Expanding the postbit

[yina]

I'm sure I'll be eaten after I say this but.. I don't need more cards in a postbit. Space that posts take is pretty big enough

If you want to show all your cards or big portion of them put them in your sig as a set or something

[kumi-kun]

Me too, 6 is definitely enough for me :3

[Ferus37]

I'm not really going to say anything one way or the other about getting more cards in the postbit. Instead I am just going to give a teeny bit of info.

Each thread in the forum now uses more space for signatures, postbits, and emptiness than for the contents of each post. The postbit takes up the same amount of space if you write 1 line as if you write 6 lines. (If you have a large signature the postbit increases in size when you go beyond about 6 lines. If you have a small signature you might have to write 20 lines before the post increases in size.) The signature fills up some of the potential empty space, but very few people have large enough signatures to fill up the emptiness left after a two line post.

I had a look at page 3 of this thread. If you look there you will see that the ones who wrote two lines and the ones who wrote more all have the same size posts, because the postbit takes up that much space.

I have a 15.4", 16:9 monitor. At the moment I can display a maximum of one post on my screen at a time. Regardless of the length of what is written in the post, 1 line or 30, I never get more than one whole post onto my screen at any one time. If the person has a contributor banner and an award in addition to 6 cards, I am not even able to display that. I'm not able to display an entire post of any of the staff, because they have both a staff banner and an award, and most (if not all) have contributor banners as well.

A 15.4", 16:9 monitor is not the largest monitor out there, but it isn't the smallest either, and with it I am sometimes not even able to display one whole post at the same time. I'm not talking about scrolling to get from one post to the next, but having it as a forum default that you have to scroll to be able to see the entirety of one post, regardless of how much that post contains.

I'm not saying it's wrong to have posts that are taller than an average screen even when the poster has only written one line (I'm not even saying that I dislike it), but I would like you to think about it.

[SexyRyu28]

@Miko Forgive me to say this, but the WoY, blogs, twitter, chat etc that have been gradually added to the forum do not express me in any way, and I find them a bit to much for a highly customizable forum like this one as you said.

So why a person like me, that posts in 5-6 threads, that chose to be active in instead of mindlessly posting just to show off, can't have 9 cards? I know that it also can be strenuous for some connections, but an extra row won't make it even more than what it was before. And as Artemis said, its a way of expressing ones self even before he posts anything

T, we think alike.

I don't use any of the new add-ons - like WoY, Blogs, Twitter Board, etc. - but there are people that like them so to each their own. I don't see how an extra row of cards would make it that much cluttered. If we can fit the awards, which I love, I think we can fit 3 cards.

[yina]

I don't use any of the new add-ons - like WoY, Blogs, Twitter Board, etc. - but there are people that like them so to each their own. I don't see how an extra row of cards would make it that much cluttered. If we can fit the awards, which I love, I think we can fit 3 cards.

Okey, so I'd rather have 3 extra cards than this award thingy, which I think is pretty useless..

[Twinstar1]

well, if we do get the option of another 3 cards, I hope it would be optional. I love having 6 cards only because then I can pair them up properly. If there are an extra 3, that would mess it up. The only way I'd like more cards to be able to show would be to have an extra two on the side, not underneath.

If some of us are saying that the cards are a way of expressing ourselves, then things like extra cards and such should be an optional thing, as not everyone wants it.

[eliddell]

Add me to the list of people who think there's too much . . . stuff . . . in the left-hand column already. Like Ferus37, I can't even display one entire post on my screen without scrolling, whereas most fora would allow me 2-3. And this is despite the fact that I keep image-loading off in my browser by default, which compresses some things.

One idea that suggests itself, however, although it might be a bit difficult to implement: how about setting up a "special" card for users with more than six of them that displays all of their other cards in a slideshow rotation? I realize that this idea would not improve loading times and would require either a script or a method of squeezing all the cards in question into an animated GIF or similar, but it would allow people people to display all their cards without increasing the (already verging on ridiculous) screen real estate requirements.

(Personally, if I were in charge--and it's probably fortunate for people here that I'm not! --I would cut back the existing boilerplate until a one-line post was small enough to fit on one screen for me, relegating whatever I thought wasn't necessary or useful to each user's profile page. Like Miko, I'm here to converse, not to stare at visuals. I only even have an avatar under protest.)

[yina]

When I first came here I remember randomly coming across a thread where dai or aarin (? cant remember) posted about postbit being edited from all cards displayed to only 6, so I guess 9 getting displayed must be doable too. I'd totally love to display more cards! Or atleast have some other way to display them. Like a link to our inventory below the six cards like SMF forum boards.

when I came to the forum there was a rolling hamster in the postbit

[eliddell]

The signatures aren't the problem, though. Disabling the avatars helps a little, but the other left-column stuff--even the text--takes up quite a bit of space, and there's a fair amount of whitespace. Most fora only present the person's name, avatar, postcount, and possibly one or two other bits of textual information, like a rank. This place has six bits of additional information even without the images, about half of which seem to me to serve little purpose. But I do realize that this is a personal preference.

(I'm one of those people who's nostalgic for the days of four-line, eighty-column, text-only, Usenet-style signatures, okay? So sue me.)

[SexyRyu28]

The only way I'd like more cards to be able to show would be to have an extra two on the side, not underneath.

That could work also, 2 lines of 4 cards.

when I came to the forum there was a rolling hamster in the postbit

I would've loved to see that