Forum update to phpBB 3.2

[Sanqui]

You can now switch to a wide variant of the forum theme in the board preferences, if you prefer.

[Koub]

You can now switch to a wide variant of the forum theme in the board preferences, if you prefer.

OW yesss ! Thanks, amesome !

[Jap2.0]

You can now switch to a wide variant of the forum theme in the board preferences, if you prefer.

Thank you!!!

[bobingabout]

You can now switch to a wide variant of the forum theme in the board preferences, if you prefer.

Thank you very much for this. Choice is always good.

I will stop complaining now.

EDIT:
I take that back, a lot of pages (topic view, even some control panel pages) are giving me an error message now.

This page isn’t working
forums.factorio.com is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500

I imagine I'm the first person to mention it because it kinda makes the forum inaccessible unless you left a working tab open.

[Deadlock989]

We don't print essays in landscape out of tradition/habit. It has nothing to do with the potential of long lines of text.

If you say so. I doubt anyone's given it much thought.

Oh wait

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ749012

[bobingabout]

We don't print essays in landscape out of tradition/habit. It has nothing to do with the potential of long lines of text.

If you say so. I doubt anyone's given it much thought.

Oh wait

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ749012

I guess I'm just different then.

if I see 5 long lines of text vs 10 lines half the length... I'm more likely to look at and read the 5 long lines, but look at the 10 lines and go "OH MY GOD, TOO MANY LINES OF TEXT, GET IT OUT OF MY FACE!", even though it's the same number of words. And if it was something I really wanted to read, it would take me twice as long to read the 10 lines than the 5.

I call it "Wall of text phobia".
I honestly prefer reading fewer longer lines than more shorter ones.

You might have noticed I often add more line breaks than most people, this is a compensation tactic to try and make it easier to read by reducing the number of lines in a block of text. As you can see, nothing in this post is more than 3 lines long, and if it were the full width of my screen, it would probably only be 2 lines long, much easier for me to parse.

[Sanqui]

The 500 errors associated with the secondary themes have been fixed as well, sorry about that.

[bobingabout]

The 500 errors associated with the secondary themes have been fixed as well, sorry about that.

Thank you Sanqui, it seems to work fine now.

[Mr. Tact]

We don't print essays in landscape out of tradition/habit. It has nothing to do with the potential of long lines of text.

If you say so. I doubt anyone's given it much thought.

Oh wait

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ749012

Well, if that article is accurate:
1) I guess I am a reading freak
2) I guess they should shrink the width of forum in half since even in the non-wide format a single line contains 150 characters.

That said, I'm glad to have and will use the wide option.

[Rseding91]

We don't print essays in landscape out of tradition/habit. It has nothing to do with the potential of long lines of text.

If you say so. I doubt anyone's given it much thought.

Oh wait

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ749012

Dated 2005 when smart phones weren't a thing and everyone was running Windows XP. Thanks but that's essentially useless research with how much monitor sizes have grown over the years.

[Deadlock989]

Dated 2005 when smart phones weren't a thing and everyone was running Windows XP. Thanks but that's essentially useless research with how much monitor sizes have grown over the years.

You mean like this smartphone I'm using today that's a few inches wide and more inches tall, and this very forum is displayed at about 75 characters per line on? Oh right, one of those.

[Rseding91]

Dated 2005 when smart phones weren't a thing and everyone was running Windows XP. Thanks but that's essentially useless research with how much monitor sizes have grown over the years.

You mean like this smartphone I'm using today that's a few inches wide and more inches tall, and this very forum is displayed at about 75 characters per line on? Oh right, one of those.

That's my entire point. The popularity of the smart phone means the advice of the article from 2005 doesn't work anymore. You have to scale the content down even more to fit phones. Similarly you have to scale the content up to fit 1080p/1600p/4k displays as to not have > 50% of the display be useless whitespace.

[Deadlock989]

You mean like this useless whitespace?



or maybe this useless whitespace?



I'd also add that it wasn't an "article", it's a peer-reviewed literature review. Essentially a summary of many different pieces of work done by a large number of unconnected labs into the effects of line length on eye-tracking and reading comprehension. I'm sure there's more recent work done on it, that was top of my first Google search and I'm not putting more effort into it than that.

While of course individual preferences do vary, there are good reasons why lines of text don't go right across broadsheet newspapers or why War & Peace isn't popular when printed sideways on ticker tape. The medium isn't the relevant issue, it's still eyes doing the reading. Besides which, people may say they have a preference but there's nothing actually stopping their preference being worse, without them realising.

But it's not an issue anyway, now that the screen-spanning width is opt-in. I was just irked by people moaning ungratefully about change, and their outrage at the idea that they might have to resize their browser windows occasionally but being completely fine with everyone else having to do it instead. This forum update is a huge improvement in terms of speed and I like that layout just fine.

[eradicator]

Similarly you have to scale the content up to fit 1080p/1600p/4k displays as to not have > 50% of the display be useless whitespace.

I sure hope your concern for wasted screen space goes into the gui update. All the tiny listboxes with scrollbars (station names, mod names, choose-element dialog, etcpp) could be far easier interacted with if i didn't have to scroll around so much in a dialog that uses less than 20% of my screen.

[Rseding91]

... I was just irked by people moaning ungratefully about change, and their outrage at the idea that they might have to resize their browser windows occasionally but being completely fine with everyone else having to do it instead. This forum update is a huge improvement in terms of speed and I like that layout just fine.

That was the issue. You couldn't just "resize your browser to be bigger" to make it stretch before. It was locked into the narrow view. You *can* just resize your browser to be narrow when it stretches to the width and it works.

[Alice3173]

You have to scale the content down even more to fit phones. Similarly you have to scale the content up to fit 1080p/1600p/4k displays as to not have > 50% of the display be useless whitespace.

Usually at those resolutions you also need to upsize the font size anyways. I use a 2560x1440 monitor as my primary monitor and I always need to zoom in on sites to be able to read anything. (Though I admittedly have really atrocious eyesight to begin with.)

[Koub]

You have to scale the content down even more to fit phones. Similarly you have to scale the content up to fit 1080p/1600p/4k displays as to not have > 50% of the display be useless whitespace.

Usually at those resolutions you also need to upsize the font size anyways. I use a 2560x1440 monitor as my primary monitor and I always need to zoom in on sites to be able to read anything. (Though I admittedly have really atrocious eyesight to begin with.)

The funny thing is that I usually either let the zoom level as is, or zoom out (for always more content at once on my screen). I admit it's a 27" though, so writing is not too small. Would be trickier on a 24".

[Deadlock989]

That was the issue. You couldn't just "resize your browser to be bigger" to make it stretch before. It was locked into the narrow view. You *can* just resize your browser to be narrow when it stretches to the width and it works.

So the proposal was that I should have to mess about with my browser window size when I flick to this site's tab, and only this site, just to satisfy that proportion of change-resistant people who inexplicably prefer to read crazy-long islands of text within massive tracts of whitespace, despite decades of research suggesting that it's sub-optimal for eye tracking and possibly reading comprehension in general ... Never mind that reddit uses fixed/limited width for its paragraphs, and news websites, and a healthy proportion of blog templates - what do they know? Never mind that phpBB themselves, with their 18 years of experience in developing forum software, chose fixed width as the default option for their own support forum ...

Fortunately the ultra-mega-wide view is now opt-in.

Thanks again to Sanqui for taking the time to update the forums.

[Mr. Tact]

Just breathe Don Quixote, breathe...

[zOldBulldog]

The update seemed to break the ability to include multiple screenshot per post.

I assume many others already reported it, it is a serious limitation, and it has been some days since I tried it.

Has it been fixed yet?
(not rushing anyone, just asking so I don't waste my time trying, I am able to submit one screenshot per post, but breaking a post into a series of posts is a terrible way to accomplish the task)