Too wide forums

[Guest]

Many of the threads in this forum are extremely difficult to read at normal resolution (800x600) because the lines are wider than the screen. To need to scroll horizontally continually back and forth to read messages is an enormous burden. This forum is a nice idea, but this technical flaw is so great I'm already about to give up on it. Can this be fixed so the forum is usable?

[Guest]

All table widths are set to 90%. They should resize to fit your screen. I tested with 13, 15 and 17 inche monitors at different resolutions to make sure there wasn't a problem. I didn't find any unless someone posted a rather long URL. In that case the software over rides the width so not to break the link.

[Guest darker]

There's a way for users to include URLs so that they don't stretch the tables. Of course, this is documented in the FAQ, but many people may not have read all of that. It goes like this:

 

[u r l=http://some.really.long/url.html]a description</font color=blue>[/url]

 

(write without the spaces: [url=...)

 

Would it be very hard to implement a feature that shortens the display part of overly long URLs automatically? Say that if a string is longer than 80 characters long, that the "[url=..." construct is generated for it by the system, chopping out a reasonable amount of characters from the middle? Maybe you'd want to make sure that the full hostname at the beginning and the filename at the end are still shown in full, but some of the path information in between may not be all that important to see on everybody's screen.

 

http;//www.example.com/very/long/.../path/ending/here.html</font color=blue>

 

As if you hadn't enough work with this already, eh? /images/icons/wink.gif