… is my computer wacky?
On my “Poststructural Whistle Board” page everything has stretched out so the topic and the author can’t be seen together. I am basically lazy and find scrolling to the side to finish reading a line a tad annoying. Am I alone in this respect?
Is this a permanent change? 
~Judy
It’s apparently caused by the Google ad banner. Perhaps if it were situated outside of the tables it would be less widening. The screen is especially wide on the index pages.
I find it annoying also. Can it be adjusted to make viewing easier? Please.
It’s that way on mine now too. But what google ad banner?
Sorry about that, folks – tried it from a couple of setups and it looked OK. If you’re seeing it stretched out – what browser, OS, and screen resolution are you using?
Same here…
PhilO
Nevermind, duplicated it. myself. I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong – it worked ok in 800x600 in Mozilla, flush to the right side of the screen, but IE is indenting it. I’ll poke at it this morning but worst case I’ll fix it tonight,
Doing it on win2000 and xp, at 1024 by 768 on MIE 6+
There, I think that’s got it. IE wanted to pad out around the banner even though it’d fit without. Taking it out of the table took care of things. Let me know if anything else renders funny.
–Rich
Thanks Rich!
Yes, much better. Thanks 
Seems inocuous enough, but why have the banner anyway? What is next…
POPUPS? 
I think Dale and Rich have found a way to recover some of the cost of this board. If the banners are the only adds and Rich has fixed the problem, I have NO (edited to say) trouble with them being there.
MarkB
I have no problem with Rich and Dale finding a way to recover costs, but I thought I remembered Rich saying if the board ever went commercial he’d have to shut it down. Not so any more?
i believe MarkB left out one important word: no
right?
No, not popups. But bandwidth isn’t free, and the forums use a lot of it (about 50Gb per month, last time I checked). While we’re lucky enough to have donated hosting right now, but I don’t want to have to rely on that continuing forever. If the forums can be mostly self-sustaining then it’s a lot easier to ensure that they continue running.
(Besides, popups are evil. Targeted text ads actually have a good chance of showing something that is relevant to the topic being discussed – a whistle conversation gets whistle ads, a conversation about spyware gets anti-spyware software ads, and so on – and other than when I screw up the HTML to put them there, should be about as unobtrusive as ads get.)
Incidentally, I’m still playing with things a bit, particularly in the (GMT-4) evening, so if anything seems to suddenly go amiss, it’s probably me.
I’m not sure what you’re remembering. Roughly, the situation is this: Right now we’re dependent on one person who is donating hosting (and doesn’t use the forums at all!). My gut feeling about that is that it might not be reliable in future, so keeping options open is important. The obvious option – especially given Dale’s experience on the main website – is to make the forums self-sustaining, or close to it. Targeted text ads have the dual advantages of being least-evil and actually generating click-throughs, so I’m giving them a shot to see how well they perform.
Oh, wait, I know – at first the boards were hosted on a machine hidden under my desk at Concordia University in Montreal where I worked. That was where commercial activity was expressly forbidden, but the forums went from being hosted there to being hosted on a friend’s server in 2001.
Thanks for the explanation, Rich. You and Dale are doing a great job. Keep up the good work!
FWIW - I’ve already clicked two ads…didn’t buy anything, but one time I was thinking - “I want to go look at that over on Whistle & Drum” and the banner ad was for, you guessed it, Whistle & Drum.
Pop-ups are evil, but ads like this simply are a reality of the internet.
Keep up the good work Rich, Dale & Co.
Eric
What are popups? Oh, I remember those, that was before I used a version of Mozilla and found tons of options including blocking pictures and popups. You can pop your wanted page in front of the popup with this little script I found:
<!-- Frame Breaker -->
<script language="Javascript">
<!--
// please keep these lines on when you copy the source
// made by: Nicolas - http://www.javascript-page.com
if (top.location != self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
//-->
</script>
<!-- End Frame Breaker -->