Color of Visited Links

September 18, 2015 4:00 PM

I might be the only one, but I find it weird when I'm scrolling through the front pages of sites, and if I've visited a profile or visited an area of the site (for instance here on MetaTalk "Metafilter-Related") that it's a different color.

I understand the usefulness of the color differentiation, but I often use it as a "Hey I looked at this, let me see if there's anything new" instead of an "oh I already clicked this link" thing. So scrolling through I often falsely pause at a place where there's really no need to know that I've already visited it. Like user names that link to profiles and "posted to" that link to ... compilations of that subject? Would anyone else gain any benefit from not changing the visited link color on things like user profiles and "posted to" links?

posted by one4themoment to Feature Requests at 4:00 PM (25 comments total)

I do get some use out of the visited link color on profiles and such, but my usage is obviously nonstandard. Curious to hear what other people think.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 4:01 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here's an example of something that throws me off sometimes. It's not a big deal.
posted by one4themoment at 4:04 PM on September 18, 2015

I've found the application of colour on visited links here exactly the same as the vast majority of the Web, and this a good and useful thing
posted by smoke at 4:07 PM on September 18, 2015 [36 favorites]

I do a weird thing where I click on everyone's handle who favorites a post of mine; so when a new person favorites one of my fpps, I know. Don't ask me why this is important but it has become an important ritual of mine. Anyways. Weird stuff. No leave as is. Seconding smoke.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:19 PM on September 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

You could always remove the offending links from your browser history. Once they're gone from your history they won't show up as a visited link.

You could probably also throw something together with a browser add-on like Stylish. You'd have to write a rule for each subsite since there are different colors for each. You'd find the non-visited link color for the site and then set all links in post bylines to have that color. For MetaTalk in the Modern theme a stylish rule you could use would be:

span.smallcopy.postbyline > a {color: #065a8f;}

That should hide visited info in post bylines for you.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:23 PM on September 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

You can add posts that interest you to your activity and use recent activity to keep track of new comments. I find it to be a lot more efficient than rescanning the front page.
posted by double block and bleed at 4:31 PM on September 18, 2015

Here's an example of something that throws me off sometimes. It's not a big deal.

Out of curiosity, what link is different in that image? Can't see the difference.
posted by zarq at 4:31 PM on September 18, 2015

The visited links are a more dull color than the unvisited ones, so I find it easier to ignore things I've already seen as I'm scrolling down the page. With usernames, though, it helps to highlight comments because I notice that I view a person's profile for some reason (probably to find cool stuff they posted).

If they're distracting you, you can apply a:visited{color:inherit!important} to Metafilter with a user stylesheet (Stylish works for Firefox and Chrome).
posted by Rangi at 4:38 PM on September 18, 2015

This stylish rule worked for me a:visited{color: #9cc754!important;} It changes all of the links but I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to go forward from here. If anyone else is interested I can post the final once I tweak it to change only the profile, posted to, and time stamp links which is what would be ideal for me. Thank you everyone :D (also thank you for introducing me to stylish)
posted by one4themoment at 4:54 PM on September 18, 2015

I do a weird thing where I click on everyone's handle who favorites a post of mine

Not weird at all. It is interesting to try and deduce the reasons why people favorite your posts or comments. Patterns emerge and either the NSA will get those people with unhealthy interests or the mods will remotely explode their heads.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 6:35 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Feature, not a bug.
posted by blurker at 8:33 PM on September 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

I often use it as a "Hey I looked at this, let me see if there's anything new" instead of an "oh I already clicked this link" thing.

Yeah, I'm still not clear on how this in anyway diminishes the usefulness of this feature. It simultaneously informs you that you have already been there and offers you the opportunity to check whether there is anything new.
posted by trip and a half at 10:32 PM on September 18, 2015

Here's an example of something that throws me off sometimes. It's not a big deal.

Out of curiosity, what link is different in that image? Can't see the difference.
posted by zarq at 4:31 PM on September 18 [+] [!]

zarq, it's the Metafilter Related category.

Feature not a bug for me also.
posted by ellieBOA at 1:19 AM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm mostly in the feature not bug camp myself, but maybe having a different style for visited profile etc links - not identical to non-visited links - might be useful if it could be made to work visually with the rest of the theme.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:41 AM on September 19, 2015

Thank you, ellieBOA.
posted by zarq at 5:12 AM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is standard for th web since even before stylesheets. It's actually fairly important to be able to differentiate between visited links and not and if that behavior was broke I think I would lose my mind.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:51 AM on September 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yeah, the whole do-show-visited-status-of-nav-type-links thing is a big subjective style debate mostly as far as I've encountered it; there's arguments for always showing visited status (main idea: communicate browser/history state clearly), and there's arguments for treating common nav/UI/reference links different from normal external links (main idea: aesthetically nicer or less distracting to keep 'em unchanging), and I think it's a little bit more of a designer knife fight or holy war thing than something that will ever be cleanly resolvable.

I like how it works on MeFi, though I don't have super strong feelings about it personally. I think "communicate state clearly" is generally the right way to go when stuck making a choice on a lot of stuff where communication and style are in conflict, though.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:32 PM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Out of curiosity, what link is different in that image? Can't see the difference.

If we're going to have differently-colored links, there should probably be a way to accommodate users with different color perceptions.

I don't know whether a small tweak to colour values would make things easier to distinguish or not. This may be opening a whole can of worms, but there may be other parts of this website that are confusing for some users.

Maybe there's already a browser-side addition that improves contrast, but it doesn't necessarily help users if they don't know they need to use it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:29 PM on September 19, 2015

So I'm pretty happy with
.smallcopy a:visited {color: #9cc754!important;}

pb I was testing what you wrote here in metatalk, and couldn't get it to ever work for me, and I think I figured out why. On for instance, ask, there is a class="smallcopy postbyline" but here on talk it looks like it's just class="smallcopy"

So since I was testing it here in metatalk I was never seeing the changes.

Thanks everyone for the help in my minimal non-problem and thanks again for the stylish intro :)
posted by one4themoment at 7:35 AM on September 20, 2015

Is that something that could ever be a user's choice, like whether links open in new tabs, or is it too complicated for that?
posted by jaguar at 7:50 AM on September 20, 2015

jaguar, we don't want to fill the preferences page with every conceivable modification. If we did there would be potentially hundreds of preferences to sift through and we feel like that's hostile to users. Every preference is also more for us to explain to folks and more for us to maintain in code going forward.

We have a large number of people using the site and we need to aim for the big middle rather than all of the edges.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:13 AM on September 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

pb I was testing what you wrote here in metatalk, and couldn't get it to ever work for me...

Sorry about that. I must have been testing on one of the other subsites. Glad you found something that works.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:20 AM on September 20, 2015

jaguar, we don't want to fill the preferences page with every conceivable modification.

That makes sense. And I like the current setup, so I'm not particularly advocating for changing anything. I guess I was mostly just curious about the reason behind not letting it be user-modifiable, and "We have to set limits somewhere" is understandable.
posted by jaguar at 8:23 AM on September 20, 2015

Yeah, it's one of those things that in practice probably makes more sense for folks to modify client-side according to their known specific needs (given the variety in kind and severity of visual processing issues folks can have) than to try and solve server-side with a one-size-fits-all flip of a switch. Though to whatever extent folks have a collective sense of something that would simply and significantly help a lot of folks in the userbase, that's okay to talk about.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:30 AM on September 20, 2015

If we were to tweak link colors in order to make visited links more visible to people with color perception issues, seems to me the easiest thing to do would be to place the visited and unvisited link colors farther apart in terms of value. Brightness should be more consistently perceptible than hue or saturation. Just a thought.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:03 PM on September 20, 2015