On Thursday, 16 February 2012 at 13:22:43 UTC, bearophile wrote:
A screen grab:
http://oi39.tinypic.com/2s7e1dy.jpg
I'm not quite sure what browser or configuration you're using,
but the screenshot does not represent the intended look of the
forums.
At first sight there are three things I don't like about them:
- All those thick boxes inside boxes waste too much screen
surface that's better used for the actual messages text.
Removing them would make the forum rather ugly in the normal view
mode. Since it looks like you're customizing half of your web
experience already, I'd suggest further tweaking the look to suit
your needs yourself.
- The image of the person that is writing steals and wastes
another vertical chunk of space. This asks for a redesign that
saves that space for the message.
I don't understand how you can claim that it takes up vertical
space when it's alongside the post. The only case where it would
waste vertical space is when the post is a few lines long.
- The menu on the left of the page steals a large amount of
space. The threads are often long, while the D menu on the left
is short, so there's often a huge amount of space wasted on the
page. The result is a too much thin space left for messages
text. In my screen about 54% of the horizontal space is wasted
for things that are not messages text. I suggest to fix this,
I'd like to something more like 80% of it left to messages text.
Viewing the forum in a modern browser will cause the menu on the
left to be hidden when there is insufficient space to show the
full width of messages.