Quick Site-oriented Poll
What is the first thing your eyes/mouse goes to when opening The Scrabbled? The second? The third? I need to confirm a suspicion, so I need as many of you to respond as possible — even if you rarely or never post or comment here.
Comments
You mean the Title Case for the headlines? I was under the impression that news headlines should always be title case. Do you disagree? I’m open to suggestions.
Kevin said:John said:
As much as I love hanging out here all day, the main reason this site exists is cause I felt like buildling it one day and the main reason it still exists is cause it’s a nice place to try out new technologies or ideas (many of which get tried out over on test.thescrabbled.com without you guys ever knowing).
So you mean we’re all just pawns in your little game?
Precisely. You are all one giant, incredibly amusing test sample.
christina said:quick question, john. and i don’t want anyone else to answer this, because i won’t read it and i won’t care.
why the all caps for each word? any precedent? you think it looks cleaner? just wondering…
Hey Christina, why none of the caps for any sentence?!?!
Paris said:christina said:quick question, john. and i don’t want anyone else to answer this, because i won’t read it and i won’t care.
why the all caps for each word? any precedent? you think it looks cleaner? just wondering…
Hey Christina, why none of the caps for any sentence?
She’s a writer, Paris. She doesn’t need to adhere to punctuation and grammatical rules of the written American English language.
In response to you, Christina, it’s just the way the “class” setting does it. It automatically capitalizes the first letter of each word. I guess the thought being that imposing the class on the item produces uniformity. Also: It’s better to capitalize words that don’t necessarily need to be than not to capitalize words that should be.
I don’t think she was asking how, Sammy, just why. My reasoning is that I thought it was proper type practices, but I’m open to hearing arguments the other way.
John said:You mean the Title Case for the headlines? I was under the impression that news headlines should always be title case. Do you disagree? I’m open to suggestions.
well, every single newspaper and news outlet has its own style. there really isn’t a norm anymore. new york times capitalizes, philadelphia inquirer doesn’t. washington post capitalizes. chicago tribune does not. it’s really whatever you want. personally, i think it’s harder to read capitalization.
Sammy said:In response to you, Christina, it’s just the way the “class” setting does it. It automatically capitalizes the first letter of each word. I guess the thought being that imposing the class on the item produces uniformity. Also: It’s better to capitalize words that don’t necessarily need to be than not to capitalize words that should be.
it’s more of a preference, at this point for john i think.
I believe I originally set it to capitalize because too many of you lazy jerks weren’t capitalizing anything at all and I thought it looked like garbage.
I think I might give myself a “your grammar and punctuation sucks” button that I can click on any post or comment that’ll highlight it in a deep, embarrassed red and keep the edit function open till you fix it.
Then the only shitty posts and comments will be mine!
I have another suggestion – can you make the links open in a new window or tab? Or at least make it a preference for each user? Every other board I go to opens all links in new windows and I instinctively close them when I’m done reading. On this board that means I also closed The Scrabbled. Then 50% of the time I just don’t respond to the thread because I’m too lazy to go back and reopen it.
Banned Bill said:I have another suggestion – can you make the links open in a new window or tab? Or at least make it a preference for each user? Every other board I go to opens all links in new windows and I instinctively close them when I’m done reading. On this board that means I also closed The Scrabbled. Then 50% of the time I just don’t respond to the thread because I’m too lazy to go back and reopen it.
Opening in a new window is terrible UI design because it removes the option to do one or the other. Anyone who wants to open in a new window or tab can ctrl-click or command-click or right click and choose their option. But by forcing opening in a new window, no one can ever open in the same window.
I usually come to the site and command click all the way down the activity bar. All new posts open in new tabs. Same with your board.
Ok never mind, your users don’t know what they want.
I empathize with wanting to open the posts in new tabs or windows, I’m just saying you can already do that. There are also people, however, who would prefer not to open posts in new tabs or windows and taking away that option is universally considered bad UI design.
So much so, in fact, that the W3C has removed the target=“_blank” directive from the proposed HTML 5 spec.
That’s why I said to put it as a user preference. Then people can do what they want. I don’t think most users will naturally think to ctrl-click because that’s not the standard on 99% of other boards. You can get on your high horse about what’s good design, but it’s the standard and people are used to it whether it’s good or not.
Or just install phpbb.
i hate hate hate the not auto-opening in a new window. i hate having to remember to cmd click. and when i don’t, i close the tab, and oh thescrabbled is gone. oh well, i will move on.
also, the auto-capitalizing is stupid, because it capitalizes letters after apostrophes. i also hate that, and find it exponentially more irritating than no caps at all (see: post format).
Noted on the caps, Mags.
Unfortunately, I will not budge on the auto-opening in a new window. It’s a terrible, terrible practice and should be banned from the web.