Sorry about the delay in replying, a truck tore down my cable line and my only slow backup internet access was interrupted by angry phone calls to the cable company.



Plus people in general crave customization. The board software won't be all that marketable without it.



There already is one in every post. The "Printable" link at the top eliminates most images and switches to a "high contrast" layout. I haven't really looked at it heavily though so it may need more image elimination.

Only thing I didn't think of is the possibility of exporting the main page or multiple messages at once.



The good news is I have a Playstation Portable and now an iPhone as well. You'll see a lot more features aimed at small devices eventually like auto-scaling images, sliding display elements, and auto-elimination of items to save screen space.

Ironically, I discovered that the current layout is easier to read story text on a small device - because the most annoying part of reading on a small display is paging right and left trying to catch all of the text. The narrower the text area is the easier it is to read. It was part of the motivation for reducing the space.

As to whether I can add more separation between the text and info bar to avoid letting it become a distraction, that's another matter. Or perhaps make it fixed and put the text in an IFRAME so it can be paged independently of the bar. Or shove a narrow bar just above the text and use mouseover to make the poster info to appear (but then there's the risk of someone with a huge name screwing it up).

btw, I also experimented with making the message reader pop up instead of going to another page. No banner, no frills, just a small pop-up window with the message text. No reply list either, because the replies are still sitting behind it. The problem with that approach was the tendency of the window to accidentally end up behind the main window, letting people think it's broken. Plus without using Javascript there's no way to control the size of the window, making it possibly take up the whole screen, letting people think they're locked into the message text with no escape.



Here's the problem with the vertical bar at the top that seemed to be constant:  Text is vertical.  That means as long names, large text, and long subjects start to add up the horizontal bar at the top becomes so large that it takes up a whole page by itself. If the banner is large enough it's nearly a page and a half before the story text.  On a small portable device it can seem like an eternity before you get there.