I think so. The last user and jumping to end of thread is useful to me quite a bit.
Check out post #66 in this thread. It has a link to a screenshot before the new skin. You can see the quoted text not being italicized, and the font not changing size.
Typically users can italicize quote portions for emphasis, but this eliminates that.
Viewing the SDMB on a 2560x1440 27-inch monitor hooked up to a Mac, this whole redesign looks horrible. It is harder to read than the old design, and I can’t stand that stuff floating in the lower right hand corner.
It wasn’t for me. I eventually had to just remove the .converttodiv class entirely, because I could not track down what in the skin was actually causing the problem. When left alone it just works like it’s supposed to.
If that hadn’t worked, I considered just actually changing the Quotes to DIVs myself. (Why call them “.converttodiv” but not actually convert them to DIV tags?!) There is no reason for Quote boxes–and not other boxes–to be TABLEs. That’s got to be a leftover from HTML3 or something.
Also, people really do seem to object to the Quote text being so much smaller than the main text. They are already having to lower the zoom for the regular text, so the quote text gets rather tiny.
And it does seem to be a bug–it is using the old smaller text size, while the posts use a larger size.
On the other hand, fixing CODE tags was easy-peasy. Just add the following line anywhere in the main stylesheet:
pre { white-space: pre !important; }
OK, thanks, Ed. I’m sorry if my description was misleading, but at least now we’re on the same page and know what we’re talking about.
I would agree with you that some of the other issues being discussed here are more urgent. There are a number of us here that have expressed concern about the font size, though, including the discrepancy between “Preview” view and the different size of the quoted text vs. the body of the post (and also the italicizing of the quote boxes), so addressing this a little further down the road would be appreciated.
The main thing I suppose is that from the standpoint of typographical aesthetics and usability design, the font just stands out as “too big” on a desktop monitor, and it’s not so much a matter of being used to the old one as the fact of being too big relative to the natural size of a normal reading font and the font sizes that one typically sees on other websites and in other applications like Word. IMHO it makes the site look unprofessional and just “wrong”, and I think you can see this best on my screenshot comparing the “Preview” image with what it looks like when actually posted. It may be fine for mobile devices but it should autoconfigure to its original smaller size on PCs or, if that’s not feasible, at least let the user set that preference manually on a one-time basis.
On a separate issue (just trying to helpfully point things out as I find them) the “Reply” and “Reply with Quote” boxes are now a reasonable size, no longer squished to the left. However, the icons at the top are now spaced across the whole width of the screen instead of being clustered on the left. With a wide browser window this puts the icons far apart from each other with lots of empty space between them. That’s just bad usability design. They should be grouped together on the left like they used to be and all visible at a glance.
Do you have an extra large display? I’m working in the reply-to-quote box now. The box is centered and takes up maybe half the width of the screen. The formatting icons are spread across the width of the edit box, not shoved left, but on my laptop they look OK. If I had a super wide display I might have a different opinion. If you can send a screen shot that would give me a better idea. Thanks.
Please post a screen shot. We’re getting into things that are a problem for some but not all users. Display size seems to be a factor. I can scrounge up a big monitor but let me see what you’re looking at first. Thanks.
This has probably been brought up already, but I’d think that there’s an easy fix to all the white space between thread titles on the forum pages.
If you look at the “Last Post” column, each entry in that column has 3, 4, or even 5 lines, because the column is so narrow. And then there’s a line between threads, so that’s why the thread titles are 4-6 lines apart from one another.
It should be easy to adjust the width of the “Last Post” column so that the date and time fit on a single line, and the last poster’s line would usually take up just one line, or occasionally 2 lines. That would get rid of the vast majority of the excess white space on the forum pages.
Can TPTB either do this, or explain why it can’t be done?
I’ll pass this along to the developers, thanks.
Not sure if it’s a bug or a feature. On my average-size laptop having quoted text italicized and smaller looks nice, but for some evidently it’s a problem. I can have this reverted to the old way, with the quoted font size and style the same as the main text. WARNING: this will make it tougher to distinguish quotes from the main text if the quote box can’t be easily seen. This seemed to a problem for Bone. Pls advise.
Can you post a screenshot of where this is messed up? I’ll pass along that plus your fix to the developers.
Take a look now. I think this is fixed. The “last post” column still drops out on phones, but I think that’s a separate problem.
Not really complaining as it’s not a big deal (the fonts still are, IMO!!) but just thought I would point it out. Here is a screen shot. On my monitor with the browser window more or less at the usual width, the 16 icons are spread out over a space of nearly a foot! There’s no reason to have to literally scan such a wide space to find the function you need – they could all be grouped together on the left as I believe they were before, so they could be seen at a glance. At first I literally thought the “Insert Link” icon was missing!
There’s a lot of variation in how different browsers render things. For me, the reply box doesn’t fill the entire width of the window. For you it does. I’ll have them make the format icons flush left.
Very much so. Forcing quoted text into italics makes some original postings meaningless when quoted. It isn’t just that an original post might use italics for emphasis - which then gets lost in any quote, but in a posting that addresses a scientific or mathematical question the use of italics may have meaning crucial to the meaning of the post. Again, as soon as the quoted text is forced to all italics the quotation becomes meaningless, or at best, unreadable.
Overall, the forcing to italics has no sensible justification. If someone insists on it, the only rational thing to do is to remove the ability to use italics from the original posting mechanism, since clearly it is now deemed that italics have no role in posting. Posters will otherwise henceforth have to remember not to ever use italics, since their post cannot be quoted and retain the meaning they intended.
In addition, while quoting a poster like I’m doing now, the italicized format takes over. But if I quote something freehand, like this:
Then this isn’t italicized.
So in the first above we lose the italicization of the “Very much so.”, but this isn’t applied globally. That’s sub-optimal.
OK, but didn’t you have a problem with the box around the quote not displaying clearly? Can you see it OK now?
I think it’s not great. But that’s more of an aesthetic, and it does seem like the appearance of the quote box changes based on platform. The changing font and size is more than aesthetic, so I’d say that’s more important. My preference would be to have the quote box more offset with the outline, but I see that as much lower priority.
Is there a way to turn off the floating “About This Message Board” & “Go” links in mobile? I don’t see it when reading the board on a laptop but on my phone (iPhone 7) it covers a lot of reading space and is not necessary to have both that **and **the giant arrow.
Thanks, that’s much better!
I see that in threads where the last post has a date (e.g. ‘09-11-2017 11:50 PM’) the PM is still on a line of its own, while ‘Yesterday 11:50 PM’ stays on a single line. So near the top, the extra white space is just about all gone, but there’s still a lot of excess white space in the lower parts of the forum pages on account of the extra line for AM and PM.
So if that column could be just a couple of characters wider, that would solve the problem altogether.
Wow, the more they tinker the worse it gets.
The staff needs the floating forum-jump box to simplify navigation between forums. The go-to-top arrow is helpful when you’re in the middle of a long thread on a phone and need to get to the nav bar at the top. You’re dealing with a limited amount of space on small devices and some compromises are unavoidable. The floating elements can be annoying at first but you get used to them. Once everything else is fixed we can revisit these things; we’ll see how people feel about them then.