Forum Update

jem16

aliasojo wrote: »

The thing is he does hold all the power, like it or not.

We're only minions.

Maybe so but a lot of his income comes from forum users clicking through on various links.

He doesn't really provide this forum out of the goodness of his heart.

meher

^ people benefit from this site; imo nothing else should matter

Back on topic, I hope we won't see huge pictures posted on the forums; it really affected threads. I think we shouldn't let pictures more than 500 px.

southernscouser

meher wrote: »

Back on topic, I hope we won't see huge pictures posted on the forums; it really affected threads. I think we shouldn't let pictures more than 500 px.

I brought this up before with the tech team who told me they would fix it. It never happened though.

Surely it can't be that hard to have an auto resize function so they fit to the width of the forum. :undecided

jamesd

YDF33 wrote: »

Wow, you people must have seriously big screens.

It's not the screen size but the screen resolution. More than ten years ago I had a laptop with a 15 inch screen and 1600 (horizontal) x1200 (vertical) resolution. It's also the person's eyesight and distance at which they view the screen because those affect how large they have their browser set to display text.

Even back in 2001 the new fixed layout would have been using only 1024 of the 1600 available horizontal pixels on my laptop computer display. Back in 1995 I got my first 1600x1200 resolution display so this 1024 width stuff looks like pretty ancient stuff to me, even though I know that web designers used to commonly use 800 pixel width and did so myself for one site where that was a design requirement.

Today a new low end laptop computer has a 1600x900 display and even the cheapest external monitors can do that. MSE has some people using old equipment that works fine and is older and has lower resolutions to consider also.

What MSE is trying with a fixed width is pretty much impossible to get right. It's guaranteed to either cause horizontal scrolling trouble or join the sites that annoy people with fixed widths when the graphic designers rule the roost instead of the users. For those who need larger text sizes it'll have even less letters per row than what he's trying to arrange on readability grounds for those who use whatever text size he's assuming people have.

Fortunately Martin is understanding so he's provided the flexible width version that should manage not to annoy anyone other than graphic designers who have to work on the site.

There are even better solutions out there. Wikipedia - a few thousand times as much traffic as here - has done lots of usability studies and has a user interface that allows logged in users to completely reskin the appearance of the site so it looks as they want it to look.

People who happen to have lower resolution display or who use partial width browsers may not even notice an issue and may be completely happy with the fixed width version.

jamesd

southernscouser wrote: »

Surely it can't be that hard to have an auto resize function so they fit to the width of the forum. :undecided

Wikipedia does dynamic image scaling to arbitrary sizes and has for more than five years. The catch here is that it's really something that the forum software developer should do, not MSE, else MSE will have an ongoing custom development support burden. Understandable that MSE would want to try to keep down the number of customisations to the software that can make upgrading more painful to do.

custardy

I still say they should add a forum skin menu at the bottom of the page,rather than just hidden away in the user CP

CommitedToChange

Just got my stretchy screen back - hated the fixed width - I say we vote on whether it stays or not, lets do a poll

meher

CommitedToChange wrote: »

Just got my stretchy screen back - hated the fixed width - I say we vote on whether it stays or not, lets do a poll

and i thought you were commited to change

CFC

New is great on my phone but rubbish on my laptop, gone back to stretchy on lappie.

2010

aliasojo wrote: »

The thing is he does hold all the power, like it or not.

We're only minions.

He would be a fool to ignore opinions.

Anyway he`s given everyone a choice, stay on fixed or go back to stretchy, so there`s no problem at the moment.
The big problem would come if there was no choice.

As I said in an earlier post, the "fixed" is nothing new, that`s how it used to be 10 years ago when the site was in it`s infancy.