This technote is in response to forum post 9f00cdb49a and subsequent comments.

Fossil normally picks the background color for check-ins on the timeline based on a hash of the branch name. (See the hash_color() routine in timeline.c for the details of the algorithm, and test it out yourself on the /hash-color-test page.) However, a "bgcolor" tag can be used to override this choice.

The two new branches (timeline-cmd-formatting and diff-numstat-total) just below this technote where originally entered using with a bgcolor tag of "#fec084". This tag was part of the check-in manifests for both check-ins ([5], [6]). The question then arose: how do you fix it so that Fossil ignores those tags and chooses colors itself again?

The way to do this is to cancel the bgcolor tags. The easiest way to acocmplish that is to go to the "edit" link of the "/info" page for each check-in. On that page is a checkbox that says "Cancel special tag bgcolor". Simply select that box, press "Preview" and then "Apply". That operation creates new tags shown at [7] and [8] that cancel the original "bgcolor" tags.