sideways Scrolling of the Screen for long words/links

Padre · Post by **Padre** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 11:32 pm

Something that irritates me about this board is the way that posting a very long word (an uninterrupted sequence of characters, without any spaces) will force the screen to widen in a jarring fashion, develping the appropriate scrollbar. This effect is particularly noticeable when people post links to Amazon products, which tend to have very length URLs.

Can anything be done about this? Could it be set up so that the text automatically wrapped to the next line down after a certain nuber of characters, even if that meant doing so mid word (appropriate hyphenation being used to indicate this)?

Or can we just all agree to not post really long links?

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[url]http://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com[/url]

Post by **ImLawBoy** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 11:54 pm

For the long links, we can encourage people to use the {url=link}text{/url} coding, or to use a site like www.tinyurl.com.

As for the technical side of forcing the line breaks, I'm pretty much clueless.

Tscott · Post by **Tscott** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 12:17 am

The thing most people don't know is for places like Amazon they don't need the whole link, the stuff at the end is all meaningless junk that's useless unless you work at Amazon.com.

For example,

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... ance&s=dvd

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... B0006GAO54

These two links get you to the same place.

And even better would be to use the [url=http:blahblahblah ]your text here[ / url] (without the extra spaces) to avoid ugly long links altogether.
Like this!:)

BTW, thanks for bringing this up, this has been buging me too, especially in the Books Read in 2005 thread where I posted my list on page one and now everytime I go to update it I need to side scroll to find the darn edit button. I didn't know how to bring this up without getting off topic and looking like I was calling someone out.

Gedd · Post by **Gedd** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 10:58 am

Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. There's a number of questions that breaking up long lines of solid text bring up, and it just may be more trouble than it's worth. Not to mention that for the added convenience of not having to side scroll, you'd be breaking the links which are the cause of the scrolling in 99% of the cases.

What we might look into doing whenever we get around to coming up with "final" phpBB themes is making it so that a really wide post doesn't cause every other post in the thread to expand. I've seen that on other boards, but I'd need to dig again to find out how they did it.

And not to sound like a broken record, but I'm hoping this is something that's addressed in phpBB 2.2. I think the cause of the current issue is the overuse of tables, and I'm hoping that phpBB 2.2 will go to a more CSS-layout method.

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 11:16 am

Padre,

Two things you *can* do in that situation are to PM the offending party and ask them to modify their post, or if they have troubles with it, PM an appropriate moderator or forum admin and see if they're willing to fix the offending text. It's not ideal, but if it's really bothering you, it's workable.

~Neal

Zaxxon · Post by **Zaxxon** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 7:43 pm

Or, you could use Opera 8 and wonder what all the fuss-izzle was about.

Asharak · Post by **Asharak** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:14 pm

Zaxxon wrote:Or, you could use Opera 8 and wonder what all the fuss-izzle was about.

It seems rather more prone to crashing than Opera 7, though.

- Ash

Gedd · Post by **Gedd** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:29 am

Zaxxon wrote:Or, you could use Opera 8 and wonder what all the fuss-izzle was about.

Really? It renders differently in Opera 8? Can I get a screenshot?

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 10:40 am

No time to give you a screenshot, but a quick description:

View menu has a "Fit to window width" option. That will resize images, create line-breaks mid-word, and mess up some of the (very few actually) table widths, such as the Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 9:29pm portion of your post.

It's very nice, actually, and I hadn't noticed it until Zax pointed it out here. I used it in Lee's thread in EbG (has a wide picture in it), and dang if it wasn't super-nice to see his image sized down automagically.

/me hugs Opera 8.01b beta

~Neal

Gedd · Post by **Gedd** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:26 pm

Hrm, that's interesting, but it could make life difficult for web designers that rely on things being a certain width or images being a certain size for things. I don't mind it so much in Opera, because I'm sure most of the folks using it are savvy enough to know that the feature (is it on by default?) can probably be disabled if a page is getting messed up.

The Meal · Post by **The Meal** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 12:43 pm

It is *off* by default, and I believe it's set such that you have to intentionally turn it on each time you would open a window (but I haven't scoured the preferences menu to verify that). There isn't a keyboard shortcut for it, so I'm thinking that it's intentionally designed with web-page designers' sanity in mind.

~Neal

Asharak · Post by **Asharak** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 7:27 pm

Gedd wrote:Can I get a screenshot?

Yep.

Opera, with fit to window width off

Opera, with fit to window with on

- Ash

Gedd · Post by **Gedd** » Sat Feb 05, 2005 11:51 pm

Thanks Ash. I see it's behaving just as Meal described. Just helps to get a visual every now and then.