Dull blue button, white text.
Firefox 55, Win7 desktop
Well, “huge” is a relative term, but the whole art of typography is based on the principle that the eye is very sensitive to even subtle nuances, and 12 to 14 point is essentially the difference between normal text and a loud headline or heading. Let me post this and then I’ll upload a screenshot of the difference between the old and the new formats.
Fortunately, the preview feature still shows the original font size for both the quoted and the main text so I can show you the difference. I’ll append the screenshot URL after I post this. Here is a bunch of text snagged from an online magazine just to provide more of a sample:
The New York channel consists mostly of two genial middle-aged men: Pak Song Il, a husky diplomat with a gray brush cut; and his aide-de-camp, Kwon Jong Gun, who is younger and thinner. They go everywhere together. (The North Korean government has diplomats work in pairs, to prevent them from defecting, or being recruited as spies.) Under U.S. law, they can travel only twenty-five miles from Columbus Circle. Pak and Kwon met me near their office, for lunch at the Palm Too. They cautioned me that it might take several months to arrange a trip. North Korea periodically admits large groups of American journalists, to witness parades and special occasions, but it is more hesitant when it comes to individual reporters, who require close monitoring and want to talk about the nuclear program.
Americans are accustomed to eruptions of hostility with North Korea, but in the past six months the enmity has reached a level rarely seen since the end of the Korean War, in 1953. The crisis has been hastened by fundamental changes in the leadership on both sides. In the six years since Kim Jong Un assumed power, at the age of twenty-seven, he has tested eighty-four missiles—more than double the number that his father and grandfather tested. Just before Donald Trump took office, in January, he expressed a willingness to wage a “preventive” war in North Korea, a prospect that previous Presidents dismissed because it would risk an enormous loss of life. Trump has said that in his one meeting with Barack Obama, during the transition, Obama predicted that North Korea, more than any other foreign-policy challenge, would test Trump. In private, Trump has told aides, “I will be judged by how I handle this.”
OK, here is the comparison between the preview, which is the font sizes everything had before, and how it looks now:
Instead of looking at the reduced image, please download it and look at it in its original size. You can immediately see that in the old format the quoted text and the body of the post were the same font size. The new body text is larger than the quote, and on most monitors – especially large ones – it appears obnoxiously huge.
If you’re looking at it on a very tiny monitor in reduced size the new fonts may not look large and may even be preferable, but on any reasonably sized monitor it looks cartoonish, like screaming headlines.
Why don’t you just reduce the size of the font? (Not being snarky, just wondering.)
Didn’t have any problem before it got fixed, but my computer experience goes WAY back and I’m generally satisfied if my computer doesn’t catch fire. The green was jarring, but I’ve come to like it, like the change in coffee cups at Mac’s.
Because (a) I would have to keep doing it exclusively for this site and then undoing it when visiting normal sites, (b) it reduces the size of everything on the site, and it’s just the body of the posts that are huge; zooming up makes the other material marginally too small, and (c) perhaps just an irritant, but I should not have to keep hitting zoom and unzoom buttons just because the site has been badly configured!
I see the following colors under either Firefox or Chrome.
ffffff - margins
f8f8f8 - post background
f5f5f5 - quotebox background
For me on my laptop display, the visual difference between ffffff and f8f8f8 is huge but f8f8f8 to f5f5f5 is only barely discernable. On preview the post and quotebox background colors are the same as each other. (The above colors are typical — in some experiments there seemed to be some dithering!)
Me too. On Windows 10 laptop with Chrome. However, testing just now I see that Firefox does present me with a nice black boundary.
Thank you, Irishman. BTW, although the words are all incorrectly placed on a single line in either case, that is normally the only line, … but on Preview the code block is padded out with extra blank lines, presumably equal to the number of newlines in the original.)
BTW, the nested quote problem identified by Chronos doesn’t affect me on Chrome — there are no black border lines to be misplaced! 
But I do get the buggy behavior on Firefox.
The fact that we can now see post counts and locations from guests is the one great thing to have come out of these changes. I am really, really glad we can see those now.
New skin naming contest, my suggestion:
“HTML on LSD”
Ye gads! The post count of this thread is going to surpass SRIOTD any day now!
Here is what I seewith the changing font sizes and italicized when quoting. Also you can see the quote box differentiation is very feint.
I have to be honest with you. I looked at your screenshot and it looks normal to me, even when enlarged to fill the screen on my average-size laptop. I acknowledge the font is larger than 12 point Times Roman but it doesn’t seem objectionable. When I get a sec I’ll look at it on other displays with different sizes and resolutions. Meanwhile, this seems like a problem that could easily be fixed with control-minus.
Not trying to make light of your problem but this may be something that arises from certain combinations of browsers and displays and what have you. Further investigation needed.
ETA: just came across your image comparing the before-and-after font sizes. I agree the font is a little larger, but I had the idea from your original post it was 72 point or something. For now I need to focus on things that are flat out awful. I’ll get back to this later. Thanks for your patience.
Actually, I think that’s kinda nifty and cute. Let’s leave this bug as it is.
I haven’t seen it mentioned for a while that we are still seeing a banner ad across the screen after every five posts. Is that just the way it’s going to be now?
ETA: What’s the difference between the “Quick Reply” button and “Reply with Quote”? They both seem to do the same thing AFAICT.
Holy cow. **Now **what’s going on with the font size? At 100% zoom, it’s TINY on my laptop screen, to the point of being nearly unreadable. At 150% zoom, it’s mostly readable but information in the Last Posted column wraps so much that I have HUGE gaps between thread titles on the right. I turned off BigT’s script to see if it made a difference, and things got WORSE.
OK, I’ve talked this over with my contractor and here’s my plan:
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We have a previously set up clone of the production SDMB site used for alpha testing. We’ll now use this for beta testing. In due time I’ll announce the URL. This site will work as follows: (a) all Members and Charter Members will be able to log in and post without further ado; (b) the Guest usergroup will be disabled. If you’re a Guest and you want to be a beta tester, email your username to me at edzotti at gmail dot com. Put** Betatester <Your Username>** in the header. Please don’t describe problems you’re experiencing, all beefs should be posted in this thread. I’ll switch you to a special Betatester usergroup and you’ll be able to post. Nothing against Guests but the site won’t be moderated and I need to do some minimal amount of gatekeeping. No big deal, email me and you’re in.
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The developers have implemented all the production-site fixes on the beta site, and have fixed the couple broken things I beefed about earlier today. I’m now going to send in the list of seven additional items I posted last night and have the developers fix them on the beta site as well. When they’re done I’ll turn the beta testers loose. Not sure how fast this will happen, probably the next day or two.
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Once the fixes are working on the beta site, we’ll implement them on the production site. Then I’ll send in the next round of problems. Not promising we’ll make everybody happy but we’ll get the major problems dealt with given the technical limits (of which there are some).
Guests can start emailing me their usernames now. Thanks for your help.
Would a multi option multi select poll be worthwhile to prioritize?
Any links that are posted create a new line of text so one sentence that has a few links ends up looking like this:
“Quick Reply” jumps you down to the Quick Reply box at the bottom of the page. “Reply with Quote” is just the same as “Quote” on the old page. It puts the quote from whichever poster whose post you’re reading into a reply box, just like in the old format.
To reply to various comments:
As others have explained, as the viewing area narrows, some columns disappear. I think the developers can select which ones go away. If so, I’ll have them keep the “last user” column and maybe drop the thread count column. Would that help?
Presumably this was a responsive design choice - the coder thought there was too much stuff to fit onto a phone in portrait mode. If I turn my phone to landscape mode, the formatting tools including smilies, etc., are all visible. In Quick Reply in portrait you see some although not all formatting tools. I’ll have to see what they can do with this.
The overlapping nested quote boxes look pretty screwy. I think that should be an easy fix.
This may be a function of the browser. For me (Win 10, MS Edge), the quote boxes are readily apparent, and they look OK on iPhone 7 too. Will have to investigate further.
As for the quote function automatically italicizing quoted text, I just checked an old board version and from what I can see that’s how quoting has always worked. The quoted text wasn’t made smaller but I can’t say I find that objectionable. Am I misunderstanding your concern?
The unnecessary line breaks before and after hyperlinked text are bugging me. I’m going to get them to fix that.
Definitely!