Let's talk the sidebar!

@barbeque  
Hmm. Well, Could you make the sidebar a bit smaller please? And to the right? :P

Wouldn’t it make more sense to add a button to collapse and expand on the sidebar instead of having to go to the settings?

@SunnySide  
It was on the right, once.  
It wasn’t good at all. And there’s a reason for that.
 
@Dr Outback  
I personally don’t think so.  
It’s just on the first page, after all.

@BigMax  
Why not make it an option? Like a settings option?

@Dr Outback  
While this had occured to me, there are some users out there that do not want to see any sort of activity easily, and would thus go insane over a 10 pixels wide collapse/expand thing on their frontpage. Probably also something with not wanting to glance at the forum activity by accident once in a while, so that they can come and whine if we change anything.
 
@SunnySide  
We already have way too many settings. For example, I don’t know why Subscribe on reply/upload/etc are even settings. Doesn’t uploading/replying 99% of the time mean you’re interested in something? That it would be annoying for those “Shipping? Lesbian? ;_;” shitstormstarters to keep getting notifications on things they already downvoted anyway is not my problem. Or those mass/meme/duck-uploaders that don’t even fave their own uploads.
 
But to answer the question: Clover is kinda against more settings. The tabs make it at least slightly more navigateable. I’m not saying it’ll never happen, but in any case not in the foreseeable future I guess.

@barbeque  
The subscription options are useful for me, for example, because I manually subscribe when I’m expecting a reply. Having a forced automatic subscription would only annoy me, because there’s a limited number of subscriptions (50?) which means the ones I’m interested about would quickly get unsubscribed and I would have to go manually check the comments, negating the usefulness of the subscription system.
 
On-topic: it’d be nice if I could make the sidebar narrower. It’s now about 320 pixels, but if it was 220 pixels, it’d be perfect. Perfect for me… :-) _{^{I need a bigger monitor.}}

@JP  
Eh, it was merely an idea. You have a good point (FYI I think you can subscribe to an unlimited number of things, but only the latest 50 will show up. I think Clover said at some point that we can probably raise this number to a hundred or something).
 
Currently the width is pretty much exclusively caused by the two smallthumbs for top scoring etc being next to each other (about 156 pixels per thumb, making for 312 pixels minimum). That was all by TSP’s design/idea, so I’m not going to deviate from it unless he agrees.  
_{also just wondering how big is your current monitor? My browser’s about 1000px wide, so when on smallthumbs things look pretty nice, though when logged out there’s only room for two columns of pictures. I’ve always disliked the bigthumbs anyway, so I miiiight be a bit prejusticed on this}

@barbeque  
1280x1024. I get 4 images per row with some 230-240 pixels to spare, so that’s almost five images. The sidebar drops that to mere three. If it was only 220 pixels (plus a few pixels of padding) then I could have the sidebar plus four images.

@barbeque  
What about a little of responsive design? Like
 
@@media (max-width: 1280px) {  
.image_container.thumb_small {  
width: 120px;  
height: 120px;  
}  
}@

@barbeque  
Way too many settings? What is this blasphemy?  
You can never have enough settings or customization.

@SunnySide  
Every checkbox increases the software complexity, the number of possible bugs and the number of required tests. While having settings and customization is a good thing, it can make troubleshooting really hard because there are so many combinations in the software. Finding the balance between too many settings and too few settings is very hard. That’s why having sane defaults is important: the less users have to change the settings, the better.
 
Source: I LOVE CHECKBOXES BECAUSE I’M A TINKERER. But I also know the pain of having to write all the code required to actually implement the various settings.

I think it would be better to remove the All time top scorers from the sidebar.  
Those two would get more attention than the others, so they won’t ever change. Not very good.

@JP
 
@BigMax
 
Taking away a few unnecessary things that’s more along the lines of stroking an already growing love for a picture, that’s been seen from probably the vast majority of the site, and replacing it with some more useful things might lessen the load.
 
Of course, that would take effort and Dammit your useless feature should be appreciated.

@JP  
In terms of complexity, I don’t think it’s even that much of a problem. The real problem is that the Settings page is going to end up having 500+ checkboxes and things that way, and nobody will ever be able to find the one they’re actually looking for. It’s great for power users, but regular users will just get lost at some point.
 
@BigMax  
As said, discuss things like that with TSP. It it was up to me, All Time Top Scoring would just be a link to said page, without the thumbs. I’m not saying it can’t be changed, I’m just not doing it without him greenlighting it. Same goes for the slightly-smaller-thumbs (though that’s going to mess with things, might be better off using 4 50x50 thumbs or something then, but then you lose vote indicators again etc). Get him to greenlight not-settings-related things like that and they will be done

Surprising myself, I’m using the sidebar a lot more! By that I mean that I could just click the Images tab but I click the DB header to the frontpage instead, when I want to refresh. The new frontpage is actually better for a quick overview on what’s happening on the site.
 
So yeah I’m sold.

@Vree  
I haven’t used the sidebar except to click the link that says “How to get rid of the sidebar”

@SunnySide  
Er ok fine? maybe you should have tried it at least once?