Personally, I hate changes for the sake of changes. The last forum color changes look exactly like that. It is in the opposite direction of business-focused image.
Existing sites’ muddy colors are not the best marketing option. But the new forum schema is even worse.
Like the best coding standards, there are best UI standards, everything else just irritates users (in most cases). Decreased contrast creates additional strain to my old eyes. What reason?
/end of rant
There was a message on Slack.
There were a few new things being tried out.
I don’t think that investigating options are inherently anti-business though 
Whether they work or not is of course another discussion. 
Have no idea about it.
And it highlights one more problem: fragmentation of communication channel. Now, we have 4: CP forum, Slack, Github, Petitions discussion.
On the production site? 
That depends. CP is only starting to break into its early adopters market.
For most (not all) innovator types, the occasional experiment isn’t really the end of the world.
I think they find that preferably to putting the site into maintenance mode and not being available while the experiments don’t affect functionality.
Admittedly, I did not see the wonky colours 
It’s not that I don’t see your point.
Branding is important.
I just think the cost of the other options did not justify it.
I don’t agree, I think bringing the forums in line with the branding guide (and new website) is beneficial and helps keep consistency across our websites. Having websites that look completely different from each other makes it look like we are unprofessional and amateurs.
Regardless, I think the change was too quick and too much at once. Instead I will use a ‘Just Noticeable Difference’ approach going forward. Now there are 3 colour schemes you can find in your Interface settings, and slowly overtime the Default will become more like the “On Brand”.
“Options, not decisions” can be the right approach to the all CP, forum colors included. But I browsed my profile and didn’t find an option to change that. So it started to scare me.
Theme options can be found by going to the gear icon when you click your profile picture, then on the left side scroll down and click on “Interface” and then there are 3 themes to choose from
When I searched a couple hours ago, I found a “Light” and “Dark” only.
I had forgotten to activate it last night - was a long day
Got it now. Thanks Wade.
For anyone interested, the first ‘Just Noticeable Difference’ is the navigation buttons (that red/orange was driving me nuts).
@anon71742606 you would need to scroll to the bottom and click Save for the change to take effect across the site - it is more noticeable once you start using the forums as usual.
@BlueSkyPhoenix just tagging you here so you can see the discussion when you are online
On brand has the purple.
This is true, I would rather push a change to production that has no impact on functionality then to pull up a testing environment/pull the site offline.
We are working on getting a staging server up and running for us to test new plugins (ie. voting - for petitions). Since those will have larger impacts to the forums as a whole and we need to test that everything will work as expected.
Despite Deep Purple is the best group for me, I am still sceptic about purple and business-focus.
I guess, a grayscale theme named “50 shades of Smoke on the water” would be satisfying enougth for you
Yes, especially those grey shades.
Don’t forget email, Twitter, website, documentation, the contact form on the site, …
Each of these channels serves different purposes, and each is important. If you have a constructive suggestion for how to manage this better, then we will be happy to hear it.
I understand that. It was just a statement report. Just the fact, that I missed the discussion about forum colors in Slack highlight some problems, and, as you said, constructive discussions in this area are welcome, IMHO. The best solution? I don’t know, I am not photolinas, we need more collective thinking.
From the user perspective I think that merging the discussion part in petitions and this forum is a good idea, but it can be impossible to achieve technically.
We are testing out a solution for this, but it is still a little while away. We ‘just’ need to make sure we can import everything (users, petitions, votes, comments) while also ensuring we don’t break the forums. But, it isn’t impossible and we are working on it