Forum style too narrow!

I know it’s current cool to have ‘narrow’ blogs and forum styles, but don’t you think the Devon tech forum takes the narrow style just a bit too far?

In the user control panel it’s not even wide enough to fit the drop down selections. Apart from being - obviously - too narrow to be able to display much text necessitating lots of scrolling.

Just a comment.

Heck yes!

I posted objections to this forum style when it was first implemented and nothing was done about it. It makes vertical scrolling annoyingly unavoidable in almost every thread, like you said. That it constantly negatively impacts usability is a problem for me.

Here’s a screenshot from NetNewsWire showing how ridiculously space-wasting it is:

I’d appreciate if someone familiar with CSS would check the style sheet and see if anything can be adjusted to make it saner. My few earlier attempts failed since I didn’t know what to look for.

Or, better yet, DEVONtechnologies could finally offer us a reasonable alternative… sooner than it’s taken to release DEVONthink 2.0.

And it would be nice to get a fix for the RSS feed bug where the Creator occasionally doesn’t match the post author, e.g.:

It’s the only one of my many RSS feeds with that problem. Also, separate feeds for the different subforums would be useful.

Thanks!

heya, the solution is easy, i had the same complaint, someone mentioned:

Go to your profile settings, there you can choose to use the regular forum style, which IMHO is much more usable and easy on the eyes (white blue standard forum design)

Thanks, superballoon! It’s much better for me with the prosilver style, which I’d overlooked since I hadn’t checked for new settings after the forum was upgraded to phpBB3.

Works for me - thanks!

The forum style adjusts to the overall style of the web page. As soon as we make the web pages wider, the forum will also take over this change. But, still, not few users prefer browser windows that do not cover the full screen left to right but have smaller windows. So the decision to make it narrower. And for all who don’t like it, there’s the SubSilver style that we intentionally left as a choice.

Regarding the RSS feed: I will have a look at this issue. As the RSS script is a complete rewrite after the switch to phpBB3, glitches like this were expected to creep in.

Which web pages?

Not sure I understand.
With the DEVONtech theme the useful content is overly narrow in my relatively narrow Safari browser windows. Trouble is there’s too much empty background space regardless of the browser window width. I can’t think of any other forum I’ve used where that’s so apparent. Blogs; yes. Forums; no.

It’s named prosilver here, and I appreciate you leaving it.

There might be quoted text formatting glitches, too, but I can’t check that right now or find a cleaner-looking phpBB3 site feed example …

The whole web site? See our page header which is common to all pages of our site.

Formatting is always a problem, our feed uses the phpBB3 transformations. The author tag should now be correct in all cases, BTW.

Okay, so hopefully you eventually make the wider web page change that’ll propagate to the forum.

Who’s responsible for maintaining those? I’d rather contact them directly, eliminating you as a middleman for the problems.

Thanks! I’ll keep an eye on it. Still haven’t relaunched NNW again since yesterday’s crash. NNW2 never crashed and bugs were insignificant compared to NNW3. I’m not expecting any stability/usability regressions with DT 2.0.

I would guess someone in the phpBB3 team. We’re using the following functions:

generate_text_for_display()
html_entity_decode()

I actually like the smallish design. Reading posts on the iTouch is quite convenient that way. On the screen, I find it easy to skim these posts.

I’d rather vote for a change in the user status names, which are a bit ridiculous: Turns out I have just turned “god”, just by habit. I am glad to see that my persistent asking of really stupid questions and posting annoying feature requests pays off, finally…

I prefer the descriptions in the Mellel forum: “Read the guide, knows everything” or “knows everything, can prove it”, although, on secound thought I don’t…

Thanks for that info, Eric.

You’ve got me curious to trying browse here with an iTouch or iPhone next time I’m at an Apple Store, Maak.

Now if only Safari Mobile would correctly show centered background images such as this one.

…to be honest, I got it from craigslist for 170 - a nice gadget, but not for the original price.

Yep. I’ve noticed The Balcony blog looks icky on my iPod touch with the off-centered background.

Got mine free; an appreciation gift for helpful contributions on another forum.
My Palm TX sure is bulky and clunky in comparison, especially for web browsing. Only app I really miss is Pimlico Software’s excellent DateBk6, my favorite appointment/todo app (period). Never bothered syncing it with iCal since the TX was always more readily accessible. Not sure the 2.0 Software Update changes to Calendar will matter much but $10 is worth it just for Apple’s Remote app. Waiting for the iTunes Store to cooperate… it’s still heavily constipated.

I know this is a very old thread now, but I tried this and didn’t see where to change the forum style. Is this still a viable option? What don’t I see this option in my profile?

Thanks!

Look here: