I'm not saying posting is difficult, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say I would like an additional (or alternative) Submit-button next to the posting field, i.e not only below all those zillion smileys and icons. This way we wouldn't have to scroll past them every time.

And while we're at it, maybe the text field we write into could be wider so to reflect the actual result more accurately. As it is now, we have to scroll a lot during writing even in a relatively short message like this one.

I think that even though these are small touches it would stimulate posting because they are 'problems' that affect every poster, every time he/she posts.


/Matias

Hi Matias,

Both those things are easily done. I've made the posting boxes a bit wider (about as wide as they can be without messing up the page layout). You can turn off the smilies so they don't show by going into your "Edit Preferences" and selecting to not show them. You can still use them in your posts by typing the code associated with the one you want. All that information is in the FAQ at the top of every page.

Hmmm, on my screen at least, the posting box can be at least a good 50% wider without even touching anything (!?), ie still staying in it's box that has the dark green back ground.

Regarding the smileys, well, there are times when I want to include a smiley, but I would still like to see an additional "Submit Reply" button somewhere above the smileys if it was possible because it is a bit annoying to have to scroll down just to find it.

(Obviously you guys decide on these matters, but maybe a thought is to use polls to get an indication of which is more user friendly on these matters. Just a thought.)

Ok, thanks Mary.


/Matias

Matias,
With the text boxes, width and height can be set only in pixels. In this case, it is not possible to set the width in terms of percent. Different users have different resolutions. If you're using a big monitor with a high resolution, the text box will only take up, say 1/3 of your screen width. However, for a user with a smaller monitor and lower resolution, the text box might be the entire width of his / her screen. If the text box width were increased, it would cause users with a smaller resolution to have to scroll horizontally on every topic.

Actually, with textarea boxes the problem is that browsers render the boxes differently. Textarea boxes are set using "cols" and "rows" ("cols" being the width setting), and some versions of Netscape have a tendency to render a col much wider than IE does. So, if you're using IE, you'll likely see a posting box that doesn't go border-to-border, but if you're using a version of Netscape, you might see the box just wide enough to fit. It sure would be nice if all browsers rendered things the same way, but this isn't a perfect world. About the submit button, the solution to that is simple: turn off smilies in your preferences. If you're a regular user of them you'll probably remember the codes to use for most of your favorites, and the complete list is always available via the "Smilies" link just above the button (the list opens in a new window).