Suggesting a Design Change

[Miko]

When I look at a geekhack page, I notice that only a very thin fraction of the page is filled with actual content. I feels like 75% is occupied with Avatars and Signatures. On DT, this is a way better, as the avatars have a reasonable size and there are no signatures. Yet, for short posts I feel that the actual content is not the prominent part of the page:

DT-Vorher.png (47.02 KiB) Viewed 4490 times

I just thought that something like this would stress what was posted, rather than who posted:

DT-Nachher.png (47.19 KiB) Viewed 4490 times

There is still more then enough space for titles. Any thoughts?

Miko

[seebart]

some club members like myself do have "signatures" if you mean the same thing.

Yet, for short posts I feel that the actual content is not the prominent part of the page:

elaborate please.

[webwit]

It's because of max username length. Try to fit WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW in.

[Miko]

DT beschriftung.png (70.47 KiB) Viewed 4474 times

I feel that the area that the "content" is occupying could be bigger in regard to the area that the whole post is using.

[Muirium]

I get what you're saying, but design is all about tradeoffs. I like the centred usernames, avatars, ranks and datestamps as they are. Sure, short posts get a bit boxy, but never very much. Because of our right rules on avatar size, things can never get worse than the example you provide; and it's not particularly bad!

[Miko]

Because of our right rules on avatar size,

These are indeed the right rules.

and it's not particularly bad!

No, it's not. I really like the design. I just wonder if it could become better.

[Halvar]

Everyone can solve this problem for himself by turning off the display of avatars in the user options...

I don't care that much about the whitespace, I find it more important that the left column with the user information has a fixed format and doesn't float around.

[webwit]

That part was hard to design, it would be nice to improve on it but there are things to consider.

This wouldn't work because of the max username length problem, and because the date format can be set in the user preferences and the interface is available in many languages (some of them have longer words). It already ignores font size settings because of these space problems.

[Muirium]

It also doesn't look as nice. The left column has excellent symmetry right now. Don't lose it!

[Muirium]

Going offtopic, naturally, something I find messy is when people quote the entirety of the immediately preceding message like this:

http://deskthority.net/help-f53/silenci ... ml#p213280

But quoting parts of a previous answer is a good thing:

http://deskthority.net/product-news-f44 ... ml#p214773

As is quoting the immediately prior post in its entirety, when you discover you're on a new page and effectively talking to yourself!

Not sure how to address this one. It's more of a posting style concern than one we could solve in software. Because it's inherently fuzzy. Especially when you're quoting a serial post-editor like, oh, you know. I forever forget to treat his posts as works in progress, likely to change entirely by the time I hit submit!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

It's the pathetic jumpy loading that gets on my nerves. Click the icon to take you to the new posts in a topic, and as images load, the post you're trying to read is constantly scrolled out of view until you mash the escape key to just make it stop. That's far more annoying than having to scroll past whitespace, and yes, the redesign causes a horrible visual imbalance between users with and without avatars.

I assume Geekhack caches the image sizes, since its HTML for an external, full-size expandable image looks like this (image is external but the size is nonetheless given in the HTML):

Code: Select all

<a sl-processed="1" href="http://i.imgur.com/Dvxi1Hy.jpg" class="highslide " onclick="return hs.expand(this, { slideshowGroup: '1672293' })"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/Dvxi1Hy.jpg" alt="" class="bbc_img" align="" height="480" width="640"></a>

DT is otherwise easier to read, but I could cure GH by just switching off signatures — they're not just clutter, but also confusing, especially when people put quotes in them! (Of course, Google indexes the keyboards listed in signatures, so that would yield search results that no longer show the text that Google is adamant is there!)

[seebart]

Going offtopic, naturally, something I find messy is when people quote the entirety of the immediately preceding message like this:

http://deskthority.net/help-f53/silenci ... ml#p213280

But quoting parts of a previous answer is a good thing:

http://deskthority.net/product-news-f44 ... ml#p214773

As is quoting the immediately prior post in its entirety, when you discover you're on a new page and effectively talking to yourself!

Not sure how to address this one. It's more of a posting style concern than one we could solve in software. Because it's inherently fuzzy. Especially when you're quoting a serial post-editor like, oh, you know. I forever forget to treat his posts as works in progress, likely to change entirely by the time I hit submit!

yeah I still have that bad habit of simply ignoring the quote I´m referring to in my answer. I have gotten better though!

"serial post-editor" sounds really bad! Could be a great signature for me though!

[Muirium]

I'm almost as bad as you at editing after I posted. Almost! I'm usually just fixing my mistakes though, or adding something clearer, rather than rewriting the plot…