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The top bar is showing (again) the suggested edits count and 10K flags count, like it was before.

On Stack Overflow it looks like this: (that's the original color, same as in old top bar)

And on this very Meta site:

Same top bar. But different colors! Consistency broken.

I've just noticed the suggested edits count on Meta:

Black on black, I can see just a floating number - really confusing and out of any context.

In the name of Consistency, can we please have the same color on all sites?

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16
  • 4
    Dunno. I like them being different - helps with distinguishing what actual site I am on.
    – Oded
    Dec 18 '13 at 13:38
  • 15
    @Oded but the whole point of the new top bar is to have the same design on all sites. Or wasn't it??
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Dec 18 '13 at 13:40
  • 2
    @codehorse well, lots of people think the new top bar is ugly, so it might just fit. :-D
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Dec 18 '13 at 15:59
  • 3
    Same thing with the suggested edit indicator (which uses hot and hotbg).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Dec 22 '13 at 1:22
  • wait, Stack Overflow has !important in its codebase? I think I should be surprised, but having seen nested tables in the design, I'm not (still better than Google's one-letter class names and unparseable AJAX, though).
    – John Dvorak
    Dec 22 '13 at 15:26
  • @Jan well, there are still times when this is the right choice so we can't flame the devs just yet. ;-)
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Dec 22 '13 at 15:41
  • @ShadowWizard hmm... at least you don't claim tables are sometimes good, just that !important is :-)
    – John Dvorak
    Dec 22 '13 at 16:09
  • @JanDvorak Tabular design is the last resort when everything else fails and it's either this or doomsday. ;D
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Dec 22 '13 at 16:14
  • @ShadowWizard I'd still prefer display:table over actual <table>s. Also, I thought that the last resort was position:javascript :-)
    – John Dvorak
    Dec 22 '13 at 16:25
  • @Jan or maybe client side VBScript... or activeX objects... <shudders>
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Dec 22 '13 at 17:34
  • cough... userscript ... cough
    – Tim Seguine
    Dec 23 '13 at 9:52
  • 1
    @Tim but then other things will break... I see too many reports here about weird problems that turns out to be caused by user scripts.
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Dec 23 '13 at 9:57
  • I don't really see how injecting a few styles that change colors into a page could break much. Isn't this just asking for the bikeshed to be painted a different color?
    – Tim Seguine
    Dec 23 '13 at 10:55
  • 4
    @Tim I disagree. I just hit 2k here, and was presented with a number next to 'review'. At a glance, it looked like it had no background, so there was no context at all. Even after using the indicators for over a year on SO, I had to click on meta to find out what it was, because it looks nothing the same. To remedy that with a userscript, I would've had to install it before I knew it was a problem.
    – Geobits
    Jan 8 '14 at 16:29
  • @Geobits cheers, good points! :)
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Jan 8 '14 at 18:46
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I just pushed a fix for this. Should be live in the next build.

The top bar will look like this across all sites:

enter image description here

(That's flags on the left in blue, and pending suggested edits on the right in orange-ish.)

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  • 5
    Ooh, neat, this'll be the first fix I can remove from SOUP!
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Feb 25 '14 at 21:32
  • Should I get my pantone chips to figure out the official color?
    – mpdonadio
    Feb 25 '14 at 21:35
  • 2
    1337? Must be a fake! Thanks a bunch, my eyes will feel better now when switching between the sites. :-)
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Feb 25 '14 at 21:45
  • A nice step forward. Are you going to fix the position, while you're at it? The 10k flags and the mod flags are in a different place.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 26 '14 at 0:15
  • @Gilles Sure, why not. Will be live in the next build.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Feb 26 '14 at 1:02
  • I had this feature request pending regarding the position. And please don't pick the MSO suggested edit color, it was the worst of the network.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Feb 26 '14 at 2:11
  • One thing about having review privs on only SO is that the color change threw me off; I very nearly posted a question asking whether it was a bug >.>
    – Dennis Meng
    Feb 26 '14 at 5:41
  • @AnnaLear if I may ask, do the colors have any meaning? Did you think of them yourself, or got help from a designer? (I ask because of this question)
    – Shadow Wizard Hates Omicron
    Mar 4 '14 at 9:18
5

While waiting for the SE folks to fix this properly, I've added a client-side fix for this issue to Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch 1.8.

Basically, what the fix in SOUP does is apply the current SO notification colors to all SE sites. The choice of the specific colors was somewhat arbitrary, but I chose to go with the SO styles because:

  • I had to choose something,
  • unlike some of the other color schemes, they're at least more or less readable,
  • they seem to be the same colors as used on newly graduated SE sites like The Workplace, and
  • SO is big and popular enough that, hopefully, the people who designed the top bar paid at least some attention to how it looks there.

In any case, I do hope that a proper fix for this issue will arrive soon, so that I can remove the workaround from SOUP. In the mean time, though, installing SOUP will at least let you see the notifications on all sites.

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