I'm making my comments with a view that your work on this board serves at least three purposes:

1. It provides a venue for the Parodyverse posting community
2. It acts as a testbed for a product that might get launched as a commercial application
3. It offers a laboratory to test new features and get some customer feedback

The first of those is the most important to me. I recall the difficulties of our original board move. Even before Zemo elected to shut down the board he'd been running there had been a period of problems with InsidetheWeb which had led us to actively consider moving. There was an offer from Alvaro to host the PVB at ComicBoards that was turned down because the posters preferred something that "felt" like the board they were used to - chain threads, customisable fonts and colours, long subject lines etc. Our eventual choice of homes has always been influenced by the our view that the board needs to be "fit for purpose".

Fit for purpose for the PVB really means "as encouraging as possible for people to read, write, and reply". Presentation, interface, archive, profiles, and everything else need to serve those three functions. Anything that improves them is good. Anything that hinders them is unhelpful.

What's new is that people are also beginning to value options. Some folks very much enjoy the ability to add tags and signature images, which enrich and simplify their posting experience and help give the board a homey feel. Others like to fix the way the board views to them to their own satisfaction. These things are therefore worthy of prioritisation too - as options.

The danger comes with what I call "The Publisher Effect". After all these years I still use Publisher 98, because after that the creators got fancy and added a zillion options. But all it meant to me was that basic things I could do in 98 with two menu clicks now take four or five (adding an image to a document, for example). So Publisher might be a better written product now but its less useful to me and I don't use it. There's a danger with any upgrade that complicates the user interface that it alienates the user.

I'll add one more function to the list, which is important to me:

4. The site provides pages which are easily transferrable as archives to my site so I can keep a permanent record of my work and of people's responses.

This one concerns me. The more the PVB uses specific non-transferrable icons (like the blue and red dots on the main page and smileys) the more I have transferred pages with little red crosses on white boxes all over them that I have to manually edit out. If the default display format remains with a column down one side I'll need to edit every single page I archive to keep it consistent in appearance with the 500+ story pages already on my site. Depending on what the debate concludes I might be lobbying for a "Convert to Archive" button somewhere that creates a page suitable for offsite storage.

All that said, on with the specifics:


I like the margins, but for me the ideal with is 90-95%. Anything more makes small window browsing or blackberry browsing very irritating. I'd like to see this as a user-customisable option and I'd like default to be 95%


I prefer the horizontal material at the top. For story posts this seems the right "intro" - a banner image, then the title and credits, then the story. The reply button at the bottom is important as well, because that should be the next natural response of anyone having read the content.

I appreciate the question of horizontal space saving, but actually the vertical space loss is much greater for story-length posts, especially if they are printed out (and the black band there is murder on printer cartidges). I also find the not-quite-black band down the side of the page intrusive, and it tends to clash with some colours -lightslategrey, for example.

The top of the horizontal page could be tidied, though. A smaller size for the banner (scaled down from the full one on the main board) might allow poster details to fit to left and right of it. A set of option buttons for reply and print etc might look better and pack neater than the current text links.

For this one I support the "traditional" layout for posts as default, with the sidebar version as a selectable option. If you are offering users choices of background colour and default fonts as well then the sidebar colour should also be customisable. Reply, print, and other links should then appear in the sidebar at top and bottom.


I agree that it's better to have micros disabled by default. However, it should be a customisable option in the user settings.


How does CSS affect pages I lift to the Homepage of Doom?

I'd want to live with the non-underlined Times New Roman text for a few days to evaluate how it looks and works before commenting about the loss of underlined links. I think I'd prefer all first-in-thread postings to be underlined just for emphasis. I'm not a fan of the coloured spots, which again divert attention from the stuff we're supposed to be looking at - the messages.


I was happy with the previous system of indenting quoted material and placing it in a paler colour. The > symbol has become fairly well understood as referring to previous quoted text. I think the smaller font may prove difficult for readers with smaller screens (Wii etc.) so I'd make that an option rather than default.


I find the highlighting very distracting as I scroll down, since it highlights and draws my attention to whatever random bit the cursor happens to be on as a I mouse-wheel down, not on the thing I'm looking for. I'd be willing to sacrifice rich text underlining in title lines in exchange for losing the highlights.


This isn't a feature I'm likely to use, but I think it's a useful addition generally. The long-awaited spellchecker must be next!


The links and buttons at the top of the main page could be revised and smartened. At the moment we have random click links all over the place - the login link at top right, five links to support pages at middle right, thread display to bottom left, moderator contact link bottom right, then the post-search - RSS etc links beneath that, with the previous pages links to the side. The eye gets dragged all over the place and there's no sense of design. There has to be a more elegant way of presenting all those things.

We have some talented graphics people right here on the board. Why don't we get them to suggest some way of simplifying the top-of-page layout?

For commercial application, of course, the more customisable colour, font, size, layout etc is the more powerful and competetive a tool the software becomes.


The question of drawing people's attention to posted stories and art is at the forefront of my mind. I wonder if we could find a way to add a "This Week's Stories and Art" list somehow - a roll-down menu added to the other (smartened up) links at the top of the board that offers direct links (or opens new windows to) any story that's been posted in the last eight days. Folks could either indicate if their new post was a story or art by ticking a box (like the No text box) on the posting form or the list could simply be maintained by moderators. That way occasional readers could see what's on offer and catch up with what they've missed without lots of scrolling down.

I think there's still work to be done on the Archive Search as well. My most regular use of it is to to find stories from a specific date, so I miss the month/year search option. At some point a body text search would be really useful too (one that distinguishes and ignores quoted text from earlier postings).

Finally, in the subject and name lines in the revised posting form in IE the return key now starts a new line of input text rather than sending the message, requiring instead that I scroll down and use the button which is down off the bottom of the screen. This needs correcting.

I'd be willing to forefeit the banner on the posting form page to get the vital information onto one screen


I think this one definitely comes into the category over over-smart features that work against the function of the board. We want people to respond to other folks comments. I'd rather have a hundred space-wasting repeats in no-text responses than lose a single commetn from somebody who gets frustrated by the extra effort of importing text to comment on.

I'd suggest a different technical fix, if possible, where the posting form checks if any alternations have been made to the quoted body text and simply deleted the body text if its unchanged from the posting ahead of it in the thread (and maybe even checks the no text box as a bonus). That way if folks ignore the quoted text it goes away and if they want it they keep it.