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The "user mini-profiles" on the left-hand column force every response to consume ~2 inches of screen space, even if it is just one line long.
You must be unfamiliar with responsive web design, another exciting development that only emerged in the last 10 years or so. Those "mini-profiles" appear where resolution allows to display post content at full width and there's room left for other things. If you're viewing that site from a phone, the profiles (or the sidebar) don't appear. It's a true joy to use compared to 1990s design of this site. But maybe you don't own a smartphone or a tablet, in which case, it's irrelevant to you. And don't get me started on the human eye-brain. Since I actually work in publishing, I get to work with researchers who study the very minutia of people's reading habits on the web, such as eye and neck strain and eyeball tracking. There IS such a thing as optimal width for reading text, and most websites that use industry-standard column dimensions already take that into account when implementing sidebars.
If you have two meters of horizontal space available, that doesn't mean you should use that whole width to spread your paragraph over just two lines of text. There is a balance between forcing the reader's eyeballs and neck to move left and right versus moving to the next line, and at some point, the latter is less work and causes less strain and fatigue. We have a couple of millennia of publishing behind us, so this isn't exactly uncharted territory.
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most sidebars out there are read and used by readers only once every solar eclipse. Displaying that information all the time is distracting and inefficient.
This is terribly incorrect. Sidebars get tons of usage, especially when they display links to other content (in the case of a forum it can be recent posts or newest threads). Quote
Most sidebars could be made into pull-down menus or separate pages, freeing screen estate for the information that readers are actually looking for.
Hiding that information within a drop-down menu would be just about as illogical as it gets and a disservice to the readers, who would be forced to scroll all the way up, hover over a drop down, select the correct link, and click on it.Quote
The general problem is using low-contrast font-background pairs, like white on yellow or gray on tan; there are several examples of that on that forum.
I believe they are working on the yellow links, which other users have commented on. But the issue is kind of moot because the ad styler allows each user to have his own color palette. Again, compared to Bitcontalk, the new Bitcoin forum is about 2 light centuries ahead, both in design, the way feedback from users is collected and paid attention to, and the way the forum is run overall (I'm not even talking about collecting a million dollars in user donations and spending half of it on a site redesign that somehow evaporated along the way). I am posting this from a smartphone and am afraid of going blind by the end of this post.
And of course, all the pretty design in the world will not make up for quality content, which this site has been sorely lacking since the degenerates have taken over in the past few months.
