In preparation for some changes to the design of the forums, the right-hand sidebar has been moved to the left side. This is part of making the entire UBC Botanical Garden site consistent, with left-side bars throughout. In addition, it is no longer possible to make the sidebar disappear, as the login and user information box will be moved there (if I'm skilled enough).
Now many posts scroll off the right side of the page. At least it does for those of us with Older Eyes (larger fonts). Could some form of word wrap be implemented to alleviate that?
There is very likely something that can be done... Could you let me know your screen resolution / operating system / browser? This is how large I can make it before experiencing those same issues on a 1440x900 monitor / Win XP / Firefox 4:
Firefox4, 1366x768, PClinuxOS Sorry, didn't get back sooner. I was cutting down a Freeze killed Eucalyptus (one of three). All died in the last two Winters.
So...can the thing be moved back? How about a poll? If there is a groundswell of opinion for the return of the right-handed sidebar, how about it? What is the point of a format change that the membership dislikes---and, as saltcedar points out, one that is counterproductive and cumbersome? Why must we have consistency? Is not variety the spice of the botanical world? Who's with me on this?
Are you increasing it to a text size that is larger (relatively) than what I had included in the screen capture?
We are trying to add consistency to the user experience across all of the UBC Botanical Garden site. While I might prefer the other way (until I get used to the new format), I understand and agree with the decision on the part of the designers & UBC BG marketing staff.
I thought it might have something to do with Word-wrapping in Firefox, but I don't think that's the case as I can get the text of the page to the same equivalent size in Internet Explorer before it starts to degrade in a similar manner (in other words, word-wrapping works just as well in Firefox as IE for increased font sizes) (edit: Nope, installed that add-on, and it had no effect)
Wonder if that's the difference between 1366 wide vs. 1440 wide. Well, I'll have the designers have a look at this page, see if they have any suggestions.
A couple of observations: Since the sidebar has moved the width of the actual messages has shrunk compared to the menu bar above, which looks a bit odd (don't know if this is a bug or a deliberate change): Forum pages are much longer vertically than most other webpages, which results in a large blank space to the left of the messages for most of the page on threads with several replies. On a non-widescreen LCD, 1280x1024 in this screen capture, if you have a sidebar open in the browser (eg. for bookmarks) in addition to the UBC sidebar then 35%+ of the screen width is used up before you get to the part you want to read, which makes the messages seem a little squashed: Obviously if the look of the UBCBG site needs to be consistent then it needs to be consistent, but some things don't work as well on a forum page as they do on regular web pages.
Not going to happen...the rest of the site pages for the relaunch (main UBC BG site / BPotD) were "baked" in terms of layout over a month ago.
Could an entry be added to Forum Links titled Toggle Sidebar that collapses/expands the sidebar element?
I've pulled the main body of the forums table over the left as much as I can, maybe corrected some of what maf was seeing above.
That looks much better. Would still prefer the messages to be displayed at the same width as the menu bar above, it looks odd from a design viewpoint if they are not the same. Clean lines and all that. Something like where the red lines are here in this image:
Ok that is strange, this forum still displays how I showed it in the last pic, but the maples forum shows the green bar with "thread tools" etc the same width as the messages, (and looking much better). Apologies for taking this thread a little off topic.
