3 issues & Solutions - Quoting, Blank space on post, Narrow width on 1st per page

[moevillini]

OK, here are some issues that annoy me to varying degrees:

1- QUOTING - The mechanism for quoting in a response is cumbersome. If the post you're responding to contains a quote, and you want your response to quote the original post, plus the response, you have to find the posts and check the boxes to allow "multiple quotes" - PLUS, if you're responding "with quote" to a post that contains a quote from another source (such as a news story that's quoted) - your response will not include the quoted news story contained within the reply you're quoting. I know I'm not quite expressing this correctly, but I think most of you should get what I'm saying.

2 - HEIGHT PER POST - it seems each post is a minimum height, regardless of how short the post may be. This means there is a lot of empty space on many posts. On the computer I normally use (with firefox) the empty area is AFTER the text in the post, but I've noticed on computers that use IE, the empty space is BEFORE the text - - which makes it seem that there's no response at all. Is there a way that the minimum height per post can be shortened?

3 - WIDTH on the first post on each page - this is just weird! Why is the text in the first post on a page (post #1, 26, 51 etc) so narrow? If it's a fairly short response, it's not very noticeable - but on a lengthy post, it can make for an unnecessarily long post.


watch, you'll see - - the text in this post will be long and narrow! If not, I'll eat my words.

 

[moevillini]

now I'll quote myself, and you'll see how it would appear if this were not Post #1...

OK, here are some issues that annoy me to varying degrees:

1- QUOTING - The mechanism for quoting in a response is cumbersome. If the post you're responding to contains a quote, and you want your response to quote the original post, plus the response, you have to find the posts and check the boxes to allow "multiple quotes" - PLUS, if you're responding "with quote" to a post that contains a quote from another source (such as a news story that's quoted) - your response will not include the quoted news story contained within the reply you're quoting. I know I'm not quite expressing this correctly, but I think most of you should get what I'm saying.

2 - HEIGHT PER POST - it seems each post is a minimum height, regardless of how short the post may be. This means there is a lot of empty space on many posts. On the computer I normally use (with firefox) the empty area is AFTER the text in the post, but I've noticed on computers that use IE, the empty space is BEFORE the text - - which makes it seem that there's no response at all. Is there a way that the minimum height per post can be shortened?

3 - WIDTH on the first post on each page - this is just weird! Why is the text in the first post on a page (post #1, 26, 51 etc) so narrow? If it's a fairly short response, it's not very noticeable - but on a lengthy post, it can make for an unnecessarily long post.


watch, you'll see - - the text in this post will be long and narrow! If not, I'll eat my words.

 

[moevillini]

Several posters have noted that in the first post on the page, the text is narrower than in subsequent posts. For some, particular when the text involves a quote, this is a major impediment to their ability to read the post because it is so narrow it appears with only a few words on each line.

Here is a possible solution:

Change the number of posts displayed per page. This can be done in your personal settings - see "Settings" in the menu at the very top of the page. In the "My Settings" box (probably on the far left) choose "General Settings" (in the "My Account" category). If you scroll down the page, you'll get to "Thread Display Options" where there are a number of settings you can modify to change how the board is displayed.

One of these options is "Number of Posts to Show Per Page: Use this option to set the number of posts to show in a thread before splitting the display into multiple pages." I believe the forum default is 25 posts per page, but the options allow you to set it to display up to 40 posts per page. If you make that change, that should mean the incidence of "narrowed margins" would happen every 40 posts rather than every 25. That should make some improvement, at least the readability problems would occur less often.

OK, maybe I should test it out to see if it helps!