You should welcome your new circumferential overlords.
I want to add my vote to those who want the actual proper rectangular image restored for the Straight Dope Light theme. It needlessly cuts off parts of the image to suit some developer’s idea of what an avatar should look like. Happily, my own avatar isn’t affected, but the avatar of one of our most active mods, @What_Exit, which was a Ukrainian flag, now looks like a dome. Think before you act, people! Consider leaving things alone!
I’ll second (third? fourth? whateverth) that.
Same here. Give us our squares back.
Who moved my cheese? 
My poor hippo!
Yeah, mine is messed up as a circle, too. Can we put it to a vote or something?
I vote square.
Anyone else notice the 1 on your avatar when someone has quoted you used to be yellow; now its purple?
Yep. That was bitched about ion another thread. The magnifying glass and hamburger menu are now so subdued that they look disabled controls, not live ones.
We have 40 years now of GUI convention that dimly lit barely constrasting controls are not live at the moment but might be live under different circumstances. Don’t take that routine predictability away for ill-considered reasons.
And the indication that you have new stuff (replied to you, DMs, etc.) is also smaller and less contrasty. That was the change that bothered me.
Also, i was wrong. I’ve seen circles in some places, but a lot of you used to look like squares in most places to me, too.
Y’all should switch to Straightdope Dark theme. Bright white magnifying glass and hamburger icons, and square avatars! I see LSLGuy’s avatar in all its square glory.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’m trying it right now and you’re certainly right that it’s still high contrast and square avatars.
I ran my work iPad in dark theme all the time just to stretch the battery life out to a full workday without having to carefully ration my use throughout my shift. Didn’t much like it that way, but I got used to it. Sigh.
I’ve never been a fan of dark mode for actual reading & writing and such. I’ll give this a fair try & see if I can adapt overcome. I see I don’t much care for how it renders deleted and inserted text; the pink and green colors are much more visible in SD Light. These look like somebody just picked the RGB inverses of the SD Light colors, rather than picking colors to contrast properly with a dark background.
At least bold and underline look good.
The SD Light Theme is currently broken: Defective top chrome tagline starting 2025-05-09 - #9 by Reply
Once it’s fixed, our custom CSS rule that square-ifies the avatars should come back in effect.
For me in SD Light it went from yellow on blue to a different shade of blue on blue. Definitely a bad change.
That wasn’t a deliberate change either. The entire theme broke, so all its customizations are gone until the theme is fixed. (The SDMB header and footer were separate files that continued to work.)
Is that what’s going on! I keep taking it for the you’ve-got-a-message icon; though that is, or at least used to be, green.
I’m apparently odd. I find dark themes extremely hard to read.
It’s definitely not just you; dark themes start hurting my eyes pretty quickly.
For now, I’ve switched to Sam’s Simple Theme. There’s too much light blue for my taste, but it’s the least offensive of the other available themes. 
When Straight Dope Light is fixed, I’ll revert.
FWIW, I’ve always used the Discourse Classic theme, and I’ve never had
any problems with it. (It’s a light theme.)
I’m not having all that much trouble with Straight Dope Light. I expect I’ll just stick with it.
Me too. I don’t like the changes but they’re only minor annoyances. I still prefer it to the other themes.