I doodled up a fun little shader.
It started out with just some (fake) iridescence, then I added some (fake) pearlescence, and decided it needed some stars, moving meteoroids, a tiny galaxy, and a few more tiny tweaks.
I also recorded a video about it, consider it a showcase/break-down thing.
I didn’t care much for optimization and just kept adding things I thought would enhance it, sometimes painting without a goal can be really relaxing and satisfying
Here’s the short answer:
The Topic Thumbnail option is currently only able to pull from images directly embedded in your post, not hosted elsewhere. It looks like all of your gifs are a bit too large for us to host though, so I’ve just made a fast trim of yours:
With that image now, we should be able to go to Select Thumbnail:
Longer Answer
Our old topic thumbnail plugin was half custom built, and half supported by Discourse. Over the past… 2 years, the programmer we were working with decided to better integrate it into the Discourse codebase for general use (as opposed to our site). What we have now is a much better integrated tool behind the scenes, but we lost a fair amount of controls that I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of - the most important being why we cannot pull our cover thumbnails from Youtube or Vimeo links anymore.
Thanks for the swift kick on this - I’m going to go stir up this conversation again and see if we can make any progress.
