Cleaning up waste space on forum posts

[begreen]

What options are there for eliminating most of the white space inside and between posts? For example, when a user has no avatar, there's a large question mark image. This takes up a lot of space. Is there an option to just show the name if there is no avatar? What other tricks are there so that the user sees more posts on the screen?

 

[begreen]

Here's an example of how I would like to see this posting's white spaces reduced so that one can see twice as much information in the same space.

 

[James]

What other tricks are there so that the user sees more posts on the screen?

The user only sees however many posts are set in your XF ACP options (default 20). If you want them to see more posts, increase this number.

It's just CSS and conditional statements to remove things like avatars, signatures, etc.

 

[Paul B]

You have posted in suggestions but your post seems to be asking how to achieve this.

Is this specifically for your own site?

 

[3c]

why can't you just change the pic to a small "no avatar" image that could be the same width, but much shorter in height as the default as that would reduce the overall height of the post (if their post was that short)?

 

[James]

why can't you just change the pic to a small "no avatar" image that could be the same width, but much shorter in height as the default as that would reduce the overall height of the post (if their post was that short)?

for consistency reasons

 

[begreen]

You have posted in suggestions but your post seems to be asking how to achieve this.

Is this specifically for your own site?

Could be, I am new here and exploring the goodness of xenforo. Did a search but didn't come up with the answer. I am moderator on a site that is looking at xenforo. As a mod I scan through a lot of threads daily. I noticed that I was doing a lot more scrolling here and thus the question. Sorry if it is posted in the wrong section.

 

[begreen]

for consistency reasons

That's understandable. If the site is comfortable with this inconsistency, it's an option, yes?

 

[craigiri]

BG is one of our long time mods on Hearth.com - I added him to our XF account.
I posted either a suggestion or a question on this - have not gotten an answer as to whether it is easily possible.
It's not a big thing, but a good suggestion for forums who are into a high signal to noise ratio. That is, more beef is on every page without scrolling.
This is also good when using small screens such as smartphones - less scrolling would seem to be an advantage.
In summary - if not easily possible, then let's confirm that and hope it makes it as a suggestion....

 

[3c]

for consistency reasons

Guess it depends on just how much consistency you want. Replacing the avatar.png with something 75px shorter would reduce the overall height of the entire post by that much, but since you'd still be getting the rest of the messageUserBlock, it's not like it would be a total absence of visual consistency. Granted, there could probably be a limit to how much you could reduce it and still have the rest of the post lay out right, but whatever you could would be that much less white space.

Individual preference I guess...

 

[craigiri]

Maybe Brogan can move this to styling questions or where ever?
Here's a quickie pic of our existing forums and a thread where a user has no avatar or sig.
It doesn't hurt my eye - and the new user without the avatar gets two full posts in the same real estate as another user gets one.

Of course, to be really effective this would need to be used in addition to a future signature add-on or mod...which limited the size of sigs.
I looked through our forums and truthfully it would not save too much space as most have avatars and/or sigs which take up that space. Still, it would be a nice style mod.

 

[begreen]

I'd be fine with smaller avatar images as well. They don't need to be square. At a bit more than half the height they could still view well. Most of us are used to this watching HD 16:9 format.