Facebook doesn’t fill the width with adds or shit. It’s main feed is even narrower than discourse at 450px. Both the feed, and the advert area on the side is 800px. I do think that facebooks links to the left including groups, pages, favorites etc is hideous. Although it seems neither myself or facebook have any idea of what do actually do there. Your focus is on the feed anyway.
Now I think you are just having me on. That is an affront to design. as @Daffyflyer just said. Just because their is space, doesn’t need to be filled. Just look at almost every other popular well designed site. That has a series of topics/posts/news. They all have ‘wasted’ space to the side, their actual contents (the stuff that actually matters is all narrow and easy to read.):
Interesting that jalopnik runs its images quite wide but keeps the text quite narrow on its posts:
Local Kiwi news:
ArsTechnica’s content is 640px wide, wired.com is narrow at 532px wide, autoblog is 720px, CarThrottle is about 600px wide.
To be honest, I think @Killrob’s changes have pushed it a little too wide now, and makes it more work to read. With our text/content width at 860px, and almost everywhere else on the internet running at around 640px. Although checking reddit, it seams the widest it allows a comment to go is 840px.
The forum has changed from phpBB3. And the most dramatic change is in the width/screen usage. The whole internet is in agreement that going full width of the screen for text is terrible. Apart from a lot of forum designs that ignores this.
And just taking a couple of random pictures from the old forums:
You get the idea, although there are posts/threads that are a lot more space fill. Just browse the old forums, and see what the average amount of posts on screen at a time is (on a 1920x1080 monitor). I find that it is basically 3. And has heap of blank empty space, or just noisy crap taking up space and not actually contributing to the conversation (Signatures/Profile). Take this populate thread (48 replies), and scroll through it. And look at how many posts are actually on the screen at once:
http://automationgame.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9723
or the last BRC:
http://automationgame.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=8998
Parts of Der Bayers initial post are almost entirely blank screen, then you start to scroll down at the replies, and you get about an average of 3 posts on the screen at once. Occasionally 4. They are mostly 1-2 line replies.
Then look at the BRC on here:
I get about 5 posts on screen at once. So the new forum’s content density is at least the same, if not a bit higher. Now I know a lot of the space is recovered from not having signatures, but also a lot of it is in the profile card to the side. If you click on peoples names in the post, you get a profile card for them, this replaces the signature/profile stuff. So we don’t have it repeated 100x times.
Enough of my grumpy ranting. Should actually do some work.