This one is probably worth some consideration. At the moment, the stats cell on message index has views and likes listed on the same line, with replies on the line above.
Views tend to outnumber replies by at least ten to one in an established board, with
examples from SMF (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?board=1.0) going as high as a thousand to one in public boards. IOW, that ends up being the longest text string in the cell by a considerable margin. Replies tends to be the shortest. My guess is that likes will end up being roughly as long as replies (maybe). So, it'd make more sense to have replies and likes on the same line.
That cell is still going to end up messy though. :P
ETA: Just took a look at vB. They've had a likes system for yonks, but they don't bother echoing the count to their message index. IMO, this is sensible. I can see why someone might want to sort threads by the number of likes received (coz it might be enjoyable to read the most liked) but I cannot see why anyone would care if a thread had 1,932 likes or 1,843. It's not relevant information.
If the threads are sorted by number of likes, they'll stack in the order desired, and that's really all the data the interface needs. The actual count is like a lot of other things the software keeps track of: useful for accounting purposes, but not useful as an addition to the interface.
An example is board id#. Some nutter might think everyone needs to know which board is the oldest, coz that's really interesting stuff. 99.999% of users wont want to know.
I would say likes are relevant but views are not.
TBH I'm not even sure replies are relevant. Maybe on a support board where you want to know if anyone has replied at all, but then if the last post isn't by the same person as the OP, that answers that question.
Number of replies once people start replying? Who cares? If there's no mini page index for the thread, then there is less than one full page of replies. If it says 1 and 2, there is somewhere between one full page and two full pages. If it says 1234......257, it's a big thread. That's really enough information, the vast majority of the time.
Depends how ruthless you want to get.
I don't agree. It might not be relevant in detail, but the eye catches the differences: i.e. I see immediately the difference between 5 replies and 155 replies (even without the other visual clues, pages of replies, hot topic icons). Also, I see immediately '1', more than checking posters.
I wonder if the number of views is actually so useful...
It is sometimes increased by bots in the range of hundreds per minute on random topics (in the sense that a random topic is "attacked" and its counter goes up without any meaning).
I was taking a look at the latest vB (5) and they have the three on three lines. TBH I think this makes a lot of sense.
They also put the view as second of the list, I don't know if they did on purpose of if by mistake, though to me it make sense as well, because since the number of view tends to be one or two orders of magnitude higher than the other two values it becomes a "natural" separator that helps in identify the other two (so you know the one before the longest is replies, the one after is likes).
I'd propose to split the views/likes line on Elk as well.
I just submitted this: http://i.imgur.com/C69vrj1.png
... if you don't like it...
/me blames... dunno yet, I'll find a name. :P
This seems to have been moved to exterminated area but it looks even more annoying to me now. The height of topic row is unnecessarily and annoyingly high. The least that can be done would be to give line-height: 1.2em and font-size: 0.9em to .topic_stats class. Also, I think it would be sensible to get rid of the lone arrow icon there leading to the last post. The date of the last post could be linked to the last post itself in its stead.
I don't recall all the iterations on this one, at one time we had them on 2 lines and then back to 3. That area has always been a trouble spot for various reasons. Anyway, yeah I agree that there is to much white space in that area, makes the area taller than it needs to be.
Never gave much thought to that icon TBH, sounds reasonable to remove it and add a link to the last post time.
I just want the replies, no likes and no views. Likes and views are irrelevant for me on the board index. The answers a question or thread gets are not. O:-)
Well, as usual you ask 10 people you get 20 answers.
I actually get used to have some space on the message index and not everything crowded up like in the original theme.
So, I would agree with the font-size 0.9, but for the line-height I would keep it at least 1.5em.
In future themes it may be worth exploring the option to move the likes to some image with the locked/pinned icons for example.
Or to make it configurable:
Show answers on index: yes/no
Show views on index: yes/no
Show likes on index: yes/no
A little dreaming... O:-)
I think all three should be there. It's easy to customize it anyway.
Although I don't think extra padding is necessary, if that's the intention, I think it should be added properly and not through a side effect of putting 3 lines (with the same line-height) in a row intended for 2.
I ended up pretty close to this as well .. think it was 1.4+ and a .9+ ... don't remember the specifics but it closed it up a bit without looking congested. ... Oh you don't need to ask 10 people, just ask me once and I'll supply 10 different answers over time O:-)
I know we had them on two lines, I seem to recall the issue was just the length of the text and numbers should you end up with large counts there (not often, granted) ... perhaps that would work again with the removal of the icon.
ohhh... come on, where is the fun if you do things *properly*? :P j/k
Here is a two line same font as we currently have ... I know we had this layout at one point, don't know if it was disliked and we changed back to what we have now.
if (!isset($counter))
$counter = 0;
$counter++;
if ($counter > 1)
break;
IIRC we started with the two lines layout and I changed it to the three lines according to this discussion, see http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=415.msg7429#msg7429
Thats this thread ... now I'm stuck in a loop :'(
I added a block to break out of the loop! 8)
Sorry. I have forgotten having fun since long ago.
I think the spacing is just right in that two line version. However, having 3 items on 2 lines hurts my pedantic eyes. Still, I guess I prefer that to having excessive spacing in topic list.
Any updates regarding this?
I think (but I may be wrong) Spuds already reduced the height of the box... no?
Is this site supposed to include that change? I don't have a test install of the latest version, so I'm posting whatever I see here.
I'm not sure. As soon as I have some time and I feel a bit better I'll upload the latest repo. ;)
I don't think there are any changes in 1.0 vs whats here now WRT this discussion.
I seem to recall that we did remove some white space based on this discussion. The only way I see to remove more would be the 2 line version or a smaller font size in the topic_stats class. Maybe there are some other ideas that we could apply in 1.01 ?
Oh okay, I thought you reduced a bit the line height.
The two lines version to me looks too crowded. :-\
I just implemented an alternating stat view, based on the sort order, which worked well enough for my needs.
MessageIndex.template.php:
switch ($context['sort_by'])
{
case 'views':
echo $topic['views'], ' ', $txt['views'];
break;
case 'likes':
if (!empty($modSettings['likes_enabled']))
{
echo $topic['likes'], ' ', $txt['likes'];
break;
}
// fall through
default:
echo $topic['replies'], ' ', $txt['replies'];
break;
}
Interesting!
actually a nice approach for the sorted views ...