MC-33304 is a long-standing bug that causes signs to have slightly different shading based on whether they're facing north or south, which makes coloured text on them often completely unreadable. For most people this isn't a problem, especially since sign colours are only obtainable via commands, but for server owners such as myself, it makes it so much harder to get information across to players when I have to remember that some players won't be able to read the signs we've written if we want to colour them (the bug doesn't seem to affect everyone).

There are a handful of great examples in that bug report, but I'll include a few more here (the comparators are pointing north):

• Both of these signs contain identical text, but the left one is facing east and the right one is facing south. This is bold text, which would hopefully be easier to read. http://ift.tt/2ekCMFx

• Obviously yellow text isn't going to be used very often, so here's some simple white text (which we do use all the time) http://ift.tt/2dqu6rl

• It affects every colour, although some not as drastically as others. These ones are still readable but inconsistent all the same http://ift.tt/2ekBt9N

• This image from the bug report shows how the colour of the text is actually unchanged, and the shading of the background is what affects the look of it: http://ift.tt/2dquWnU

In January 2015, Grum marked the bug as "Working as Intended" because as long as black is readable then signs are working as they need to. When this bug was opened in 2013 I feel that answer would have been fair enough, as sign colours had to be cheated in with 3rd party programs, but the functionality is now in vanilla Minecraft via JSON in commands. It's also an inconsistency – if the shading was always broken then it may not be worth fixing, but this is something that gives you completely different results based entirely on which way you place the sign. Of course there are other cases in the game where this happens with the south-east rule, but these were fixed when encountered (such as dispensers firing through south or west blocks).

I figured that, since the Java Edition team has changed a lot in the years since this was opened, they might consider at least re-evaluating it to see if it's possible to fix. Sadly there seems to be no consensus on what causes the issue and why it only seems to affect some people, but hopefully re-opening it for another look could help that.

Thanks for reading.