I just did some general searching on VBulletin and the answer looks to be, “no,” but I’ll throw it out anyway… is there any way to disable the pop-up previews in the thread listings? I find them highly annoying when I am trying to scan a list of topics and of no use in any situation whatsoever, and with a multiple-monitor setup it’s not easy to just whip the pointer out of the way.
I am surprised that so many forum/news sites use this feature (it was one of the reasons I dropped AICN from my reading list… every goddamn thing on the page makes a popup appear). Do a majority of users really find it useful/worthwhile/benign?
I am surprised that with so many complaints about VBulletin in particular that an admin- or user-level option hasn’t been integrated.
I suppose the odds of a custom addition to SDMB are somewhat lower than a zombie thread flag… which we also desperately need; I was stung by about four zombies in a row this morning.
When I am perusing the list of threads, I often look at the popup to see if this is a thread I might want to open. I find the popups very useful on that account, and would be sorry to see them go.
The mouseover, you mean. It would be nice if that was an option, to turn it on or off, but it’s not currently offered that way. Sorry for your inconvenience.
An admin-level option does exist. The admins can set the number of characters in the preview string to any length they want, including zero. However, this is a board-wide setting and it’s not at all clear that the majority would favor disabling the preview.
It would also be relatively straightforward to add a custom variable that users could set in their UserCP that would toggle whether or not the mouseover is displayed or not, but this would require editing the style template, which the admins here have indicated they would prefer not to do.
If you are using firefox, you can go to about:config and change browser.chrome.toolbar_tips to FALSE.
Warning - this disables this type of popup for all web pages, not just the SDMB (which actually sounds like what the OP wants anyway). You can also totally hose your browser if you poke around in about:config too much.
Search for “tool” in the search bar on about:config and you can easily find the line with the above.
I haven’t tried this for the SDMB (I love the popups) but for Firefox (and I assume Chrome) you may be able to use the Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus. You can use it to block individual elements on a webpage. I used it to block the annoying popups in ebay (“Somebody else is browsing this listing!”).
The popups I want to disable are the ones that all the social networking services litter the pages of the various blogs and media sites I visit. They pop up when you mouse over, and do not have the decency to close when you mouse away. I have not found any easy way to kill that behavior.
I prefer to mouse over, which then informs my decision about whether to click. As long as they close when the mouse moves, or after x seconds, I find it helpful.
I use a tablet most of the time, so I miss out on the pop-ups. Which is kind io unfortunate. If I could tap the envelope icon for a preview, that would be darn handy. In fact, that icon is very nearly otherwise useless: if it could be pressed into service as a preview widget for everyone, seems to me that would solve the Barbarian’s issue, help the tablet users out, and not really inconvenience anyone.
Just to flog this horse a bit more, I’ll say that I find the preview pop-ups one of the best features of the Board. Without it, I (and everyone else) would wind up wasting time having to click and open a thread to see if we’re interested in it.
I like the preview feature too, but I would rather there be a preview icon that you could mouse over (something akin to “go to first unread post” icon) rather than using the thread title itself.
Even though I do like the feature it can be annoying sometimes.
If anything, I’d like to see MORE text in the previews. So there!
Some may recall a thread a year-or-so ago, in which it was noted and discussed that some text in an OP does not appear in the previews – in particular, the text enclosed in certain (or all?) BBCodes is omitted. People were having fun, starting threads in which the preview said one thing but the actual OP said something else.
There are a million billion settings in about:config! Is there any more-or-less comprensive documentation anywhere of all that? Shame to have so many options and not publicize how to use them all.
This works perfectly, and yes, I do find it annoying and am willing to dispense with it on all sites. I grow weary of having to endlessly move and find a safe parking spot for my mouse pointer just so I can read the page without floaty shit in the way.
