What's with all the coloured buttons below each post?

[trisonic]

I think so too, at least give them a fair chance of three months or so. Are they perfect? Nope! Nothing in this life is.

 

Besides this is a "benevolent oligarchy" not a democracy - where we would never all agree on anything much......

 

Best, Pete.

[Barry Ten]

After my statutory moan I can see that the new buttons have been broadly welcomed by members, so I'm happy to give them a shot. However, I reserve the right to have a good old moan about something or other later on.

[Pete 75C]

I think so too, at least give them a fair chance of three months or so. Are they perfect? Nope! Nothing in this life is.

 

Besides this is a "benevolent oligarchy" not a democracy - where we would never all agree on anything much......

 

Best, Pete.

 

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with you. It would all depend on finding out what "benevolent oligarchy" means...

[Alan Higgi]

 

 

1.Characterized by kindness and concern for others: altruistic, beneficent, benign, benignant, good, goodhearted, kind, kindhearted, kindly.  So not me!

[Pete 75C]

1.Characterized by kindness and concern for others: altruistic, beneficent, benign, benignant, good, goodhearted, kind, kindhearted, kindly.  So not me!

 

Are we sure we're talking about RMWeb here...???

[Adrian]

I have a great idea. After 8 days, why don't we just accept the changes Andy has made and move on...??? There will be something else along in a minute to moan about. For the Victor Meldrews amongst you, the disagree button is the cross within the circle...

 

Well I'm happy to oblige - it now appears that the default theme has been updated to include the buttons so now I can't use that dodge to turn them off, call me Victor if it helps it but doesn't bother me 

 

It would have been nice to have an option in my user settings to toggle their visibility because in all honesty I visit here to look at some great modelling and I have no interest whatsoever in point scoring. The additional clutter I find distracting and on my netbook the extra space used means that I can barely see two posts on screen at once. for me it is eroding the signal(content) to noise ratio even further. In addition at work we are limited to using IE8 and the formatting of the awards is still all messed up.

 

I don't have an issue with a points/award/system I just wish there was a way I could turn them off or make them less instrusive for me.

[martin_wynne]

I don't have an issue with a points/award/system I just wish there was a way I could turn them off or make them less instrusive for me.

 

Hi Adrian,

 

If you are using Firefox you can easily turn it off for the page you are on.

 

1. Before browsing RMweb, copy this:  div.forums_rate_bar{display:none;}

 

2. While viewing a topic, press SHIFT+F7  (or click the tools > web developer > style editor menu item). A window will open at the bottom of the page, with the right-hand side focused.

 

3. Press CTRL+V to paste what you previously copied. The Like buttons will vanish.

 

4. Press SHIFT+F7 again to hide the bottom window.

 

Each time you go to a new topic page, press SHIFT+F7 , CTRL+V, SHIFT+F7 in sequence to hide the Like buttons (provided you don't Copy anything fresh in between).

 

Martin.

[Xerces Fobe2]

How about a button to opt out of having any buttons associated with a members post?  "Don't press any of my buttons"

 

XF

[Adrian]

How about a button to opt out of having any buttons associated with a members post?  "Don't press any of my buttons"

 

XF

Call me a crabby old fart if it makes you feel better, it really doesn't bother me in the slightest and if it gives me the option to opt out of the point scoring and reduce the clutter then I'll be a happy crabby old fart.

[Ian J.]

THE FOLLOWING IS ONLY TO BE DONE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
 
To extend Martin Wynne's suggestion. For users of Firefox, it's possible to create a userContent.css file in your profile folder and add a line very similar to Martin's, and it will hide the Rating div element.
 
Using a typical Windows 7 32 bit install, the file is

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profilename>\chrome\userContent.css

The entry (the only one if the file has had to be created new) is:

@-moz-document domain(www.rmweb.co.uk) { div.forums_rate_bar { display: none !important;} }

I've just tested this on Win7 32 bit, with Firefox 21.0, and it's working on my laptop. Note that to see the results work, you need to exit FF completely and restart. To reverse it just comment out the line or delete the line (or delete the file, if you've not got anything else in there).
 
Doing it this way means once you've set up the .css entry, you don't need to keep editing the page source.
 
WARNING: This is a hack, and could have unintended side effects!!
 
EDIT: I've just been doing some additional testing on reversing the setting and it appears something else is affecting my system and screwing things up. I have temporarily struck out this while I work out precisely what's playing up.

 

EDIT: A change to the file name, its location and the entry is required. The text above now reflects the correct setup. Note the edit to the entry should also restrict the setting to the rmweb domain.

[martin_wynne]

Hi Ian,

 

To make all that easy, try installing the Stylish add-on for Firefox. You can then easily make this and lots of other changes to the appearance of RMweb.

 

You can instantly enable/disable this option via the Firefox Add-ons Manager tab, without restarting Firefox or even reloading the topic page.

 

I will make a bit of tutorial showing how to set this up.

 

Stylish also lets you choose new ready-made styles and themes for lots of other sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

 

n.b. This is for Firefox users only -- there may be something similar for other browsers but I have no info about them.

 

regards,

 

Martin.

[Mikkel]

 try installing the Stylish add-on for Firefox

 

Can it also make my hair grow back?

 

  

[Ian J.]

Hi Martin,

 

I've installed Stylish just to get a feel for it and see what it could do, but for my reply to the topic I wanted to provide a 'raw' way to do the div element hiding based on a known Firefox capabililty that didn't require an add-on.

[Gwiwer]

Copy, paste and use as appropriate 

 

[PhilJ W]

Copy, paste and use as appropriate 

 

Error Message-1.png

The right hand one is the most important.

[martin_wynne]

1. Before browsing RMweb, copy this:  div.forums_rate_bar{display:none;}

 

2. While viewing a topic, press SHIFT+F7  (or click the tools > web developer > style editor menu item). A window will open at the bottom of the page, with the right-hand side focused.

 

3. Press CTRL+V to paste what you previously copied. The Like buttons will vanish.

 

4. Press SHIFT+F7 again to hide the bottom window.

 

Each time you go to a new topic page, press SHIFT+F7 , CTRL+V, SHIFT+F7 in sequence to hide the Like buttons (provided you don't Copy anything fresh in between).

 

If you change 1. above to copy this:

 

div.forums_rate_bar{width:21px; height:21px; overflow:hidden; background-color:#ffffdd;}

div.forums_rate_bar:hover{width:100%;}

div.rating_block{border:0px; border-radius:0px 0px 0px 0px; padding:0px;}

 

the result may be more to everyone's liking:

 

Normal view:

 

 

Moving the mouse over the icon on the right:

 

 

displays the full rating bar.

 

(To access the other buttons move the mouse quickly to the left before the first hover text appears).

 

I will post a tutorial for the Stylish add-on showing how to make this a permanent mod.

 

n.b. all this is Firefox only.

 

regards,

 

Martin.

[martin_wynne]

Here is the way to fix the above modification, so that you can turn it on and off as required.

This is for recent versions of Firefox. A similar option is available for Google Chrome which I will post later.

1. copy this (click down above it and wipe your mouse over it, then right-click on it and Copy. Make sure you get all of it):


div.forums_rate_bar{
 width:21px !important;
 height:21px !important;
 overflow:hidden !important;
 background-color:#ffffdd !important;}
 
div.forums_rate_bar:hover{
 width:100% !important;}

div.rating_block{
 border:0px !important;
 border-radius:0px 0px 0px 0px !important;
 padding:0px !important;}


2. go to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

 

3. click the green button to download and install the Stylish add-on for Firefox. Follow the instructions, after which you must restart Firefox.

4. when Firefox restarts you will see the Stylish welcome page with a video about modifying YouTube. You don't need to note any of that.

5. go to RMweb.

6. at the bottom-left of your screen you will see the small boxed S icon for Stylish. Click it (taking care not to click the Windows Start button):

 

7. and on the menus which appear click the Write new style > For www.rmweb.co.uk... menu item.

8. this dialog will appear:

 

9. enter a name for this modified style. You can call it whatever you wish -- I called it hide_rmweb_rating_buttons.

10. click on the blank line 4 in the panel, then right-click and Paste. Make sure not to change anything else:

 

11. click Save.

That's it. You will now find on RMweb topic pages that the rating icons are hidden until you mouse over the one showing on the right.

You can turn this modification on or off whenever you wish. Click the Tools > Add-ons menu item in Firefox. This screen appears:

 

12. Click User Styles on the left. Then click the Disable (or Enable) button.

 

regards,

 

Martin.

[Adrian]

Many thanks to Martin and Ian J for all the pointers.

I'm using Chrome on Ubuntu and Stylish is available for that as well so it has been installed. So slightly different screen shots to that posted by Martin.

However I've no interest in switching them on and off by hovering over an icon so I just made them permanently hidden. The first style mod was made.

 

I've logged this on the user style website to installing this style sheet  

 

http://userstyles.org/styles/88022/rmweb-rating-free

 

Should remove the rating bar.

 

 

However for those of us on machines with limited vertical space the user info takes up an awful lot of space on the left-hand side, a one line posting fills my entire screen with a lot of white space. So I created another style to turn off all this junk as well.

 

http://userstyles.org/styles/88024/rmweb-compact?r=1369350980

 

 

I can finally get two one line posts on one screen so now I'm a happy crabby old fart. If you want to see the user details, location, number of posts etc then click on the avatar picture to take you to the profile page of the poster. All the information and contact details are there for you.

 

I presume by logging the new styles on userstyles that other users can access them if they want to. I couldn't see an option to apply it to a specific domain, maybe this is available when a user installs it. 

 

 

 

 

[Peter Beckett]

It's not random -- it appears while your mouse is over that post and disappears when it moves over a different post.

 

It's not available for members who haven't set a signature.

 

Martin.

 

I am still using XP professional on my main computer and using IE8 and Martins suggestion works to untangle the "mess" but I have to do it to individual replies.

 

Andy, is there a way to apply it to the entire Forum?

 

Np problems with the laptop (IE9 and W7)

Cheers

 

Peter

[Ian J.]

Just had a thought after reading Adrian's post above. With the exception of the picture, the user info on the left hand side could possibly fit quite comfortably into the username 'bar' as a wider one-line item using otherwise blank space. Leaving it empty seems a bit of a waste on today's wider screens.

[Miss Prism]

Has the left-hand column info been recently reduced to 76px width because of mobile use?

[ozzyo]

Has the left-hand column info been recently reduced to 76px width because of mobile use?

 

I'd noticed a change on the left hand bar as well in that some place names etc. are now on two lines one of them now shows as Londo

n.

 

I wont say what JeffP's says.

 

Miss P looks to have been evicted. From the Manor House.

[martin_wynne]

Has the left-hand column info been recently reduced to 76px width because of mobile use?

 

Hi Russ,

 

It is currently set to 8% of the window, hence the text wrapping on narrow screens:

 

author_info {

    float: left;

    font-size: 12px;

    padding: 15px 10px;

    text-align: center;

    width: 8%;

}

 

It needs to be a fixed width. Here's the block view. There is clearly some wasted space:

 

 

I think Andy is currently experimenting with getting some advertising into the side columns.

 

regards,

 

Martin.

[Adrian]

It needs to be a fixed width. Here's the block view. There is clearly some wasted space:

 

This is clearly a new definition of "some" to me.

 

I think Andy is currently experimenting with getting some advertising into the side columns.

 

Marvellous - cue Kenton saying I told you so!

[brian777999]

I think Andy is currently experimenting with getting some advertising into the side columns.

 

As long as it does not flash, move or vibrate !