Smiley Management

[SvenLittkowski]

Some forum admins give a lot of smiley options to their forum users. The smiley management is not bad, but can be improved a little bit to make it more comfortable. Here some suggestions:

That Edit Icons page could have - above and below all tick boxes - a general tick: a click ticks all tick boxes (useful if you got over 300 smileys) and a second click unticks all tick boxes.

And instead of just one tick box beside each smiley, it could be three:
- one to tick/untick just this smiley
- one to tick/untick this smiley and all others above
- one to tick/untick this smiley and all others below
This makes sense if you have larger numbers of smileys.

And all available smileys could, instead of being listed beside the message box, be listed below the message box. This looks better if a person has more than a certain number of smileys enabled. Or they could be inside an area not taller than the message field, and have a vertical scroll bar. Please see the screenshot:

[Pony99CA]

The screen shot doesn't appear to show anything related to smilies.

Also, the three "tick box" (check box) idea is pretty horrible sounding. I don't think that I've ever seen that anywhere. Plus, the above/below controls should be radio buttons, not check boxes, as selecting more than one above/below control doesn't make sense. And what happens when the above and below controls are set along with some check boxes? You'd need some ugly error checking or heuristics.

For example, suppose I have 300 items.

1. I click Above 100 and Below 200. Does that select 1-100 and 200-300 (a union) or nothing (an intersection)?

2. I click Above 200 and Below 100. Does that select everything (a union) or 100-200 (an intersection)?

I don't know if it's possible, but I'd rather see multiple selection allowed like on Windows -- click selects an item, then Shift+Click selects all items between the first item and the Shift+Clicked item.

Steve

[SvenLittkowski]

Yes, radio buttons (selectors) are better in this case, true, as only one of the three possibilities can be selected.

Screenshot: did you scroll to the left?

[Mess]

If you want the smilies to display differently on the style you use (PBTech) you should probably talk to the author of that style.
I can't see from the screenshot if its displayed like in prosilver.

[Pony99CA]

Screenshot: did you scroll to the left?

I don't recall seeing the scroll bar yesterday, hence my comment (if I did see it, I must have thought that it was part of the image).

That said, I strongly suggest cropping out the useless stuff to avoid having to scroll. There's really no need to see your browser's address bar and tabs, the Windows task bar, or most of the empty space on the left.

Steve

[brunoais]

Even when scrolling I don't get what the image is supposed to represent...

[DavidIQ]

Even when scrolling I don't get what the image is supposed to represent...

I believe he's trying to show that there is a long list of smileys on the page, caused by he himself having set all of his smileys to display on the posting page.

Totally against the idea of having checkboxes or anything else in the smileys list that would make the user select multiple smileys and then click on a button to post the selected smileys. Makes no sense at all and makes for nuisance postings where if there really are 300 smileys on the posting page the user will easily be able to post all 300 to the topic.

What MIGHT be useful is to "float" the posting area so that if there is a long list of smileys, a problem caused by the administrator themselves, the posting box along with the buttons moves down when the user scrolls down, docking that section to the top of the screen.

[brunoais]

What MIGHT be useful is to "float" the posting area so that if there is a long list of smileys, a problem caused by the administrator themselves, the posting box along with the buttons moves down when the user scrolls down, docking that section to the top of the screen.

I disagree. In my opinion, there should be scrolling available for the smilies if it gets too big.
If it gets too big, a scrollbar appears on the right of the smilies that allows scrolling the smilies container in order to see them all.

[DavidIQ]

What MIGHT be useful is to "float" the posting area so that if there is a long list of smileys, a problem caused by the administrator themselves, the posting box along with the buttons moves down when the user scrolls down, docking that section to the top of the screen.

I disagree. In my opinion, there should be scrolling available for the smilies if it gets too big.
If it gets too big, a scrollbar appears on the right of the smilies that allows scrolling the smilies container in order to see them all.

That would work too.

[Pony99CA]

Totally against the idea of having checkboxes or anything else in the smileys list that would make the user select multiple smileys and then click on a button to post the selected smileys. Makes no sense at all and makes for nuisance postings where if there really are 300 smileys on the posting page the user will easily be able to post all 300 to the topic.

I don't think that's what the OP meant. I think that he was suggeting two ideas -- the check box features for the ACP page (what he called the "Edit Icons page") to make management easier and a different display method for the posting page. I think that you conflated the two because the initial post wasn't particularly clear.

Steve