Over in the Cafe Society forum view, the thread titles are scrunched into a column so narrow, some of them are five lines deep.
Near as I can tell, it’s because Amazing Magic-Gro Monster has an active thread, and his/her name doesn’t wrap like most longer Dopenames, so the “Thread Starter” column takes up too much space.
Why doesn’t he wrap? Can/should this be fixed? Whenever I see this phenomenon I feel claustrophobic.
I suspect this person entered hard-coded spaces (alt+0160) between the words in his name, rather than simply using the space bar. It bugs me, too.
Well, umm, Mr. Moderator, can’t this be, umm, fixed?
Ya know, I think it can. Lemme get hold of one of the admins.
I tried to fix it, but I don’t think that I made any difference. Is it still a problem?
Amazing’s name still appears all on one line, and does not wrap. It’s a problem for me at home on my 15" monitor at 800x600, however here at work I’m using a 21" monitor at 1024x768, and there is no problem, i.e., everything fits OK.
So perhaps it’s time for some of us to buy bigger monitors? 
It’s always time to upgrade…
Really, I don’t know how to fix it. I tried my best.
I cut and pasted Amazing’s name from his profile into my word processor, and it appears to have only ordinary spaces and an ordinary hyphen in it. His name does wrap in his posts within threads to
Perhaps the “thread starter” column is limited by the length of the longest name and isn’t designed to wrap. On most of the forums (using 800×600 screen resolution, anyway), the width of the column is limited by that inveterate troublemaker TubaDiva (Administrator) in the announcement. There’s an ordinary space in there, but it doesn’t wrap either.
I’d be interested to see examples of names that do wrap in the thread starter column, if you can find any.
I don’t think the username in the Thread Starter column changes even when the username is changed. For example, on Page 2 of ATMB, you can see that Jill Magruder is still listed as the starter of Jill Magruder = JillGat, even though she’s changed her name since then. Maybe the problem with Amazing’s username won’t happen the next time he/she starts a thread.
Yes, the thread starter column and the last post column get their values from the exact text that the person entered when he or she logged in. Thus, if Amazing Magic-Gro Monster logged in as AmaZInG MagIC-GRO monSTER, that’s how it would always appear in the thread starter column. If he wanted to, he could probably log in with non-breaking spaces (or continue to use cookies made with non-breaking spaces) just to prevent word wrap. I’d imagine an email to him asking him to log out and back in with normal spaces to clear out his SDMB cookie might be needed, if he’s not reading this.
The only ways to fix the problem as it is now would be (a) lock the thread, so it falls out of view or (b)directly access the database. At least as far as I know of how vBulletin works. Anthracite might be a good person to ask, as she runs a vBulletin message board.
His name doesn’t scrunch up the too badly titles when it is in the thread starter column, but when its in the last post column its pretty bad.
bibliophage is correct. In fact, if you look at the source for the forum page, you will find that the “Thread Starter” and “Last Post” columns have “nowrap” attributes on their table cells.
For what it’s worth, I sent him a (hopefully polite) note a couple days ago about the length of his name, pointing to what it did to the forum display, and suggesting that he could email an administrator to get it changed. We don’t ALL need to mail him.
I saw another excessively long name messing up the layout in “Cafe Society” anyway.
A very minor change to the layout of the “Last Post” column would help matters a lot, but I don’t think it’s within the scope of what they care to customize locally (what I was thinking of was an explicit break between the date and the “by …” of that column, forcing it to 2 lines without really messing up the readability).
Yes, I know ways to fix this, but they are not ways that the SDMB is able to do easily or safely.