Robespierre (or others) Why does the left topic menu become so narrow?
 

How come the left topic menu of this forum becomes so narrow that I have to use the slider to view the full sentences? And I don't seem to be able to adjust the width of it. Any fix?

It happens when someone posts a link or a sentence with no breaks in it that's longer that a line of copy. Since the site won't break that down, it makes the right hand columns too wide to fit, and narrows the left hand columns accordingly.
It could be avoided several ways, but the easiest is for posters to use tinyurl.com to translate long url's into short ones.

that happens when someone posts with a title that has a long string of words with no spaces.....just / or , or -

a bit annoying until that thread moves down the line to another page

neoPatrick has his left's and right's confused. he is talking about too long URLs in the posts. (and that doesn't do anything to the left hand column in any case)

What you are asking about is what Grcxx3 describes. When someone posts a long title w/o any spaces the title doesn't "wrap" so it is too wide to show in the frame. The frame doesn't get narrower - but you have to scroll back and forth to see the full titles of all threads on the same page as the offending one.

Darn. Being an actor, I keep thinking in terms of STAGE right and STAGE left.

In this case the "bad" title ( http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34962695 ) has finally dropped off page 1 so the frame is back to normal.

Unfortunately - if anyone posts to that thread it will come back to the top and screw things up again.

OK Thank you. I knew about the tinyurl one in the right column but not the left column title thing.
Wouldn't it be great to solve this glitch....

robjame: One time I pulled that boner - posted a long title w/o enough spaces. I got an e-mail from the editors telling me they had deleted the thread and giving me all the text from my post. They told me to re-post w/ a better title and I could just copy/paste from the e-mail.

I though at the time wouldn't it just have been more efficient for the editors to actually <b>EDIT</b> and fix the title themselves?? But apparently that wasn't doable.

This was about 2 editors ago so don't know if the new guys even have a procedure . . . .

Actually janis, I'm surprised but think that was a great thing for the editors to do. If they fixed it, you wouldn't have known about the problem and would do it again. I think that kind of monitoring by the editors would be very good -- teaching people how to make this site work, since so much is never explained anywhere.

NeoPatrick: I agree - what I meant - they could have fixed it and just send me a short e-mail w/ a heads up.

<b>WHY DON'T THEY JUST FIX THE CODE ONCE AND FOR ALL AND BE DONE WITH IT?</b>

Or at the very least, lead new subscribers through a few pages of information describing how the site works and what to avoid to make it run smoothly.