Changes to the Message Boards

The font is way too small…difficult to read.

The font is *much* too small.

The appearance is very “busy” — blue lines, grey lines, white lines, little black connectors between parts of a thread, red “new” screaming out at you — oh, my aching head.

Black print on grey background is just plain dumb. Need contrast.

Roman type font as in the old board is the easiest to read; typewriter-type font, Courier or whatever as we have now, is far more difficult.

The old board was designed neat and clean by someone with a good eye and a nice taste for simplicity and ease of use. The background was clean white and uninterrupted. The type was 12 or 14 point Roman, easiest of all to read. The article titles showed up alone with no other interfering junk. The titles showed up blue, nice and dark for good contrast, and after reading, turned purple. Simple and easy to follow. Threads were shown by simple indents, plain and clear and simple.

Maybe you need a new server — and thank you for getting the board back up — but please go back as far as possible to the old visual format.

Thank you.

Greetings LDonline,

I really like the Flat View so I can see all responses to the original post without clicking back and forth. Definitely more user friendly! However, like the others, I find that the font is almost too small and the grey background with the off-black lettering isn’t enough of a contrast.

Thanks for your continuing efforts to improve the boards!

Blessings, momo

I agree with all the below posters. The “flat view” is a nice improvement but type setting, size, and contrast make this board hard on the eyes.

One of the things I always liked about old format was ease on eyes…. Know you can’t go back but maybe some changes are possible …

For ease of reading I would use Arial or Tahoma fonts and make a bigger font but I suppose that takes up too much space so then you could cut down the messages to 150 on the BB instead of 250 to accomodate extra Memory needed for the bigger font.

The contrasting white/gray lines seem very busy when you look at the page and difficult to read. I would suggest getting rid of the gray scale all together and the KISS method works best here.. keep it simple with a plain white background.

Was the old way that LdOnline did the BB’s really unusual? After having the old way the BB was designed for the past 3 years that I have frequented this BB, this new look is really a shock to my visual memory.:-) But I am sure you will work out the kinks in time.. but a good start would be to change the font size and type to Arial or Tahoma for ease of reading.

I don’t like this new format, type set, etc. at all. It’s very difficult to read. Please visit Teachers.net for an example of a site where most of the chatboards are easy to manipulate and read. One of the things I really appreciate there is the sequential listing where the newest post is added at the bottom (like the new format does here but is still hard to read.).

I agree with everyone about font type and size. I also like Arial a lot - simple. What about white letters on colored background? The font size is too small for my aging eyes! I do like addition of “new” because color change in past BB was not always consistent after I had previewed a listing.

The new BB looks great. Much easier to navigate. I find the type size fine (at age 50+), but I have to admit I have a cool monitor (17” flat screen LCD) so I’m not sure if that is why the type size is OK for me. As to font style, I would suggest keeping a serif font (as opposed to a sans serif like Arial). I have always read in my books on designing newsletters that the serif font is actually much easier for the eye to read than a sans serif. (?Something about the little extra pieces on the letters that pulls the eye to the next letter/word?), You could probably find a graphic artist on this board who could give you a recommendation on the best type font (and the best for printed out hard copy text might be different than for screen reading?) My only suggestion might be to “tone down” the NEW in red. It’s distracting. Maybe a less bright color. I actually liked the old system, where I could tell my a color change in the message header that I had read a message. But Ilike being able to see more message headers at a time on a page; make going through much faster. Thanks for a great BB! KathleenW
PS Oops…what happened to the password, so that we can update our posted replies? I never see my typos til after I push the POST button!LD OnLine Adminstration wrote:

I agree with the general opinion on font size being expressed here, and I have a good 17-inch monitor. It’s just too small to read comfortably.

As for the colors, I can adjust, but the gray background doesn’t help readability in my opinion.

I like the general layout, however, especially the way the new messages are added to the end of the list instead of the beginning.

I didn’t understand people’s “flat view” comments until I saw the “Flat View” in the options listing. It’s pretty neat, and saves a lot of clicking when reading a new thread.

I’m not sure if I’m going to miss the “Preview” option when posting, or not, but I suspect I will, and I’m sure I’ll miss the option we used to have to delete our old postings by using a password, but the main reason I used it was when I felt I was ranting too much, so maybe I just won’t rant so much? I’ve noticed we’ve gotten a lot better on that score over the past few months, incidentally, and the board is much better as a result.

But, I’ve got to confess, looking at that “Post” button and knowing that there’s no backing down after I hit it, makes me nervous….well, not now, maybe, but it sure will on the more controversial issues….here goes……..Rod