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The shock of the new


MikeyD

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MikeyD,

Seeing the new Forum was a shock, made worse by my initial visual impression the pages would now consist of one post per page. Happily, that turned out not to be the case. Compared to the one from before, the UI seems pretty stripped down. Unfortunately, one of the casualties is the direct delinker now no longer in the toolbar!  Sloppy, IMO, on the part of whomever wrote the IPS v4 code. And with the avatars now so large, I may have to finally come up with one. Have absolutely no idea what, though. 

Regards,

John Kettler

 

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LOL yeah @ASL Veteran is one that scored a big win with the round avatars, also @Bulletpoint.  My new cat had its ear chopped off.  One thing you can do is extend the canvas size for your image so that what you want appears in the centre and with a little experimentation you an get the look you want.

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Oh my, somebody redecorated! Round avatar pics - looks like I'm going to have to find myself a new avatar picture.  :D

Grabbed a childhood photo for a new round avatar pic... but 'Buss' (my mischief-maker monkey in previous avatar) still flies the Tomahawk :D

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OK as promised.  I have found away for Fire Fox and Chrome users to tweak the forum web site.  There is an add in called Stylish:

For Fire Fox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stylish/

For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en

With that add-in installed you can write your own CSS that will be used to style web pages of your choice.  I have created a package of CSS styles that reduce some of the white space - every where, return the avatars to square and remove announcements from the topic pages.

Here is what the Black Sea forum looked like in my browser before the change:

before.thumb.jpg.4af91a05d5096f2875cdc86

As  you can see no actual content is visible because of all the excessive white space in the header area.  Now after applying the styles using Stylish the site looks like this:

after.thumb.jpg.10c72cd952454b9972cc9289

And now you can see the first five topics of the forum.

Once you have the add in installed you can add these styles to your experience by clicking the "Install with Stylish" button here: https://userstyles.org/styles/119012/compact-battlefront-forum-ipboard

You can inspect and modify the CSS at any time.  You can turn it on and off easily as well so if anything breaks you can get back to the default quickly.

Enjoy.

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Signatures are out of my hands for sure.  @Bootie I am not sure about BFC working through the issues I have with the forum styling.  When they switched to this software the previous version had the same problem (in my opinion) of too much white space and it bothered me but not enough to get me to restyle it.  I cannot say for sure but I do not think the BFC Admin has much say in spacing issues.   That is down to the software developers of the forum software.  I tried to provide my feedback but IP Board does not have a mechanism for customers of customers to give them feedback.  BFC have much better things to do than try to get spacing changes made (even if they agree with me which I have no idea).  The latest upgrade made things even worse, in my opinion.  Again mostly due to the way IP Board is written.  This time it was bad enough that I decided to act.  Really it is my personal issue but I figured some of us would agree with me.  There is a design aesthetics in the UI community that, again in my opinion, overvalues white space.  White space is very important.  Without white space things become unreadable.  I just personally think the current fashion is over kill.  There has to be a balance between white space and actually showing content. 

So, I did this for my own benefit because I reached my grrrr point :).  I predict that BFC will be spending their time on other far more important things then trying to get a provider to tweak their forum template based on my opinion.

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