Compacting threats equals improving (reading) quality

a reply to: MuonToGluon

Interesting, I did not know there were settings to do this. Perhaps it's as simple as setting these to the - what I suggest to be - correct defaults then. If people really love being trashed with fancy banners, signatures, whitespace etc. they could simply make it so.

Oddly enough you say that going back to olden days is NOT what should be done, whilst others suggest that remaining the avatars as they are is what needs to be done

BTW: it's not about how old a technique is. It is about how well it works.

a reply to: MuonToGluon

Well, I just checked my settings, but I fail to find any that do as you suggested. I can, of course, turn of MY avatar etc. - but I want to turn of the OTHER folks avatars (and, given that I'm just as special as the next person, my own too, of course).

And there is most certainly not a setting to eliminate unneccessary whitespace and overquotation.

It's amazing to me. A guy makes a (well-thought-out) suggestion, one that is obviously coming from a place or a degree of coding experience and systems management, and the overwhelming response is to castigate him? This is getting ridiculous around here.

((sarcasm))
I wonder if Obama or Bush are responsible for his untimely and what seems to be his repugnant egregious suggestion within the proper forum FFS. ((/sarcasm))

You guys can express your distaste without being constantly and overtly acerbic about it. Not to mention there ARE things in life, especially in the IT industry, that are in a constant state of evolution or can be improved upon, and ATS is no different.

For what it's worth OP, I agree that threads can be hard to read for a lot of the reasons that you've pointed out. As I'm sure you're well aware, a website with the sheer volume that ATS has, re-indexing the content that already exists to apply changes to it's structure would likely be time-consuming, nevermind the codification of the changes and subsequent testing. But over the years ive thought about that too. Perhaps something as simple as a minimize/maximize arrow next to their avatar that when minimized would display their entire post along with the avatar and pretty much viewable exactly as it is now....when minimized, shows only their name, who a reply is to (if applicable) and only their reply and timestamp while actively removing those aforementioned whitespaces from the reply...it can be restored to full whitespace/avatar/yada yada upon re-maximizing it again.

a reply to: ForteanOrg

I'm sorry, I was wrong there, I just checked the settings and it seems they were removed, I'm guessing they were removed with the ATS revamp - apologies there.

Only thing I can recommend is install an adblocker like uBlock Origins and selectively disable elements on the site, most blockers have a draw box that you can just point to the offending object and click and remove it.

Don't take my blunt writing as anger or anything, I just usually write stuff without emotion involved, and it makes it seem...angry etc.

a reply to: ForteanOrg

you can hide all avatars in account settings.