Hi everyone,
There is an issue on the new Community site and the in-app theme manager where new themes sharing the same name with older, retired themes (made by different developers) can have their download counts merged.
For example, a newly released theme inherited thousands of downloads from an unrelated older theme. The original theme stats also demonstrates release activity (like ‘recently updated’), even though it is a different dev. As far as I can tell, the star counts seem unaffected, but download metrics can be broken (worth checking it out).
With the increased number of themes released, naming collisions will only increase. Plugins already use unique IDs—so my suggestion is to please consider implementing unique IDs for themes to properly separate metrics, stats, and indexing of current and future released themes.
Thanks and all the best.
Do you have an example? My understanding is that theme names are equivalent to plugin ids, in that no two themes can share the same name. But I’m not as familiar with theme development so I could be wrong on that.
While plugin IDs prevent this issue, themes don’t use a separate immutable ID system in their manifest.json, relying instead on the display name as the backend identifier. When a new developer submits a different theme using a name already used before, the registry seems to merge their metrics and status tags.
I prefer not to name-drop specific theme(s) publicly, but I can confirm there is at least one active collision (the error is still there to check).
Implementing unique IDs for themes would permanently fix this. Another fix would be checking for theme name and author repo URL (“authorUrl” in the manifest.json)—this would prevent these accidental collisions. Actually, this easily fixes the problem without needing unique IDs for themes.
Just wanted to point this out to help—won’t be digging into it further.
All the best
I’m not able to submit a new theme that has the same name as an existing theme, this is the error I get.
I also checked obsidian-releases/community-css-themes.json at master · obsidianmd/obsidian-releases · GitHub and did not find any duplicate themes with the same name. There are some near collisions but no exact duplicates.
I don’t think there’s an issue here, it is impossible to submit a duplicate theme and there are no existing duplicate themes.
If there are specific themes that are having issues with their stats, I’d need examples to investigate further.
Well, have you checked the list of removed themes (community-css-themes-removed.json)? Submitting a new theme using the name of an older, removed theme is likely where this happens, causing the new submission to inherit the old stats/downloads of the older/removed theme.
I hope this helps. Take care
