Visual Real Estate: latest alterations of the website

From a strictly graphic design perspective, having the News/Ads/FF column on the left of the screen works just fine at the root of the forum (the topmost level where the threads are), but when one wants to read posts within a forum, the new design has questionable results:

A horizontal ad (banner etc) inserted every five posts is a good use of visual real estate for a forum. Assuming the posts average 3 or 4 lines each, you dont have to be distracted by advertising more than once every 15 seconds to 30 seconds or so while casually browsing a thread.

The verticle ad space has to be seen every time one moves their head back to the left of the screen. Superficially, this might seem like an advertising coup, but in the end the effort it takes for a user to ignore that advertising space the 20 or 30 times they see it after the first time creates a frustrating user experience. Trust me. I used to work for an ISP that gave people free dialup accounts. All they had to do was acknowledge to a pop up ad at regular intervals. We were called FirstUP.com, and for about a year we had nearly as many users as AOL. Never heard of us? Read the above paragraph again, and youll get a big clue about why we went out of business. People do *not* like being distracted when they are online, and verticle ad space on a forum is pretty intrusive.

And even after one has read past the ads and news (which is totally wasted space after we read it the first time), we are left with a huge empty space on the left hand of the screen, while the forum thread itself is still compressed to the right.

And for those who view the screen at 800x600 resolution, you have to scroll over just to see the end of each line.

I think if you increase the number of horizontal ad spaces, include the fight finder in them, perhaps a random picture from the gallery as well instead of the infrequently updated headline content, it would be received a lot better.

- some mouthy jackass who'se a guest on your board but thinks he has the right to tell you how to run your business