Update: 32 new avatars available! 😍

When my sister, Alexa, came on here, she said, "Hmph. My laptop's broken." When I checked on mine, I saw the same thing. we both hated it. At first, I got hyped up on Ice Cream Blobby. Now it looks silly :(. 

Please add the backgrounds, or at least let us add our own images/colors. It would make so many of us really happy.

#BringBackBackgrounds

#BringBackBackgrounds

Listen to us! Me and my sister decided that we want the old, easy, agreeable site than this WEIRD, CONSTANTLY CRASHING site! Please listen to the USERS, not developers!

#BringBackBackgrounds

Listen. Plenty of people have posted about how this causes eye strain, and it doesn't even look good. BRING BACK BACKGROUNDS!

So, i love the new avatars but why take out backgrounds now that they are gone it looks so bland please add them back and give me my streak i had a streak of around 60 it may not be that impressive but it is to me please return them. love K.A it awesome and everyone here is wholesome and cool and i have a cool group to help me out with coding. other than those i love K.A :)

Ok, I'll be honest. I don't like the new avatars, but I can live with them. They're a different style, and we still have the old avatars. But, why did you guys have to remove the backgrounds? As Brad | The Cool Dude said : "

Well, I believe that the community thinks that the background to their profile is akin to the wallpaper of their room. Now imagine that one day, you wake up, and the walls of your room are just a solid gray.

That's it.

It feels like our proud, colorful room that reflects us has been invaded.

I know many people on the KA community are proud to be able to personalize their background. I think a good option would to at least let us pick the color of our "room".

"

I completely agree.

Well, Laurie @KA, I have an idea.

What if you have some of the prominent coders help with the site? It would be a great learning option  for them, it would help ease the workload on you guys, and the community will be able to add their tastes to the site, per say.

A reward could possibly be a badge. 

Any ideas?

I think that would be a great idea. I don't see why not. KA hires KA users as Guardians, I don't see why not for devs, or at least assistant devs. If you want to keep it professional, well, just hire them on to the team.

I totally agree! They could just hire them as volunteers or interns.

Yup. 

Assistant devs is a bad, bad idea. You’d need users with even stricter qualifications than Guardians to make sure they didn’t try to inject malicious code into KA. There aren’t very Guardians, and there are even fewer (I’m guessing) who know Go and could keep up with the dev team.

Based on what Laurie said, it sounds like the main reason to remove backgrounds is that the developers want to focus on the more important things. How adding 32 new avatars is easier than adding backgrounds I don't know, but Brad has a good point, if the devs are too busy then volunteer devs could add in the backgrounds.

Quin Hardbrook has some good points though. However, I don't think the things he said are an issue. Most coding languages are very similar and you can find documentation for them easily on the internet. A coder on KA who is proficient in JS, I would think, should be able to learn Go fairly easily.

The bigger concern is security. Of course, we don't want them to inject malicious code into Khan Academy, but I think that can be avoided. You don't give the volunteer direct access to Khan Academy's source code. Instead, you just have the volunteer write blocks of code, and then the developers look over to code to make sure there isn't anything malicious and then they add it to Khan Academy. That way Khan Academy will be secure, and it shouldn't put any major strain on the developers since it doesn't take that long to scan over a piece of code and then copy/paste it.

I really do think that adding in backgrounds is something KA should consider because just about every single user likes the backgrounds. This update has -54 votes for a reason (people don't like the update). If the developers want they can make plain bright gray the default background, but I think it's a major improvement to allow uses to change it from a painfully bland gray. 

It’s typically not easy for one coder to understand another’s code unless they are in constant communication or have very clear comments on very simple code. Maybe it would work, but it would still take time away from the developers.

To be honest, I don’t think KA will give us backgrounds back at this point, at least not like they were. There have been several extensions made already to re-add them by users, and that’s probably our best bet, as sad as it is. Maybe KA could officially encourage these extensions? I don’t know at this point.

They would need to use clear comments on what they are doing. And adding something like backgrounds I think should be simple enough to understand given the comments. Its not like they are re-writing the whole of Khan Academy. Sure it would take a small amount of time for a developer to review the code, but I don't think it would take more than a single day.

I don't know of any extensions that add backgrounds. I am a user of The Khan Academy Extension and I am unaware of any background updates for it. I don't want to have a ton of extensions for KA though. It The Khan Academy Extension adds a feature for backgrounds I would be satisfied.

Hi,

the new avatars are cool but at the same time why remove backgrounds? The white background is too light for me and it affects my eyes. If you're not going to put back backgrounds atleast make the background a different colour other than white. Also if you want Khan Academy to be more engaging I recommend that you put backgrounds back to normal. :)

Thank you.

Any plans to add new badges?

I know at least one user who has made an extension, and I have too. I haven’t released mine yet since I only got the main portion working yesterday.

I agree, it’d be nice to have the unofficial KA extension add backgrounds back as a feature, but remember they already have a lot of features. It’s hard to keep any addition to a body of code up to date, and adding another feature could mean the next time it breaks, it’s broken for longer. Additionally, I don’t think they’d want to do much more than add back the old images. With an extension dedicated to just backgrounds, there’s a greater likelihood users would get to see added functionality for greater customization.

I’ve asked my friend if he has released his extension yet, and hopefully I’ll get a link :D

Has anyone thought to make the background that everyone dislikes a green color? The same green color as the Khan Academy logo. That way, it can stick with the theme! How does that sound? 

No response for 3 days, I doubt Khan Academy as a whole cares that much what a couple of users say. It's not like there are 112 comments other than this one...R.I.P. backgrounds. Next thing you know the old avatars are going to disappear.  

collijae000 Well, they did say 

 I should have more information about this project on Friday.

So I don't think that it's necessarily over yet.

Cake and Cookies

They might have some good news, but idk at this point. I've kind of given up.

Hello Warren!

Have you considered experimenting with subtle inset box shadows?
That one slight change (Which I tested via inspect element) seems to fix the issue where the new flat-color background was too bright and not contrasting enough.

Please, try the colors I used here:

background-color: #efefef;
box-shadow: #00000025 0px 0px 40px 0px inset;

Edit: I tested it with the avatars that are most likely to blend in, and while some may slightly, I think people should have the option to have a less-contrasting avatar. (and since there are multiple colors for each of the new avatars, it should be fine)

Thanks for the update, Warren.

I think that the stark blue-and-white contrast may look nice, so maybe you can try that. Also, have the Developers discussed my idea about letting some of the prominent coders on KA try to help? You could give them a sample of code, then you could see if it will work, and can give credit to them. After all, you probably have 2/3 of the KA world's brainpower to use on this issue.

First off, thanks for coming here and being willing to talk with community, especially knowing you aren’t exactly giving good news. That takes some guts and commitment, Warren.

I think the reason no one color works well for the backgrounds is because none of the avatars are one color. The alternative is something what we have right now with a grayscale theme, but obviously the community doesn’t want that. A darker color with some box shadow or clear borders for the elements above and below could be great, in my opinion, but there aren’t really any colors in the current KA theme which would match up.

I personally think a bright background could look really good if you had a backdrop-filter for the child elements, but FireFox doesn’t automatically support backdrop-filter. You could play around with some other options to blur behind the child elements, but I’m not sure how easy that’d be.

I think images were the clear solution, but it seems they aren’t a valid one :/

Thank you for talking with us and taking everybody's opinions into perspective, Warren. It's true that one color won't be able to match all the avatars. For this reason, maybe you could have a different colored background for different avatars? Some of the avatars might look good with the same color as the background. Or, you could make a simple gradient of two colors for each different avatar (again, some might have the same). For example, a solid color for mine might be a dark blue-ish purple and a gradient would be of a dark blue and dark purple. This would take more work that just setting one background for all avatars, but it wouldn't take that much work and would look better. 

I've been wanting to clarify what I think about this for a while now, but I didn't really have anything to say until now, so I'll clarify now. My first comment was a little bit...ungrateful in my opinion and I didn't realize that until a while ago. I didn't intend to come across that way. I really appreciate all of you trying to give education to everyone for free because there are so many people around the world struggling to get it. You guys have a really great goal and, honestly, whatever you do to the website (in terms of looks) won't really affect it that much. I've seen a lot of rude comments here and I applaud you for ignoring them (at least I think you did). I know they can be tough to handle. Thank you so much for all the work that you've done, I really appreciate it :)

@Warren, and @Luarie, what I said earlier was a little rushed and unthoughtful, but I said it because I didn't understand what was going on. Thank you so much for what you've all said, it's made it 100% better. At first it was "The design team decided", then it was "design changes will always have there detractors" then "We have a small team and have to make decisions." So yes, 100% better and I can't wait to see the finished project, it'll look great!

Let's take an overview of what we know.

What Happened: The Khan Academy Developers removed backgrounds and added new avatars.

Why: The developers are converting all of khan academy's code to a new language. Converting the code for the backgrounds would be a lot of work and they need to focus on more important things since a cosmetic background isn't as important as making Khan Academy actually work.

Wait But If They Need To Focus On Important Things, Then Why Did They Add New Avatars: Avatars are pretty important to Khan Academy. I don't even want to imagine the chaos that would happen if there were removed. The developers, therefore, needed to convert the old avatar system to the new language. Since they now already have a working avatar system, it's incredibly easy and super quick to add new avatars unlike adding backgrounds which would be a lot harder

Results: With backgrounds removed the developers needed to put something there instead. As a result over half of all Khan Academy users are highly disappointed.

Why: The developers can't worry about backgrounds right now so they need to choose a solid color that's easy to implement. They went with a super light grey because it's a pretty standard color.

Result: Over half of Khan Academy user's eyes are being hurt by tons of bright light shining in their face. And Khan Academy's profile page doesn't look as good as it did before.

Is It Really Over Half Of Khan Academy Users: Since the community post has far more negative votes than positive votes I would say yes. 

Possible Solutions To The Problem: The most obvious solution would be to re-add backgrounds. But that is an unrealistic solution and won't happen anytime soon for the reasons stated above. So the only other solution is to make the background a color that everyone likes and matches well with the avatars. So let's think, what color would work well as a background. Well most colors would cause the avatars to blend in which is not desired. So lets think of the possible colors that would not have that problem: the only colors that would not have the problem of avatars blending in are a light shade of white or a dark shade of black. We have already seen that a light shade of white is not ideal since it provides no contrast with the rest of the page and is "too much white". The only other reasonable option is the make the background a dark near-black color. I have read through all the comments people have left on this comment thread and it seems that the majority of people would be in favor of a dark background.

A dark background would not hurt anyone's eyes, it would look good, it would provide contrast, and it would be incredibly easy to add. It seems that just about everyone here would prefer a black background over a white background. It seems that having a near-black or black background would be the best possible solution to the problem. What I don't understand is why the Khan Academy developers are against having a black background. Can someone explain to me why the Khan Academy developers are against having a black background.

New avatars look great! They're cute and playful and allude to the new style. They're also diverse to reflect a lot of things and personalities that people may attribute to, and they all seem to be starter avatars as well, giving people getting started a lot of easy options, which could be seen as a negative since for example I remember the great excitement when I unlocked the full Aqualine and could switch to more exciting looking things (due to difficulty transitioning the stats it used to GO it is unfortunately all available at the start since they scrambled the avatar requirements), but I think that's good overall and will give people more excitement at the start of their Khanacademy journey.

Not sure the removal of backgrounds makes the avatars more engaging. They broke up the page to make it feel more spacious. There were different colors including the dark blue (surprisingly the top top bar is also white now and the page looks completely white), and they were more motivations for early learning as you could unlock them with energy points and show them to others and say "look at that I have the cool background!"... also they're space themed (as is the older theme) which is always sleek looking, I find.

Hopefully when the hard transition to GO is finished the amazing devs can reimplement the same backgrounds, maybe like with the fantastic new avatars add some new ones, just as soon as there's time to try and add it in, I think the community would love it.

P.S. Whoops I slipped in too much bad stuff in there, sorry haha! I think some of the stuff that has changed is odd, but I'm excited to see what we get next after GO.

VEXCESS #BringBackBackgrounds navy blue? =P (like the old top bar and what is at the bottom with the about us and faq links) Actually, most of the backgrounds were a similar colour.

edit: it's true and really unfortunate that we do have a lot of negative votes and comments about backgrounds, especially since the post is in theory mainly meant to be about the avatars, and even that is getting split reviews. I got really really sad/angry back in June when my missions were gone but I've learned to handle everything and other removals and although the removal of backgrounds is unfortunate, hopefully the reactions start to skew more positive in the future.

I'm sure I'm no the only one who's noticed but this is either an easy thing overlooked or a sneaky hint, since apparently everyone can still see my backgrounds. Imagine this getting patched tomorrow =P (please refer me elsewhere if there's a place to report "bugs" and you think this counts)

Ya bring back backgrounds