h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, here I am again. It seems than when you upgraded your system, you failed to check if it caused any problems for us ordinary mortals who are stuck using older hardware, rather than fall into the wintel obsolesence trap.

If you look at forums using a 640x480 screen, you will find that your nice long-winded "this is the forum for..." which replaced "forum for..." means that anything with a reasonably long title looses it's backlink. how about reverting back to the original, which always kept the backlink whatever screen res you were viewing it under.

Sorry, xyroth. You don't want to hear this, but we don't support 640x480 screens on our current skins. We are looking into providing a Simple Skin which will contain just text and in-line graphics, which should help, but our minumum guaranteed resolution is 800x600.

I appreciate that this doesn't go any way to solving your problem, but I'm afraid it's a policy based on the very small number of people who surf h2g2 at 640x480, and things will probably not improve - we do not have the resources to tailor skins to users of small screens or old browsers, and although in a perfect world we'd be able to please everyone, I'm afraid this is a far from perfect world, and we instead cater for the most popular surfing resolution of 800x600.

Sorry.

Mark

That is fair enough, but the old wording worked perfectly well at 640x480, and stil left enough room for a minimum backlink, so that you could easily return to the page whose forum you were on.
If you revert to the old wording for saying that you are in so&so's forum, it works at 640x480 and thus works at all higher resolutions as well.
This is not a complex problem, and the rewording hasn't really changed anything, and going back to the old wording wouldn't harm at all, so why not?

better yet, just remove the redundant word "conversation" from the forum header, and this will totally solve the problem of the missing link.

I don't want to remove 'Conversation' because we no longer talk about 'forums' - that's a horrible, techie word, and I loathe it on its own.

However, I could remove the 'the entry' from the end, so it would read 'This is the Conversation Forum for xxx' where xxx is the link. Would this fit onto your screen?

If so, I could make that change, though it might take a week or two to filter through to the live site...

Mark

Yes, it sure would, and then all of the pages would work in 640x480 so you could then say that you had checked them, and you do support that resolution and above. That would mean that you would then support any machine with a graphical browser in 640x480x256 colours or above, under any operating system. not bad realy

Sounds like a good idea - I'll make that change, but it will only proliferate when we next restart the web servers, so if it doesn't appear for a little while, I apologise.

Hope this helps.

Mark

It does, and thanks for putting in the effort. I don't think there is enough appreciation for all the hard working staff at h2g2, do you?

Glad to be of service.

Mark