New News Page Layout

This is just an experiment - I'm not sold on it. The idea is that bigger news items dropped out of sight pretty quickly with the old format, while this one allows more to be seen at a glance. On the downside, it also makes it look a lot like every other news site on the web. The difference isn't as big as it appears at first - it's just that individual items are collapsed rather than expanded by default, in an attempt to make more room. Other than that, it's the same.
Anyhow, with the caveat that nobody likes change, let me know how you get on with it. It may stay, or it may go back to the old way. Switching it back is only a single click away!

 

[Morrus]

Re. single column, have you tried CSS media queries?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Media_queries

I don't write this stuff! Other than changing settings in the backend, the only way I was able to use your CSS was thorugh the magic of copy and paste. I didn't even know where to put it, but vBulletin had a template called Additional CSS, so I took a guess, put it there, and it worked!

 

[Agglomérante]

Alas, there's no easy CSS fix for the loud COMMENTS as I suggested, but you can at least remove the bold:

.fullwidth b big big { font-weight: normal !important; }

That makes it yell a little less.

While I have your attention, how come there's no enworld database of user-generated adventures?

 

[Morrus]

There's a downloads section - that's where adventures would go.

 

[Agglomérante]

Try these two CSS rules:

.cms_separator { border-top: 0 !important; }

.fullwidth b big big { font-weight: normal !important; font-size: 80% !important; }

The first rule removes the dotted horizontal line. Resist the temptation to add that divider! Try the layout for a day without it.

The second rule makes the comments count non-bold and smaller. It's still conspicuous because it repeats in the same spot in each block, it's just not punching out of the page as hard.

 

[Agglomérante]

Cool!

Now to finish the job -- nuke the pointless grey background that runs down the left and right shoulders of the page. It's stealing roomy white space from your layout and serving no purpose:

html { background-color: white !important; }

Your banner now looks like it's suspended from the top of the page, like a friendly neighbourhood pub sign.

 

[Zaran]

So may I ask, is 38% dislikes good enough to get the old news page back?

 

[Morrus]

So may I ask, is 38% dislikes good enough to get the old news page back?

62% want to keep it! I was going on a simple democratic vote as the fairest thing I could think of.

 

[Nellisir]

62% want to keep it! I was going on a simple democratic vote as the fairest thing I could think of.

That's certainly what I assumed. It's not the worst thing that's been done to the front page (I forget what it was, but there was a period when I set my bookmark to the forum rather than the frontpage specifically to skip the frontpage).

 

[Agglomérante]

Boo! The too-fat COMMENTS block is back.

Did you want to try setting the less intrusive comments to be aligned left rather than right? Looks like so:

View attachment 65544

If that appeals, in the custom CSS I've provided, delete any CSS declarations for ".fullwidth b big big" other than these two:

.fullwidth b big big {
font-weight: normal !important;
font-size: 80% !important;
}

Here's the combined recommendations -- no borders between articles, no grey gutters down the outside margins, more discrete comment counts:

View attachment 65545

 

[Jhaelen]

I wonder if I'm seeing what everyone else is, because I hate hate hate it. I'm not seeing "more at a glance"; I've got some kind of rolling banner up top that's showing the bottoms of pictures, most of which are meaningless, and then one or two massive "boxes" below it.

I agree about the rolling banner: It's useless, distracting and annoying. Just get rid of it, because apart from that I like the new layout.