Forum OpenACS Q&A: New Forum Issues: Link, Style, Last Post etc...

FIRST, I love the new OpenACS site and particularly the top with Alex! Now my Nits!

The NEW OpenACS FORUMS

• UNNECESSARY SUBJECT LINK
  The subject line is displayed as a LINK in when viewing the thread (/message-view?message_id=12345) This is a link for the page you are on and clicking the link only REFRESHES the page you are already on.... Seems redundant to me... Why not just make it BOLD without the Link?
  
  
• READABLE STYLE
  People who have large monitors end up reading very long lines from one edge of the monitor to the other. This is hard to read and sometimes when reading a long forum thread, I'll resize the browser from full size to a narrow column so I can read it like a newspaper column. I think 500 pixels width is ideal. It would probably mean putting the body in a table. Heck, the Poster, Date and Subject are already IN a table, why not another table row to include the body and a width=500 tag in the <table... line.
  
  
• LAST POST
  And I see it has been mentioned in two other threads currently fading into the swamp at the bottom of my monitor, The Last Post date needs to be fixed SOON. I can see how this feature will negate the need for the old bboard system of clicking on the "Recent Posts" link once it is working correctly...
  
  
• FORMAT PLAIN or CHOCOLATE
  When posting, there is the dropdown choice of TEXT or HTML for FORMAT. This is really UNnecessary.... Can we not have the computer look and see if there is a <p> <br> <b> etc and just set the flag to HTML otherwize it is TEXT and not bother the user?

Thanks!

-Bob

The posting text can't be in a table because sometimes there is a very wide prefotmatted piece of code in a post, and it screws up the formatting for all the posts in a thread if they are in a big table. I added a <div> around the post text and created a style to adjust the margins.

> Why not ad an admin function to the /pvt/home where users
> can set their personal preference for collumn width

As Bob already mentioned, users already can control column width 
- by resizing their browser window.  Doing it that way has advantage
that people actually know it's possible even if they are new to    
the site.

Also, IMHO, anything you try to do with fixed table widths, character  
sizes etc.  is more likely to reduce than to increase usability    
and accessibility.

 -- Branimir

How difficult would it be to implement such a feature.

This is very usefull to get people to use it extensively, as it happens in a knowledge management system.
Lars (and others working on dotWRK), what do you think?

One counter-argument is that the screen is small compared to the size of document. You are peeking at the text by sliding a small hole up and down. This is why many users maximize the browser window. Seeing a bigger chunk of the text at the time helps them to read and scan it faster more than having optimal line width.

Another counter-argument is that you can't control the width well and will probably screw the user. If it's left uncontrolled, one can always resize his rowser window and read at the width one prefers, and this is indeed default behaviour of the Web.

Now making some small margins is good. The old forum used <blockquote> around posts.

Auto guess of format won't work in all cases, as Ben said. Let's leave it implicit.

To say in another words, these two improvements you propose would probably be "too smart" features. I agree with your other two points.

Why not add a user_preference for an external style sheet? Mark up the forum pages with a number of classes and let users hack away at their own version of Nirvana? I know that you can do some of this with your browser setup, but it doesn't move from computer to computer or browser to browser so easily. Maybe store them in file-storage or somewhere easy to access. Trade and borrow style sheets with your friends!

The only issue with usability I noticed that hasn't been mentioned so far is the Forums Section in the banner. When you are reading a message or are in a specific forum, the "Forums" text is not a link, so the only way to get to "Forums" is to use the breadcrumb/context link. It seems like you could change the text color, but still preserve the link when you are below the index page.

Optimal line width is nice, but because this site does not dictate font size or browser window width, or screen resolution, there is no way we can tell how the site will render in any situation. So we cannot design a solution that will work nicely.

I agress that too long lines are harder to read, I just do not know of a solution that would not create another problem.

Possibly a <div> with a width of so many ems would work, but support for dimensions specified in ems is not very reliable in current browsers.

do not seem to appear in

email

alerts...

...or atleast they don't for me.

(ie, This multi-line post appears as a single line in my email.  Is anyone else experiencing this?)

If not I will try try again.