No you can’t. Shrinking your window doesn’t add whitespace, it just adds desktop clutter.
“As you may have noticed, websites today have plenty of white space in their graphical interfaces, as opposed to websites 10 or 15 years ago, when everything was cluttered.”
i.e. Website design for 800x600 is stubbornly clung on to when screen sizes have dramatically increased.
To be fair the standard resolution was also 640x480… now it’s not unusual for a monitor to be 4096 pixels wide! There’s also a reason pages of a book are arranged vertically and not horizontally! It does all boil down to a personal preference, but there is an optimum that works for most. Maybe there should be a setting.
I do find horizontal scrolling worse than vertical scrolling. I get irritated when websites’ content is framed wider than my screen/window when I enlarge text to a comfortable reading level.
But websites nowadays already have to be able to accommodate a very wide range of variability, from desktop screens the size of TVs to phones held in portrait. Being able to resize narrow enough for puzzlegal shouldn’t be an issue.
I also understand other people can find vertical scrolling annoying. Having to constantly shift the text upward makes tracking your place and reference a little harder. For me, reading text isn’t as bad as, say, working with content in a table. Trying to quickly read a list fairways l downward or trying to count items is tricky when constantly siding the page.
I get the arguments for trying to frame relevant content to the center of the page, not riding the left side of the screen. Still, it seems there should be the availability for those who want to maximize width to be able to do so,even if you don’t enjoy that appearance.
I think the whole goal of one theme for everybody is off track. I appreciate the idea of collecting the list of features that are useful as a way to drive better theme options.
One option should have the ability to go wide.
No, it shows a lot of empty space that is wasted.
Having some margin at the sides is important. Having good line spacing is important. Having sufficient spacing between elements is important. Having a huge swathe of empty space on a third of the screen is wasteful.
I get not cluttering it up with distractions, like ads or lists of links to other websites or pictures. And many people find text stretching wide to be it’s own complication. But that screenshot does not show good use of whitespace, it shows wasted space.
So what exactly would you fill up that ‘wasted’ space with?
And how exactly would that work on narrow screens?
Basically you’re free to develop any kind of theme you like, or modify any existing theme. Discourse gives full instructions, and I’m sure the mods will add it to the board for you. Maybe it would be better to do that than to keep complaining about existing themes that 95% of users are happy with?
I don’t understand why the question of how it would work on a narrow screen? The old Dope looked perfectly fine on my phone, the text just arranged itself to fit whatever browser it was in.
If you want to fill the white space with links, or categories, or a second column of text (as was suggested), or something else, then you need to explain how that would work on a narrow screen.
If you simply want a wider block of text, then create a new theme to do that (or use Greasemonkey or similar). But don’t expect the existing themes to be altered to suit a small minority of atypical users.
Kittenpix! 
This. As others have suggested already, I didn’t literally mean “One Theme and One Theme Only” to the exclusion of all others. I want to get a consensus (more-or-less at least) on features that are so universally desired that they should be included in ALL of our themes. Mouse-over previews seem to be an undisputed candidate for this, as far as I can tell.
Plain-text user-names and time-stamps for the OP and most recent post in the thread list have quite a following. Alternatively, having that row of five avatars in the thread list. I’ve suggested that there may be room for both there.
And please, get the good SDMB banner into all the themes.
White space seems to have brought up enough discussion (and nobody seems sure if that is really something that is or can be a theme option, or an individual user option), that may have been worthy of a separate thread itself.
Is there an easy way to figure out what CAN be configured in a theme?
Wow, you TOTALLY missed the point. Using every pixel = clutter.
If you mean user configurable, literally anything but that’s not theming. If you mean able to change via changing themes, then it’s pretty much anything that can be controlled by CSS which is A LOT. There’s no short summary short of learning CSS.
Discourse renders in pages - no infinite scroll - when javascript is disabled. It also gives precise date and timestamps and clearly shows the post number next to each post. There are no themes in this fallback system so my request is moot.
I didn’t realize any of this until I actually tried to login and had to enable javascript, cookies, and other standard browser features (until today I had mostly been replying by email and hardly used the web interface for posting).
~Max
What’s JavaScript, how can I disable it, and can I disable it just for the SDMB, or do I have to disable it on my whole phone (or PC)?
I REALLY want my pagination and straightforward time stamps back.
You can disable it per site, but it will break a lot more functionality than just infinite scroll. It will have no effect on time stamps.
Javascript is a computer program language that runs in your web browser. Discourse is a javascript application. When you first connect to the StraightDope, your computer actually downloads about 3 megabytes of javascript code containing the Discourse application. The application is saved to your browser cache so it doesn’t have to be re-downloaded. The application is then run and it does all the fancy formatting and themes using your computer’s processing power instead of the website’s host computer. This means after the initial visit, hopefully you see content much faster.
If you use chrome there is an option in settings->site settings->javascript and you can turn javascript off for individual sites. But as Omniscient said, it breaks a lot of functionality. You can’t log in, you can’t search, you can’t post, you can’t open spoilers, etc. On the mobile view, the categories pages don’t seem to work at all so you can only browse individual threads. I had been replying by email so I didn’t really notice any of those drawbacks.
As I wrote above, the fallback website is made for web crawlers like Google. It is not made for forum users.
~Max
On the vBulletin site of yore, I ran with JavaScript disabled most of the time. Most of the functionality that I needed most of the time worked, and a certain amount of obnoxious stuff that I would have preferred to squelch was indeed squelched. On this new site, with such obviously extensive client-side JS stuff going on, I would never even imagine this site could work without it. Max_S’s post above substantially confirms that.
Thanks for the warning. I’ll continue waiting for the theme that will return my SDMB experience to what it was for the first twenty years.
I started a new thread:
I feel like there have been some partial consensuses reached, but this thread is long and it’s hard to find them. So I tried to summarize the groups of features that seemed popular from reading this thread.