one color scheme defined as we use a custom theme already for various reasons. we would need to find out how we make a color scheme for that.
but i turned on that users can switch themes when we have a new theme.
Okay - thanks. I do HTML and CSS for work, so if you’d like me to help out do let me know.
well currently i wonder why my instance imported the dark theme and discuss.pixls.us didnt. so we will learn more in the next few days.
I have trouble looking at web pages (such as the current pixls forum pages) with dark text on a “max white” background. I also don’t like white text on very dark backgrounds, in either case there is a lot of contrast.
To my eyes, your personal blog colors are very easy to look at, in fact just about perfect. If I could change anything I might make the text just a tiny bit darker, but maybe not, the text seems perfectly legible just the way it is
User choice in themes is always nice. If this happens for pixls.us, I’d like to see a theme choice that matches @patdavid 's blog.
In the meantime, it might be nice to change the current pixls.us background from pure white to something a little less contrasty. For example, I use #fafafa as the background on my own website (and even that could be a bit less bright and still look “white”).
I’m with Elle on this. The #FFFFFF background tires my eyes before too long. I’m more or less indifferent to light or dark themes as long as the contrast is not excessive. I’m not a loyalist to either camp.
I use a dark theme in my Atom editor, while I use a light theme in jEdit (which allowed me to customize the background to #EEEEEE…much easier on the eyes). I’m happy with both.
The Manjaro forum (https://forum.manjaro.org/), which uses Discourse, offers a dark theme. Not saying it’s good or bad, just saying that dark themes for Discourse are out there.
All,
This is something I know folks are going to be really interested in.
I’ll work with @darix to get the custom theme stuff sorted out asap, and possibly find a way to collaborate to create something custom that still looks good (I’ll get in touch with you in a bit @DavidOliver).
Thanks @patdavid @darix for taking good care of this forum 
I agree with the above. There are things we can do to make it easier for the community and visitors. More people than you think need accessibility considerations not just for aesthetic reasons. Generally, I believe there is a consensus that dark text on light background is best as long as the contrast difference is within a certain range. The are a few guidelines on the web with which some of you might be familiar. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - Wikipedia lists many of the relevant ones.
