When I signed up my account in mid 2020, I tried to edit my theme. Did not work. It brought me to the donation tab. Then, I started looking for dozens of random names that I would see on the forums or on the main page just to double check. I noticed that only those who had the donator badge also had themes on their profiles, one of the first users that I remember visiting is @4, and he had a theme but he also had the donator badge. [quote=Quivico] Can confirm profile themes were always free. Mine dates back at least to 2018. [/quote] But you donated to the site, of course you would have access to it.
@Hi Again, I am a specific counter example to what you say. I set my profile theme (background, speedrun.com logo, cyan text ) in 2019, and I didn't donated.
Maybe there is like a 5% chance that I'm misremembering but I'm 95% sure that themes became available for free at the same time that gradients and badges did.
I knew my memory wasn't fooling me.
I asked @Meta about it and this is what he had to say (and @AnInternetTroll casually joining the discussion too):
Interesting find while I was researching this topic: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/urcdg/1#z3s7d
Basically, it appears that accounts created before february 2017 could edit their theme for free, while accounts created after that date had to donate to unlock that perk. This treatment is specific to theme editing and didn't seem to be applied to gradients and/or badges.
...this still sounds weird to me, because I still feel I could edit themes yet I'm not a donor and I made my account back in december 2018, so there'd seem to be more to this story than meets the eye.
PS: In case anyone's wondering, donation perks all around got unlocked for everyone on november 2020: https://www.speedrun.com/news/570-2020-11-18-donation-perks-unlocked
[quote=SioN]see Oreo321 you were the crazy one here[/quote]
https://web.archive.org/web/20200928062644/https://www.speedrun.com/user/Oreo321#close
Given that his cached profile from september 2020 indeed shows the longcat background theme (which'd be 2 months prior to the unlocking of all donator perks), I wouldn't say that either.
There's definetely some funny business going on here with the locking/unlocking of theme editing, but I'm not sure we'll ever get to the bottom of it.
Even the site changelog says nothing about locking custom themes for non-donators.
