Nick Colors

Every username gets its own color hash, so it is the same everywhere you see it and for every other user using the same userscript. Optionally, names also vary in weight, italics, small caps and little pre/post icons. This is the old deprecated Nick Colors userscript, merged in, and on by default.

In an attempt to be WCAG compliant, aesthetically pleasing for the many themes, AND give everyone their own ability to customize to their heart's content was fairly complex. There's more about it over on this page.

Once Nick Colors is enabled, you'll have a Nick Colors settings section. You can then:

1. choose to have the nick colors follow your site theme (they adjust when you change themes)
2. choose to set your own nick colors (do not change when you change your them)

If you choose to leave Follow site theme off you can select a preset to start from. This is just a starting point, your browser will remember your settings.

The nick color examples under the preset buttons stay at the top while you scroll the settings below them, so you can see what each change does.

Preset Examples

Monochrome Mode

Now it's time customize, maybe you decide you don't want any hue, saturation, or lightness variation:

That's what this toggle is for, it means all the nick colors will be exactly the same color. You can still vary them in other ways such as bold, italic, small-caps, icons. It starts on your site theme's text color, unless you already picked one.

Contrast

Depending on the settings used for Hue/Saturation/Lightness, some nickname colors might not show up well on the background. If Enable contrast auto-inversion is toggled on, it tries to invert the background on colors that are too dark/light to be seen well for the current theme.

You can adjust this threshold if you want more or less drastic contrast between colors, by default it's set at 4.5 which is WCAG's suggestion.

Or maybe you HATE the background color, in that case you can toggle it off:

Style Variation

Style variations are also hashed, so if you enable any they'll show the same on every other user's browser that's also got them turned on. What they look like off, just plain text nicknames:

Enabling most of them you get some fun italics, font-weights, small-caps, and icons. This allows users that don't want colors on their theme to add something to make nicknames easier to tell apart visually. Or even just more variation in addition to colors. A name in a cIRC /me line always stays italic, like the rest of the line.

Moving from Nick Colors

See: [Installing: Moving from Nick Colors](Installing#Moving from Nick Colors)

Reset Nick Color Theme

Allows you to reset just the color settings back to the preset, without touching custom user nick colors or notes or any other plugin settings.

Site-wide overrides

Some users have a style everyone sees by default. These come from overrides.json in the repo. Your own custom styles can override it.

If you too would like a custom nickname override color (e.g. by default you show as italic yellow but you'd really rather be pink and bold) you can send your style via cMail on Cyberspace and get an override entry.

1. Right click on your nickname and adjust your personal color and styles to your heart's content.
2. scroll down to the bottom of that dialog and click "Request Override." This will send me (z0ylent) a style via cMail so it can be added to overrides.

Next: Nick Notes