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

I realise I can only see the "not logged in" version, but a few problems strike me immediately.

First, as with the front page, the fonts are too large in comparison to the rest of the BBC. That is to say, they are really good, but all the BBC message boards have moved on to a tiny font that requires a degree of "zooming" in my browser, and the browser is "smart" enough to remember my preferred zoom level and apply it to all BBC pages. What this means, in effect, is that as I hop back and forth between h2g2 and the message boards I will have to be constantly resetting and applying "zoom". In Firefox, at least, it's not possible to have two tabs open to BBC.co.uk sites with differing zoom levels.

Try it for yourself - go to, say, the Food message board, zoom in until the text is comfortable to read, then visit your Beta's front page and see the mess the whole top area breaks up into. The user page breaks up similarly.

Second, it only shows the last five conversations. (As opposed to the current ten) Will this be configurable in any way? I rely on my h2g2 "Space" to follow many threads on multiple message boards, and even with ten threads showing I find myself having to click on "More Conversations" at least once a day. With only five I will be doing that all the time. A user setting to set your own number of conversations to show when you are logged in would be good.

Third, I notice you are truncating thread titles. On my current ("Plain") skin this doesn't happen, and it can be quite handy when long thread titles show up on the Archers boards. Can we have the option to show thread titles in full, please?

Finally, I note that the tables with images inside are broken on "My Space", in that cells have collapsed to cut off much of some of the images. I don't know if this is something I'll be able to fix for myself when I can log in, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to. I'm guessing you have applied CSS somewhere that has affected "legacy" layouts. It's not a big deal, but some other people have really beautifully laid out pages and it would be a shame to break them.

The overall look is nice, though. I could see myself growing to like it, as long as the functionality lives up to it.

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'h2g2 Feedback - Design Feedback' to 'H2G2 Read Only Beta'.

Sorry - your page was confusing. It had a heading that said "Read only Beta" and then sub-headings that included "Design Feedback", implying that was feedback for the *Beta*.

No worries Peet. We've logged your comments now

My footnotes are all messed up To be exact, the notes themselves are still at the bottom, but there are no numbers in the text. If you've been to my PS, you know this is a big deal

Also, my drop-down boxes seem to be missing, with some of the contents in tiny font just sitting there, unconfined.

I've seen other comments elsewhere about images on PSs, so I'll just say that I'm having the same issue.

And it looks like the stuff I had in between tags is showing up--I'd been thinking of getting rid of it anyway

Oooh, I just noticed a fairly major error...

It says I joined the site on July 15th 1999. I actually signed up on May 12th 1999.

When did you first open up your PS? (I did mine within an hour, so my date's correct.)

I pretty much created it immediately. I suspect the date they have is the first time I edited it.

Right now, I'm devastated that my name has been taken from me.

I uploaded a photo, and my name reverted to the short form. When I went to reset it I found that the "User Name" field had been removed from "My Preferences" without any notification. If I'd realised that any changes would become permanent I wouldn't have done anything to risk it.

Yeah--my name's missing punctuation, the wording I preferred, and any room for tags

re: The date I signed up, here's the article I wrote on my first day: A61732

How are you getting into your own pages on the beta-viewer?

You can either find a thread you've responded to and click your name, or you can go to the beta home page and add /user/U180656 (or your own U number) to the url

>>>Yeah--my name's missing punctuation, the wording I preferred, and any room for tags

We've logged that and footnotes too. Also, we're working on a Site Specific Solution to names whereby H2G2 users can append their iD user name with a tag or suffix that will display on H2G2 only.

>>>It says I joined the site on July 15th 1999. I actually signed up on May 12th 1999

It says July 15th on your PS on the current site.

"It says July 15th on your PS on the current site."

It does, and it's wrong, which is why I'm complaining. See my link above - if this user number didn't become active until July 15th how come it created an article on May 12th?

(I didn't know before because that info isn't shown in the "Plain" skin...)