• change the grey to be darker / black but that defeat its purposes in other context when a dimmed text is desirable

The color used is just the standard ANSI/IRC color code 14 (https://modern.ircdocs.horse/formatting.html#colors). It sounds like your IRC client/terminal is not well configured to display that foreground color?

• change the notification background color to something else but I don't quite see what would work with a light grey (maybe a way darker background, then it would stand out to much).

I'd like the foreground text to remain the default color.

And someone else wanted it to be a different color. I guess this leads to the question of how do we resolve such personal preference differences in a project where the output cannot reasonably be changed per-user?

Maybe the different colors for Open → Resolved is sufficient to distinguish them from other kind of task.

In the one particular event you noticed there is a status change, but this is not at all guaranteed to be part of every event where a closed status Phabricator task is reported to IRC.

An alternative would be to use emojis?

What would the emoji represent and where in the message would we place it?

We could try to mimic the Phabricator rendering of the titles of closed tasks by using strikethrough styling instead of a color change. I'm not sure how well supported strikethrough is for terminal based IRC clients and if this would cause even worse usability for folks.

@greg and @taavi are the other two Wikibugs watchers who have asked in public about the intent of the grey color implementation. Perhaps they have additional feedback on any usability impact the change had for them that would be useful in this discussion.

This is how it looks to me:

I feel the main issue here is that changing the color of the main text is not as intuitive as colors that are attached to specific parts of the message. I thought this was a some sort of bug.

In T360353#9689602, @Nikerabbit wrote:

This is how it looks to me:

I think that "dimming" of the title and url is what @Danny_B was hoping for in the T140881: Print events in closed tasks in grey feature request. One aspect of this styling that Danny may not have thought of is that the actions which close an task get this styling due to the order of operation and how events are reported after Phabricator has taken action on them. With some work the feature could probably be tuned to not dim things when reporting the Open->Closed transition, but to keep doing it if and when someone comments on an already closed task.

Looking at https://modern.ircdocs.horse/formatting.html, the alternative of using strikethrough that I mentioned in T360353#9639079 is not likely to be noticed by all clients. I think italics would turn out to have wider support. I do think the strikethrough might be more intuitive for folks though because of Phab's own use of that styling when mentioning a close-status task.

bd808 opened https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/wikibugs2/-/merge_requests/31

irc: Use strikethrough style rather than grey color for closed tasks

Rendering of T1152#9715558 in my Textual client with some additional styling triggered by my irc nick being part of the the message:

Rendering of T1152#9715566 via https://web.libera.chat/. Note that this client does not render the strikethrough style, but it also does not show any strange formatting characters:

bd808 merged https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/wikibugs2/-/merge_requests/31

irc: Use strikethrough style rather than grey color for closed tasks

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-cloud) [2024-04-15T21:12:32Z] <wmbot~bd808@tools-bastion-12> Restarted irc task to pick up new container image from git hash 406e9e18. (T360353)

I'm not the biggest fan of the strike though as it makes the text harder to read (probably worse than the grey, but that might be a personal preference, at least with formatting in the lounge).

I wonder instead of trying to effect the text with colours or formatting, just having comment at the start that is formatted in a colour (Phab has limited formatting, just just picture the highlighting as coloured text like the project tags.

<+wikibugs> (NEW) Continuous-Integration-Infrastructure, Release-Engineering-Team (Radar), Zuul, collaboration-services, Patch-For-Review: Test zuul under Bullseye with contint1003 - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T361224#9716592 (hashar) Open→Resolved a:hashar I have done the basic testing...

<+wikibugs> (CLOSED) Continuous-Integration-Infrastructure, Release-Engineering-Team (Radar), Zuul, collaboration-services, Patch-For-Review: Test zuul under Bullseye with contint1003 - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T361224#9716592 (hashar) Open→Resolved a:hashar I have done the basic testing...

In T360353#9716792, @Peachey88 wrote:

I'm not the biggest fan of the strike though as it makes the text harder to read (probably worse than the grey, but that might be a personal preference, at least with formatting in the lounge).

I think the lowered readability, either with the color or the test style, was the whole point of the original feature request. Comments on closed tasks, like this pair of comments on this closed task, should be outlier actions. If you want to report a new bug, report a new bug. If you need to report that the fitness criteria for a new feature were not met or we not properly considered, reopen the task.

In T360353#9689655, @bd808 wrote:

With some work the feature could probably be tuned to not dim things when reporting the Open->Closed transition, but to keep doing it if and when someone comments on an already closed task.

I did not make this sort of distinction in the code yet, but it seems like the remaining reasonable complaint as closing a task is (or at least should be) a common action.