Fading and pop ups

meta
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Continuing the discussion from Tangents: how off-topic is too off-topic?

Did I do the right thing? Is this too little of a topic change to warrant a new thread? :stuck_out_tongue:

I’d like to properly talk about the way the buttons and things fade in and out on posts. Does anyone actually like it? Personally, I find it really frustrating and distracting when anything on the page I’m looking at changes like that. Same reason I disable all the popups and tooltips on RES on Reddit. Any chance the fade out can be toned down a little?

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I can’t tell if they’re totally invisible or if I just can’t see them, but I find it annoying that I can’t see if a post has replies at-a-glance until I mouse-over it. I don’t get why I’m not supposed to see it passively.

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Frankly I do not care for rococo user interfaces with spurious graphical flourishes.

I do like avatars, though. (Not to be confused with gravatars.)

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I’m a little unclear exactly what you are talking about.

  1. There is a fade-to-highlight when entering a topic at a specific post so you know which post in the stream you are situated at.

  2. The post action buttons at the bottom of the post are dimmed until they are moused over. This doesn’t happen on tablets because… wait for it… no mouse. This is to enhance readability so you can scan down without SUPER DARK icons fighting in your field of view for attention on every single post.

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but even when they are faded in they are hardly what I would call “SUPER DARK”. I personally think its much clearer not having thins flashing on and off as I move my mouse around the page, and far more distracting when they do.

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You can use custom CSS stylesheet to set them however you like in Firefox.

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I wouldnt know where to start

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It’s pretty easy to set up a custom stylesheet for a website to change one or two things, here’s some basic info

Here’s the add-in for Firefox

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/?src=external-userstyleshome

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CSS can be a little hard to grasp if you don’t already have the rudiments of HTML, but forcing your head through the wall is really pretty extremely rewarding, assuming you have any intention of owning and/or operating a website, or if you have any programming interests whatsoever.

Most people find CSS to have an “aha!” moment where suddenly all the turgid, impenetrable documentation becomes pellucid, perhaps with a rushing of wind and roaring of celestial trumpets. :smile: After that you can comprehend any well made, handcrafted CSS/HTML instantly, and you will be able to struggle through the bloated, inelegant garbage that toolsets generate if you add a smidgen of javascript knowledge.

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Also if you want to turn off the dynamic opacity for that section, it is here, in the F12 inspector of Chrome. Just turn off the marked rule with a single click

You’d need an !important override to that rule in Stylish to tell it you don’t want any opacity.

The other way to make this happen is to tell BBS that you are using a tablet or touch device, replace your user-agent with an iPad one.

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I’m scared and confused :’(

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Well, I think I did say it starts out turgid and impenetrable, you know?

Jeff’s second point gives you a nice little hack. Every web browser passes a “user-agent” value to the web server. Right now mine says “firefox on windows 7”, or words to that effect, because I’m at work supposedly working (which means I’ll have to stay late again if I don’t finish this post right quick). If I was at home it’d probably say “firefox on ubuntu linux”.

Because the introduction of “smart phones” and their ilk has done disgusting things to the state of standardization on the Internet, regressing us back to the bad old days of the browser wars, web sites now produce completely separate pages depending on the user-agent value they see. So iPhones see a page optimized for pretentious artists in bad turtlenecks, linux systems see a page optimized for near-autistic neckbeards living in their mothers’ basements, and Windows systems see a page optimized for self-centered corporate drones who never turn off their computers. Etc, add bigoted caricatures as desired. :smile:

If you are running either firefox or chrome you can load a free extension (search for “user agent” in the add-on store) and purposefully change your user-agent to say “I am an iPad running Safari” or whatever the hell iPads run, or “I am a Nexus 7 tablet running Android with something vaguely like chrome”. The more user-friendly user agent switchers will present this fairly intuitively, you just click on a button; and the more powerful ones will let you enter anything you want which is usually less than useful (fun for supergeeks though).

So you can grab a free user agent switcher for a free browser and take a look at what the site shows to people with different hardware than you, and if you like it better you can use that version instead. Bonus, the iPad version might support multitouch if your keyboard incorporates a synaptics touchpad (I dunno, don’t count on it).

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I made a quick bookmarklet for you. To use it, copy the following and create a new bookmark. In the url or location field, paste the code. Click this once per full page refresh to stop hover-in effects.

@Medievalist It’s a bit absurd to change your UA string just to toggle behavior on a single website. I wouldn’t suggest that for normal users.

@codinghorror A request for user themes/turning off effects doesn’t seem that far fetched. Most users will never change settings, but super users who post and use the site daily will appreciate being able to customize these things.

javascript:(function(){    
    var style = document.createElement('style');
    style.setAttribute("type", "text/css");
    var rule = document.createTextNode('.discourse-no-touch .topic-post .gutter .reply-new, .discourse-no-touch .topic-post section.post-menu-area, .discourse-no-touch .topic-post section.post-menu-area, .discourse-no-touch .topic-post .post-actions {opacity: 1 !important;}');
    style.appendChild(rule);
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
}());
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Thanks, gwwar. I change my UA string all the time, so perhaps I am jaded.

When I build web apps, I use Paul Sowden’s switchstyle.js to give end users the ability to trivially flip among styles, because all the youngsters want pale grey text on a white background and all the fossils want green on black. Check it out if you’re not already familiar with it!

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EEEE! It WORKS and everyfink!

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Maybe except what he is asking for, is exactly what we do on tablets – show all elements, no mouse hover fades since… there’s no mouse on a tablet.

Perhaps, but already covered, and then some, by Stylish and other extensions plus the user repositories of hundreds of CSS tweaks. Particularly given the rarity of such requests. The tools are already there, gotta learn how to make fire.

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Having things blink off-and-on at me (unless I am careful to keep my cursor on the far edge of the page) is supposed to be more *readable* than having the post action buttons on all the time?

I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

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Wow, thanks for the help…

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