Quick bit of usability research:

When YOU are logged in to UMD and viewing forum posts, are the pictures full-size
within each post or are they thumbnails which you have to click to see them full-size?

(btw, it's a setting you can change under MyProfile -> Edit Profile -> Preferences)

Great results so far!

It took me a while to find that option, but it's good that I'm in a minority... or is it that more seasoned 'power users' are more likely to answer this type of poll than less engaged users

If I remember correctly, I went looking for it when it was first added and images suddenly shrank.

Fullsize. I hate having to click on thumbnails.

The point to this poll is not to literally find out who likes what size pic in the forums. It's to find out whether people understand how to change their UMD preferences, or if those settings are buried too far down for the average user to find them (or if people even knew such settings existed). It's also to find out if the default setting is okay enough for people that they wouldn't need to change their preferences anyway.

Excellent poll, except for one thing: This forum allows manual posting of pics via HTML. That lets producers override any user setting and force large pics. I don't know if that'd skew the "I don't remember how to change back to thumbs" option since it doesn't happen on every post...

The profile settings and user options have been there together for years in the same place, so I think people just know where they are, but if anyone has input on how to make it more easily accessible, I'm all-ears. Perhaps make a "Preferences" text link at the top right, next to My Profile?

Messmaster

It'd be nice if the forum width was percentage of the browser width instead of pixel-fixed, MM... that way ballers like me with 1920x1200 desktops can have bigger pics without having edges cut off.

+1

+2

That would make line-lengths really uncomfortable to read. I already find that at the current width, so I sometimes increase the font size to compensate (although that breaks other parts of the site design).

The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.
Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Website
Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
2nd edition, page 97.

That would only apply to people who have been around for years too.

So break image elements out into separate tables...

If uploaded pics are too big to fit in the forum, and you have chosen the preference to "View large pics inside forum posts instead of thumbnails", UMD will show the large pics within the posts, but it "html-resizes" them to fit inside the width of the forum (if they are too big). You can still click these pics to see the unaltered full-sized versions. Now whether clicking these pics results in a pop-up window with the big pic or not depends on how you have set the option, "When clicking thumbnails, show large pics in a pop-up window?"

Point being that pics cannot be cut off unless someone consciously chooses to use html to manually embed pictures into the forum, instead of using the actual upload feature. Then, UMD has no control over resizing the pic, html-resizing the pic, thumbnailing it, etc.

This would be great.

Even if the problem would be fixed if producers used the upload, enough go for HTML for whatever reason that you can see plenty of pics where you get maybe part of a leg coming out of the mud and that's it, which is bleh. Especially when you have giant blue bars on either side of the window doing nothing because of the UMD's fixed width.

Especially when sites like MostWAM, which generally has some of the *best* still pictures, habitually use HTML. It's bad enough when any pictures get cut off, but when the really good ones do, it sucks even more.

(That said, I'm sure some of them are wide enough that even if the UMD wasn't pixel-fixed, they'd still be cut off, so I'd be happy if Leon/Lisa just went to uploading, instead. )





I've seen sites do some similar looking things to decent effect, too--have a "standard" width for posting (either a percentage or fixed), but where individual posts expand in the case of giant pictures--so most posts in a thread are at the normal size, while the one guy who posts table-breaking pictures has his replies require horizontal scrolling.

I myself use Large pictures in the forums, because I changed the setting. I may have slow net, but I would rather have all the images load once. instead of tiny images, then manually loading all of them.

However, on the other note that's been brought up in this thread:
I myself like sites / forums that stretch to my screen width, as I run a 40" Widescreen HDTV as my PC screen, UMD is so small on it, with massive areas of wasted space on the left and right.
but I can understand how people might not like having long text lengths. so maybe, an option, for if people want the site to fit to the width, they could change an option?

I went with fixed width because I didn't want people's content determining the layout of the site. You'd go into one forum thread and it looks normal, but on the next forum thread everybody's post is 2 miles wide with horizontal scroll bars because one of the posts had a huge picture in it. That's just ghetto.

If the upload feature is used, pictures are always presented so you can see the whole thing, regardless of how your preference is set. Plus, they are added to the pic archive and linked back to the post (and become searchable). You can even rate them and they show up on the wall and on the forum homepage and all that jazz. But if producers purposely bypass all this, then we'll allow them to do that, but then it's their fault that all you can see is a cut-off leg coming out of the mud.

The issue you describe would be a problem on an old tables-based site, but wouldn't be an issue here as you use XHTML/CSS.

Regardless of whether the site is fixed with or liquid, specifying (on the containing element) overflow:hidden would clip images, or overflow:visible would display the images overflowing the edge of the container without stretching it.

The problem for I have with liquid layouts you have less control over the site design, so there is more potential for it to look really ugly as things reflow and adjust to window size. You can't anticipate how much room there would be. If you went down the liquid layout route then you could (should?) also set a max-width which would limit this potential uglification.

Yeah... one big ass image overflowing and overlapping the whole right nav. As I said: ghetto. For now I'll stick with the fixed layout and let UMD keep it neat by resizing. If producers don't want their images clipped, they know what to do!

Gee, until I read this post, I didn't even know I COULD change my forum preferences.

Anyway, the default settings are just right for me, except I use a black background.

Spot on – that was the point of the post, to discover if those preferences need to be more prominent.