My comments in RED:
Quote:
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I too must admit that I would prefer a more conventional BB layout for this site…
I’m not sure what this board does that is unconventional. What are you referring to? In designing it, I studied several of the most popular bulletin boards, and tried to deliver the same functionality.
One important point though: Most of the Sierra users are more ‘computer literate’ than the target market for my product. Some of the features I observed in other message board systems would be too complex to explain to non-techies. My target market, for the talkspot.com system is a ‘average person’ who wants to build a website. Techie features tend to alienate this group. I need to focus on the 10% of features that make 90% of the end users happy.
, with categorized threads listed in descending order of times posted (as with the messages themselves.)
We do this (I’ll look to see how I can make it more obvious):
Having a link beside each thread header to take you to the first unread message makes it easy to pick up where you left off in a thread.
Good idea.
Would it be possible to have user preferences that could display the threads and messages this way or in the way that Ken has as the default?
Sorry – I don’t understand this comment.
It might also be nice to allow the user to alter the CSS in their profile to set font face and size, not just colors. The CSS specifies a font size that seems to be chosen for a small laptop with a low resolution, which is too tiny for any of the more usual resolutions on a 19′ or larger monitor. Yes, you can set the font size up in the browser, but you have to set it back down for any other sites.
I’ll look to see if there is a way to do this that doesn’t add too much complexity. THe problem is that only 1% of the people want to do this, but it complicates the user interface for everyone — plus, the browser already provides this functionality. The code is simple — keeping the user interface simple isn’t.
If this is possible, could the underlying code and possible interfaces could be experimented with and worked on, but give the users more usability in the meantime?
I’m peddling as fast as I can!