Troy, I'm curious about something...

[beer100]

Why is it that so many sites are setup where clicking on a thumbnail brings up another window?

[Troy Roberts]

Do you mean the attached images?

[beer100]

The thumbnails that appear in the posts? Yes.

Is there some unobvious benefit to having a web site setup that way?

[Troy Roberts]

The most simple answer is that vBulletin software is coded that way.

The more complex answer deals with staying on the primary surfing path. Normally, looking at an image like that is a sidepath to what you are doing. It opens in a new window to allow you to look at the image and then continue with what you were doing. Or you can keep it open for reference. It also makes it easy to popup just the picture without all of the other page elements.

If it were to open in a full page you would need to add navigation elements to make it easy to find your way back to where you just where. You wouldn't want to come back to the same page in a different location for example. Most links would take you back to the top of a page instead of to the post you were just reading. This is important in an environment like this where you are scrolling down a page reading threads. The browser back button would work but it's generally not good web design to force someone to use the browser navigation to get around. It should all be internal to the site.

[beer100]

Originally Posted by Troy Roberts

The browser back button would work but it's generally not good web design to force someone to use the browser navigation to get around. It should all be internal to the site.

Boy am I out of sync. I use the browser buttons and keyboard shortcuts mostly because they don't move, and I don't have to search all over tarnation to find something that might be scrolled off the screen or not even be there.

When a web site is designed to deny me the use of a frenquently used function like [alt-<]...

Any way what started this was those popup picture windows. I was suspecting that there was a fiscal reason for that behaviour. Like not having to resend the last page again, cause it's still there. I still wouldn't care for that, but there would be a good reason for it.

This site is real easy to navigate with keyboard shortcuts. Just leave the mouse pointer near where the last thread was selected, scroll to read, back, pick the next thread, repeat.