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Also to consider: using nothing but Unicode characters for your posts/profiles causes them to be pretty much unsearchable by people looking for something that your idea or character might match.

And let us not forget the wonders of older devices translating those fancy 'copy paste from nicecutefonts.com' fonts to literal blank cubes. Sure, I'm sure some folks see appeal to having to figure out what a thread's title it, but y'know.. there's eye-friendlier ways to decorate your text!

Another accessibility thing to consider is how it might impact people using screen readers if your post or profile is all unicode. I don't use one myself, but I imagine it might make things hard for such users.

Has the mere mention of cursive fonts melted my brain to pulp or did a reply of a friend of my friend just disappear...? That's sus-

To further drive my point home.

Also those character profiles where you have to highlight everything with Ctrl+A to be able to read anything.

Also, light colored texted against a light colored background. If I see someone with a cyan page with yellow text, I'm going to cry after washing out my eyes.

I get what you're saying. I think some thought needs to be put into how things will look on both the light and dark theme of the board.

100% unreadable. text-to-speech says absolutely nothing for these fonts (as if no characters were there at all) and on braille displays they show up as "••••••••••"

Fading out images on character profiles.

It's something that's always bugged me.

Like, there are some really super amazing pretty templates out there that I would LOVE to use for my character's. But once I find out that they fade out images - or at least the colors - I won't use them.
What is the point of this? I don't spend money on art to display it just to have the color drained away.

But I agree with the cursive fonts or script fonts. Same as above. Whether it's a character template doing it, or it's something someone chose to do (if they can) - it makes it hard to read and there are also a lot of templates I won't use for this same reason....

Like, I get elegance - and wanting elegant looking templates for elegant characters but - the point of having a character profile if nobody can read what it says anyway?

I wish there was a way for us users to be able to disable custom fonts used on profiles. On our end anyway.

"This profile uses a custom font, would you like to convert to default?" sort of thing.

I think this has appeared down in Suggestions before, but not currently remembering for sure. One complicating factor is that just swapping out the typeface without any other adjustments (that the system would have no way to know when to consider them needed) can end up turning things pretty wonky, especially on very carefully arranged profiles. Doesn't mean you can't express your support for the idea, though.

That said, there is something you can do through the browser, provided it's not a mobile browser. Unfortunately, what would have been simplest only works partway, but the next option up is still pretty straightforward - but it'll reset every time you refresh or change pages, just so you know. It's at least something to work with until there's a better solution, though.

1. Right-click on some text you're struggling to read and select "Inspect" at the bottom of the menu that appears. This will bring up a panel in that same window that displays relevant HTML and CSS. If you're already familiar with these, you can probably figure the rest out yourself, but I'll keep going for those who aren't.
2. Identify the CSS. I think this appears furthest to the right by default, and it's labelled as "Styles." If that doesn't help, look for {curly brackets} and lists of things.
3. Look for "font-family" on a line where it isn't crossed out. (Keep any crossed-out ones in mind, though. The strike means that line has been over-ridden by another line - or already turned off - but you might be turning that over-ride off.) If you see a box at the top of the "Styles" panel that says something like "filter" or "search," it might make things easier to type "font-family" there, so it'll only show you places where that term appears.
4. If you move your cursor over the CSS areas, checkboxes will appear. Click a checkbox to turn the item next to it off. (If this line was overriding another, the other line will turn on when you do, but it can be turned off the same way.) If all font-family lines that can apply to that bit of text are turned off, it'll display in whatever is set to be your browser's default (but you don't have to turn them all off, just as many as needed to be able to read the text).
   • Alternatively, if you click into the list of typeface names on the other side of "font-family," you can remove what's there and enter the name of one you'd prefer; so long as the browser or that page can recognize the name you typed (it can be fussy), it'll change that text to that typeface. You can also just type "serif" or "sans-serif" in there, and your browser will use the relevant default.
5. You can close the panel (it has its own x separate from the window's or tab's) and your change will stay until you refresh or navigate to another page. This probably didn't change all of the text on the page, but you can repeat the process as needed, and each change will add onto the previous.

It makes some pretty interesting things happen with Discord's TTS feature if unusual unicode is used even if Discord can recognize it...

Also: Amen to the OP. I can't read cursive, so people using cursive are opting to make their post illegible to me. Honestly, I take your fancy-pants fonts and run them through plain-text editors so take that! HA!

I don't even put my eyes through the strain of it and just bounce. Clearly that person doesn't want me to read their profile, and they can find someone else to play with.