Nifft, I apologise. I find this thread very hard work (along with most of the threads in Meta), and I took it out on you. I did not mean anything personal.
Apology accepted.
Something I learned -- the hard way, like you're doing right now -- in the House Rules forum is that people who tell you things you don't necessarily want to hear are
doing you a service. They are going out of their way to
help you, and paying attention to your (often imperfect) ideas for free.
I'm sure following this you'll get lots of warm, fuzzy, supportive posts -- it's what we do when we see people who are feeling down, the forum equivalent of "Get Well Soon!" cards. These posts will feel better than criticism, just like those "Get Well Soon!" cards usually make you feel better than medicine.
- - -
Anyway, what to do about the vertical expanse. IMHO you should:
- Remove the custom user title. It was toy chrome before the tweetbar, and it's redundant chrome now.
- Remove the extra spacing between the user title and the tweetbar.
- Possibly remove the mandatory username prefix from the tweetbar. Since it's the only thing following the big username, it ought to be unambiguous, but we'll see how people use it.
- If you do remove the mandatory username from the tweetbar, possibly seed the message prompt with the string "... is ", so the user's tweetbar would by default look like:
Nifft
... is an ugly duckling.
But if people deleted the seed string, they could use the tweetbar just like a custom title, or put something else in entirely:
Nifft
... has cold feet.
You'd keep the functionality without wasting space, or duplicating toys.
Cheers, -- N