While creating a new vault I realized the MagicUser theme no longer appears in the manager. After reading over its GitHub repository, it is my understanding that the developer decided to archive it because it was fully feature-complete and bug fixed. I suspect that triggered an internal protocol which flagged it as deprecated.
While it’s perfectly possible to download it from GitHub,
should it still not be included for a bit longer?
Please do tell if I should be posting this elsewhere.
Are you able to contact the developer in some way? It’s essentially up to them whether the theme is in the community themes or not. If they don’t want to do it, it might be possible for someone to fork it, but there are rules about that somewhere because it has caused problems between developers in the past. (I don’t remember what the rules are; perhaps they allow forks of archived themes.)
I can’t seem to find a direct point of contact, besides posting in his forum thread to hope it makes an e-mail notification. Though there are some emails registered on a site where one would have to pay to reveal them.
On the GitHub page itself it is stated that the project is Feature-Complete, has zero issues, and is considered Stable.
My presumption is that they want it to be available, but perhaps aren’t planning to fix any future issues.
One of the requirements for inclusion in community themes is maintenance, which this one obviously won’t be getting.
I don’t remember if archiving a GitHub repo automatically removes the project from community themes or if the developer specifically does something to remove it, but every archived repo I’ve seen has been removed.
Is this the one? GitHub - drbap/magicuser-theme-for-obsidian: MagicUser theme for Obsidian.md (light and dark themes) · GitHub
I’m reading it a little differently; the note says the “repository has reached its completed state”, not that it’s feature complete (altho it may be that too).
It’s frustrating that there isn’t a convenient way to contact them.
It’s still possible to install the theme manually if you want to.
Yes, that’s the repo.
I think I read “feature complete” somewhere.
It is of course possible I misunderstood. And this isn’t really a “problem”.
It just seems to me that the product is very good and the developer put a lot of work into it, and then when it seemingly reaches a “flawless” or “complete” state, it becomes unreachable to new eyes in the community - which seems like a loss.
I understand maintenance is vital to long-term support.
An idea of posting this was to let it up to someone with a better position to judge whether this could live on for a few versions longer. Otherwise, it would seem apt for someone to fork it. I don’t have the capacity myself, though.
If there’s nothing to be done, I’m fine with closing the thread.
On second thought I’m not sure if the maintenance requirement applies to themes. It might, but I only know for sure that it applies to plugins.
FWIW 
… The author of the theme created a thread out here to “share & showcase” said theme:
… It might be worth to potentially send them a DM here to clarify the situation ? 
Or just open an issue on GH ?
Although, it seems like they basically archived any themes/plugins they made related to Obsidian, either on 2026-02-27 or 2026-03-03 which is still quite a few weeks before the Community directory (and its new submission system) came to life.
In one of their Obsidian plugin (also archived), they mentioned:
This repository is officially archived. After some years after its initial release and 58,000+ downloads, I have decided to reallocate my free time to other projects.
(So, maybe they’re just not using Obsidian anymore )
When it comes to the theme, it was removed from Obsidian on 2026-03-13 apparently due to the fact that the repo was archived (chore: Update community themes · obsidianmd/obsidian-releases@b04bfd3 · GitHub)
I tried finding a way to DM him on this forum, but couldn’t find any way to do that.
So I left a post in that thread yesterday, in an effort to make him aware.
That message you’re quoting does help make sense of things.
He is likely not going to maintain it moving forward.
From what I read online, he works at Meta and/or Google; probably a very busy person.
Anyway. How fast do themes break anyways? (rhetorical)
It would be nice if the Obsidian team could let it be in the manager until the next big update.
But these protocols are likely in place for a reason.
I only ask because I myself found great value and joy in discovering the MagicUser theme.
Again, I would fork it myself, but I really can’t take on any more load atm.
PS: I did try to open an issue, but the archived config prevents that. Couldn’t find any open channel on that repo to post anything.
One of the most comprehensive and customizable themes I know of. Drbap has taken some of my ideas and brought them to life. I’ll keep using it until it stops working. (How likely is that?) I’d like to take this opportunity to thank this dedicated maintainer.