Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/lnteractive Prototype/Problems with the spacing

I think that there are some good ideas about functionality here, but, to be frank, I disagree with a lot of the visual choices.

1) The tag, star, and gear icons are too close together, which makes it look muddled. I would personally like to shrink them down just a tad and up the padding between each one a little bit.

2) The indent between each reply (how much indented to the right each box after the first begins) is a bit too much. I personally like the indent size used in this interface here better. For longer conversations, and with pages like ANI there are going to be really long conversations, the number of replies before everything gets squished is really important.

4) There is so much surrounding each comment that I can fit, at most, three or three and a half comments in without having to scroll. In the current system I can see upwards of 10 or 15. This is going to make dealing with conversations of any reasonable size difficult.

4) On a related note, let me turn your attention to this screenshot, taken from the live demo. Aside from that the heavily padded boxes around each separate comment make that conversation absurdly long, the indenting is extremely confusing. It jigs back and forth liberally. Now as someone that's been around his fair share of forums, I know that the jigging and jagging means that we're dealing with different subthreads, but many people aren't going to know what's going on. Additionally, the combination of crazy indenting and crazy length makes it very difficult to follow an individual subthread without getting lost. I strongly suggest that you implement a subthread collapsing system like the one at imgur (picked that one because it had lots of subthreads several posts deep for people to play will collapsing and uncollapsing) so that people can follow long conversations easier.

5) I realize that this is a prototype, but the amount of whitespace off to the right in my widescreen is just bad. I know that there is literature on maximum width, and it makes sense to do what you can to prevent eye strain, but it just looks awful.

But other than all that, I like where it's going thus far.