The message board would be better if only the first subject line of a thread was visible and when you clicked on it the whole lot appeared, then you could easily view more of the threads. I've seen it done on some post rooms.
Bet you could have shortened the title of this thread, yer hypocrite!
hypocrite n. Hypo (above) crite (critters)
Yeah, I could.
Actually, it would just be a better way of presenting all of the threads.
The title was a mistake, I was going to comment on how long titles really clouded the screen with loads of shite (sometimes, quite literally) by taking up twice as much space as normal.
Of course I'm a hypocrite...
I could easily set a character limit on the titles, but I don't know if that would actually help, since the result would be messages with titles which get cut off half way through.
Better just to shorten titles as you reply to the messages...
Hi Wake
I confused it all here. As usual. I think you ought only to be able to see the first post of a thread, then you click on that to see all the rest of the posts. Then you can look at individual posts. Does that make sense? I've seen a few sites do it and it is quite good.
You are probably right on the bisected titles though.
Cheers
pvs
That would only work if there was some form of signifier to show that additional replies had been posted since your last visit.
Otherwise, if you want to keep up with messages, you'll still have to weed through any number of dead threads.
I definitely don't want to increase the number of clicks to get to any particular post, and I don't think we want a week's worth of first messages on the index page.
One easy option would be to suppress the title (but not the category) on the index page for all posts older than 24 hours, or all posts except for the first one (which appears at the bottom of the thread) or the most recent one (at the top which may therefore still get wrapped).
Wake
I've just put some code in place which should help with long titles, without stopping people using them if they want to.
Wake
Looks better to me, I wasn't sure what you meant to do, but at least it means some threads are only taking up half the space now.