RichieAllen.co.uk Forum

Having just registered for the forum, I have made observations and have suggestions.

On the Register page, under Account Preferences there are tick boxes are for the same thing, with both saying Receive private messages from other users.

Having set these preferences at registration stage, I was unable to find a way of changing them once the account was active and I was logged in. I intuitively went to User CP which is on the drop-down menu available to the top-right of the screen, next to ‘Welcome’ followed by username.

Having looked at this page several times, and scratched my head, I noticed a small cog symbol just off to the left (pictured). On clicking this a list of options appears. Can this be made more obvious please? The reason for going to the page was to make changes, so why is another click needed to do that? Viewing this on a large computer screen, the symbol is tiny. Having the word ‘Settings’ by it would also help to draw attention to it – please make it more obvious.

Within Edit Options it is possible to change the date format. The default is mm-dd-yyyy, which is common in North America, whereas in the UK it is dd-mm-yyyy. One of the issues of reading things on the Internet is that websites don’t make it obvious which format is in use. So is 02-03-2018 meaning 2nd March 2018 or February 3rd 2018? It is obvious that the four digits at the end are the year, but which is month and which is day? Good practice would be to always have the month written, perhaps as three-letter abbreviation, e.g. Feb-02-2018 or 02-Mar-2018.

Can an option for 24 hour time be added, also?

Having pressed Preview Post the preview appears, but the subject title previously typed is missing, requiring it to be entered again.

Having thought further about this, it comes down to the fact that the panel with the options is hidden off the side of the screen. On a small smartphone screen then this is common, as the size of the screen is a compromise. Users expect to tap on icons at the side of the screen to have other content slide into view.

However, on desktop size there is no need to hide it because space is not at a premium. Indeed, looking at the design of that page there is a lot of space width-wise (on a 26" 16:9 screen with resolution 1360 x 768) and therefore it could quite easily be brought inwards, with the panel of options visible at all times. Thus, whether the panel is hidden should be conditional on the width allowed by the screen.