I guess the question is WHY would we want something there, what would actually be useful? I’d say not much right now.
Users can apply for car company adverts on the sides of the page that links to their thread or something, idk.
That is something I don’t like the idea of.
What about quick links down the side to different parts of the forum?
Possibly, though not sure how well it’d work usability wise.
I feel like we’re now trying to find an excuse to fill that space though, rather than putting something there because it needs to be there.
I’d argue good clean design is all about keeping it to just the things you need, not cluttering it just so you can say you’ve used all available space 
The thing is, for every thing I can consider useful there, I can think of six reasons why it shouldn’t be there.
This is possibly impossible to implement, and I apologize to who had this idea because I’d say your name if I could remember it, (I know, USDMFTW said it, but I meant the forum post)
What if we had a wall of badges, where clicking on one would lead to the persons company page?
(Obvious problem, company pages might well become obsolete as the game is developed further)
(Second problem, why? We have a forum section for that)
Other than that, unread threads? There’s a tab for that.
Online users? What, for stalking?
List of threads your active in? What, so we can spam them more?
A button to explode Norman’s engine? That’s redundant, it’ll do it anyway.
But I definitely agree with Killrob’s 5 points.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
Sorry if the lol and the content of the photo weren’t enugh to say it was humor. I do get what you are all saying. I don’t know what I would want there. I’m also not fond of FBs layout. I don’t want space filled for the sake of filling space either, per-se. Its just a lot of space. Why did I go out and buy a bigger monitor if less than half is going to be used? Do they make a stand adapter to turn my widescreen into a tallscreen??? I guess it just gives me a Windows 8 feeling with what was basically a touch-screen design layout pushed to desktop users. “Screw you PC users. Tablets and phones are where it’s heading. We don’t care about you anymore.” Does that make sense?
Like I said already, Killtobs changes make it better. It isn’t too wide. The background changes made also help it. It’s just new, and is going to take some getting used to is all. Everything is moving from informative text to pretty pictures. A user picture tells me nothing. It’s like trying to read a text from my 13 year old cousin…who writes entire sentences with nothing but emoji. Clicking said picture takes me away from what I’m currently reading. And I, for one, love signatures! 
Thumbs up for subtle but effective changes!
I wouldn’t fill the space around, it would make the screen messy.
Having read through this thread, I also had some debate with other users elsewhere about the new forum format.
My overall verdict is that the new format is a positive step. Early criticisms about it being easier to navigate as a mobile user versus a PC user are well founded. However I must say as somebody who frequently switches between PC and mobile the forums sync and autosaving is a real bonus. Management of drafts is so much easier!
Thoughts:
- I agree that having excessively wide posts makes it too difficult to read. Is it possible at all for us to be able to determine our own browser preference?with regards to preferred post width?
- Can we have either a legend or an updated text editor to reflect the full functionality? On that note the auto-popup emoji on typing a colon is convenient.
- about the empty space, I’m not a fan of the filled up layout. I frequently get lost on Facebook. I do like some degree of empty space. Or at least the ability to customise my own space, like on DeviantArt, though this might be far too much to ask here
- I was a bit of a massive signature offender but honestly the multiple iterations of the same banner gets very old quickly. I favour a more streamlined approach and am happy to sacrifice signatures for that.
- Larger user swatches and text info on most recent poster would be helpful, I agree.
- What’s with the “suggested topics” list? I personally find this not useful and I’m going to go further to suggest that it’s not useful for this forum in general. Could we disable it?
More as I think of it!
I have to agree that a fixed width is a good thing. And i think the current size is fine.
While the forum looks good on a mobile device, i am not liking it on my desktop. I also think there are to many different and inconsistent font-sizes.
I played around with the CSS file a bit more and maybe the following small changes might also help readabilty:
- a slight border top and bottom the text (border-bottom on header, border-top on action bar). At least my eyes seems to concentrate easier on the post content.
- the paragraph font to 13px from 14px
- Adjusted the Header Padding/Margins
- Changed the font-size of the action bar beneath a post to 14px, and adjusted the padding/margin.
Current:
Adjusted:
The funny thing about this is that they don’t automatically adapt to the screen. Right now, my iPad isn’t quite wide enough to see the whole page, with last night changes, whereas the narrower version fit the screen perfectly.
Right now, I Have to scroll to the right to read the full post. Meanwhile, it still works fine in the phone. Why?
@07CobaltGirl A lot of programmers do run their screens in portrait (I don’t, again as 1080 pixels is not enough to get screen across). As I looked into things, I did start to realise how much wasted space the original forums have. Just because the borders push out to all edges, doesn’t mean the space is used.
This thread has made me want to get 2x 28" 4K monitors for my desk, so I can run portrait format 2 code windows at once. I may make that a future present for myself.
@strop: I dislike the idea of user set widths, and there is nothing out of the box to allow that to happen.
In regards to the editor, when you first join the forum (but for some reason this didn’t happen to imported users). You get a welcome to the forums notification that links to this: http://discourse.automationgame.com/t/welcome-to-automation/15615 which covers the basics. The buttons at the top of the editor cover almost all the functionality, the only thing it doesn’t is the [color=red]color[/color] BBCode I added.
I/someone needs to play with usercards a bit more (click on someones name on a post/topic), and what info comes through, and how much can be added/displayed. @UltimateBMWfan (click the tag) has a pretty good one so far. I think it serves a signature like roll without having it repeated ad nauseum.
I’m not sure how useful having last poster information is, discourse automatically takes you to the last place you read to, not the end of a topic (unless they are the same thing). In the topic listing, the last user avatar (on the right) is the most recent poster. The rest are based on how often they have posted. You can click on the avatar to get their info. I don’t think there is a option to toggle it to being just the most recent username, but their might be a plugin for it. After a couple of weeks you might of gotten a feel for all the common contributors avatars and you can quickly see who is in the conversation.
In regards to suggested topics, are you talking about the ones at the bottom of a topic? I agree that they do feel a bit useless (picking wildly random topics). I’ve turned them off.
@asdren can you send me that CSS/snipets or did you just make the changes through inspector?
@Leonardo9613 which iPad we talking about. I believe discourse has 2 modes, mobile and desktop. It probably treats tablets as desktop. If it is a mini, or a lot of standard tablets. The CSS width is 768 wide. Our recent changes have pushed the width to 860px. I’ll look into resolving this.
@zeussy It is an ipad air, the one with the 9.7" screen. I tried to upload a screencap, but apple didn’t allow it 
Just found chrome’s device emulation, and see the issue with tablets. Will give a go at fixing it. I really need to clone this discourse so I can play with it ‘offline’ so to speak. I need a place to play with other cool features. Maybe autoposting cars to the forums or something like that.
Pretty fun browsing the web at 4K. Pretty fun browsing the old forums at 4K. Those old forums sure use up all the space well /sarcasm.
It does look great on my phone though, 5.5inch 1080p. The thread i just made has everything resized properly.
Upon reflection that would make it horrendously difficult to predict how posts will appear and might also break a lot of intrinsic formatting. It’s not an elegant idea and I think the current width is actually good.
I’ll definitely have a play with the user cards now. Is there a way to activate the tour of the forum and its functions? I feel like I know enough to get by but I’m sure there’s a few things more that would prove useful. Already the functionality is much smoother and more versatile than previously, it’s just different (and many of us were used to that way of things).
EDIT: images in cards work well enough with a little rejigging on PC screens. However they don’t scale well on mobile devices: my profile background picture has blown up somewhat ridiculous and I can only see like 1/40th of it!
2 Likes
Signatures also have the same sort of issue. The only real way around it would be to require people to have 2 images, card images, one of mobile and one for desktop/tablet.
The only thing I am aware of is the post I linked above.
…I’m sorry, but I loathe the new forum software. I didn’t even read this thread because it would mean interacting further with Discourse.
- It’s really script-y. Like, I don’t need to see a live preview of my posts. It’s actually distracting.
- I hate infinite-scroll. Hate hate hate hate. Give me a page of a predictable length that I can scroll to the part of the thread I want to see. Give me landmarks I can hold onto to know where I am in the thread.
- The only advantage I see of infinite scroll is that loading all the posts at once means I can search in the page for posts instead of using the site search … except that’s not how it works. It doesn’t load all the posts at once, and if I try to hit ctrl+f to search the page, it opens the site search instead. Stealing keypresses? Incredibly rude.
- Remember how I said that, in the paginated format, I can scroll to the part of the thread I want to see? When I try to use the browser’s scrollbar in this thread, for example, it scrolls up from 43 to 26 … and then skips to 5, because it hit the top of the loaded posts and swaps them out for posts higher on the page.
- It becomes even more aggravating trying to use on the iPhone. Mercifully, the preview pane is gone, but select-to-quote (say) is a huge pain in the keister.
I know there’s a lot of “ugh things changing grump grump grump” in my reaction, but with all this floaty Web 3.1 garbage all over the place, I’m about ready to quit before I even have a chance to get used to it.
Sorry to hear you dislike it that much. I guess you can’t please everyone, and we definitely should not try to either, because that means pleasing no one.
These are the forums we will have for the foreseeable future, apart from a bit of polish here and there. I fully expect a few people to quit, that is natural with any bigger change. It has happened with Automation and the forums are no exception. Next up for quitting: people disliking the upcoming engine designer revamp.
1 Like