For those who haven’t heard/noticed yet, someone has created two new themes: “Straight Dope Dark” and “Straight Dope Light”. They increase the line length of posts by using up most of that blank space (which many people have been complaining about) on the left side of the screen.
Kudos and many, many thanks to whoever created the new themes!
Reunite Gondwanaland!
Some have noticed it. I’m praying for a theme that combines the uncluttered configuration of Sam’s Simple with the post delimitation in Material Design, but I don’t nurture great hopes. I’ll stick with Sam’s Simple, I think.
I was using Vincent, but I’ve switched to Dope Dark.
They look cool, but I’ve never been a “dark” person.
How to make your own themes if you have the skills.
For now, I’m content with Discourse-classic. Best visual separation between posts.
SD Light and Dark are the best themes by far.
They remove a lot of the white space, making everything so much easier to read, and do not seem to cause formatting errors (removing gifs, and emojis, etc).
Discourse-Classic was okay for me too, but I think I’ll try SD light and dark out today.
Er, um, it sounds wonderful. Any chance you could explain how we access that? 
I’m not seeing ‘theme‘ listed in the preferences so, like, is it magic? Do I need to sacrifice an animal? Or is it knowledge you need to be born with? 
Can anyone point me in the right direction pretty please?
Preferences > Interface > Theme.
It’s not a complete change from classic but a bit more helpful though.
Is “Straight Dope Light/Dark” just listed as “Light” and “Dark”? Because if not, I’m not seeing them.
Maybe. For me, there used to be Dark and Light, but Light is now gone and there are Straight Dope Light and Straight Dope Dark. Dark is still there, too.
For me, the themes are listed in alphabetical order, which puts them near the bottom of the list, between Sam’s Simple and Vincent.
Same here.
Yup - found it. I had to refresh my Preferences page, since apparently clicking between forums and such doesn’t actually do that. That’s a weird glitch/feature…
I’m in Straight Dope Light right now and no, it doesn’t use that blank space on the left side of the screen; or the blank space to the right of the scroll bar, either.
Mac desktop, Firefox.
Screen resolution greatly affects white space… 
Yeah, there is no difference in the amount of space used between the Straight Dope theme & the Sam’s Simple Theme I had set. They both have the same wasted white space on both sides.
In fact, the line length is actually smaller in the Straight Dope theme than in Discourse-classic!
My screen resolution’s set to “default for display”, for what that’s worth.
I love the “Straight Dope Light” theme.
The only downside is that it makes all the avatars round instead of square.
Any chance the theme could be modified to make the avatars square so as to match the old board?
Just checked – Straight Dope Dark (which I’m using now) and Sam’s Simple both have two fingers of blank space; Vincent (which I was using before) has five fingers.
And you’ll note that I said
– not all of it – and I said nothing about the right side.