Forum gripe - Howto remove "Look for us on: F, tw, in"

[jimdempseyatthecove]

Why in the world would the web designer think placing the screen-wide, 1/2" high banner with 3 buttons on it for Facebook, Tweeter, Linked In. And might I say overlays the bottom line of the edit Body area of the screen so you cannot see the text you enter it without having to drag the vertical scroll bar. Put the '@#$%" buttons on the right or left side of the screen. Let me see content and create content without having to work around some buttons. My preference would be to place those links/buttons on the bottom of the scroll able page.

Other minor gripe: Add "Xeon" to your spellchecker.

Jim Dempsey

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I'll pass these comments on to the forum maintainers. Some things people complained about in the past have been fixed. I don't see the overlay issue in Firefox - which browser are you using?

[Paul_Curtis]

Yes, that overlay bar is visible in Firefox.  My vote would be to get rid of it.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

I a using IE8

With the poor visual area on these "HD" monitors and 16/9 ratio you do not have much vertical space.
Out of 11.25" vertical:

1.5" is eaten by: IE title, URL, "Favorites", tabs at the top,
0.5" is eaten by: "Look for us on:"
0.25" is eaten by status
0.5" is eaten by task bar buttons

2.75" non-content, 8.5" content
32% is occupied by non-content

Removal of "Looking for us on" yields 25% non-content (which is too bad too)

I know I can Alt-Enter to get rid of most of the non-content, but this does not "dispatch" (as in firing squad), the "Looking for us".

This forum is about technical content, not "look and feel".

Note, regardless of which format 50% of the remaining screen is unused (left and right sides). This is an IE (and/or Firefox) problem, I think it would be nice to hav

I shutter to think of the scope of this problem on a netbook or lower-res (vertical) screen.

Jim Dempsey

[jimdempseyatthecove]

?edit box truncated text??

it would be nice to have two column format

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I've been told that the bar is to make the layout more "touchscreen-friendly". The design is in transition and will be changing more over the coming months. Keep the feedback coming.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

It is not friendly to content consumer/producer.

Though it may have some marginal use to tweet "look at this". But then those responding to the tweet, will have issues reading the content. These types of controls are better suited in the user's browser (one place) instead of on web pages (every place).

Jim

[mecej4]

I agree with Jim Dempsey; a sizeable fraction of the screen is occupied by three links of dubious interest to readers of this group. This intrusive feature may may strike one as "taxation without representation".

Why can't these links be provided as entries in the pull down list "Resources >" at the top of the page? They will be available to those who have interest in them without everyone being forced to stare at them. "Touch Friendly" does not have to be "Unwelcome Touching".

[qolin]

Given that anyone looking at a forum about Fortran is self-evidently a dinosaur, I can't see anyone here being at all interested in any of these links. So get rid of them.

Kind regards

Diplodocus

[TimP]

Steve Lionel (Intel) wrote:

I've been told that the bar is to make the layout more "touchscreen-friendly". The design is in transition and will be changing more over the coming months. Keep the feedback coming.

It's working poorly enough to discourage me from buying any of those touch-screen devices I've been trying out.  For sure, I'll want one capable of working on sites like this which depend on a working keyboard.  Wordpad is the most sophisticated text app they allow you to try out in the shops.  It's no mystery to me why current touch-screen Windows hasn't opened up a big market.

I see now that if we use web search to find each individual forum, we can go there more easily than attempting to go through IDZ forum home page.  For me, this is a lot of bookmarks to set and not something I would inflict on the owner of a device which I'm borrowing. So it means we must remember the names of the individual forum sections with sufficient accuracy. 

If our memory is good enough, we can avoid the standard IDZ "page not found" page.  I've been wondering for months why anyone decided to make that the normal entry page.  Now they've made it require 2 more page loads and URL clicks to go from there, typically 5 seconds more for each page load on what passes for a top quality internet connection in the USA.  I remember in the pre-graphics days 2 seconds was rated as the highest acceptable response time for text screen refresh, and no one dared add extra page load steps.

[qolin]

Given that anyone looking at a forum about Fortran is self-evidently a dinosaur, I can't see anyone here being at all interested in any of these links. So get rid of them.

Kind regards

Diplodocus

[jimdempseyatthecove]

>>TimP... typically 5 seconds more for each page load

You are lucky, for me it is 15-20 seconds... when it is working fast. Often enough it is up to 60 seconds or not at all.

It has to be that these website developers are oblivious to the impact on the average user of the website. I would like to be able to suggest that for every second over 1 second per link touched, that 1 cent of their paycheck per user experience gets dumped into a kitty to hire someone who can do a better job. IOW, if the next programmer reduces the link hop by 1 second, they get to claim 1 second worth of the kitty.

Note, the time measurement has to be from the location of the user, and not from the location of the website development system.

Sergey, if you read this, what is your experience on click latency?

Anyone else can place there sample latencies as well. The stats may be a sobering experience to these web developers.

Jim Dempsey

[jimdempseyatthecove]

The above post took 25 seconds.

Jim Dempsey

[FortranFan]

jimdempseyatthecove wrote:

>>TimP... typically 5 seconds more for each page load

You are lucky, for me it is 15-20 seconds... when it is working fast. Often enough it is up to 60 seconds or not at all.

...

Note, the time measurement has to be from the location of the user, and not from the location of the website development system.

...

Anyone else can place there sample latencies as well. The stats may be a sobering experience to these web developers.

...

IDZ Forums have some of the slowest page loads I run into - anywhere from 30 to 60+ seconds is common.  And when one combines that with page freezes and other errors (quite common indeed for me), the entire experience is very bad, to say the least.  I'd think it reflects very poorly on the Intel brand.  But for Steve Lionel, I would be a rather infrequent visitor to these forums!

In fact, I find the entire Intel.com domain user-unfriendly, slow, poorly laid out, very difficult to navigate, and hard to search.  IM(not so!)HO, Intel would do well to reset their web development with speed and ease of navigation from end-users's perspective in mind and hopefully, the IDZ forums including this one will also benefit.

[andrew_4619]

When a do a page refresh/load I often automatically click another tab in the browser for something else I am looking at so I do not have to 'wait' for the page load. My local internet connectivity is very fast so it must be at the web server side I would think.

[andrew_4619]

The post above look 24 seconds from "submit" to being  displayed.

[DavidWhite]

I understand that the typical internet user won't wait for pages that take longer than 7 seconds to load.  So the performance of the forum system would appear to rate a "fail".

David

[John_Campbell]

It appears that the refresh time for pages is a problem to most users.
I also wait up to 30 seconds, especially for the first look at the windows fortran home page.

John

[Les_Neilson]

The 0.5" banner at the bottom of the screen duplicates what is already available at the top of the screen (but without the digg + icon)

Response times for me vary, but have improved recently, e.g. when after reading a post I click "back" and then click the next post it sometimes took several seconds to respond (usually to the "back" click). Ah how I long for the days when there were "next" & "previous" buttons to jump immediately to another post.

Signed

Another diplodocus :-)

[FortranFan]

Les Neilson wrote:

Ah how I long for the days when there were "next" & "previous" buttons to jump immediately to another post.

...

I agree - the "Next Thread" and "Previous Thread" would be very useful - I wonder why they are not available any more...

[Bernard]

Page load time is between 30-40 seconds and page refresh after submitting post can take on average 7-10 seconds.