Best posts made by Oppidum

I would also like a sort-by option that sorts by posting date. I don’t care when or if any replies are made, I keep track of threads by the date they are initially posted.

Just to explain why Mikk1 started off the thread asking this question of me specifically – this was a brief side conversation within a different thread (on the Support forum) and the moderator forked it over here to the Technology forum to make it its own topic.

Here is the ‘vaunted’ chart I mentioned earlier, which I actually found not to be very accurate about a couple of VPNs that I had signed up with and/or researched.

https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparison-chart/

@Global-Moderators…

Okay, I’ve just figured out I can “at” the mods by doing the @ sign, in order to alert them.

I hope that is okay that I will “at” you when I want to call your attention to something, since I can’t use many of your site’s buttons and functions on my computer.

Tangential issue – I find the comment box a few lines too small. I see just 4 lines in the write-a-reply box. Would you be able to add a couple of lines to it? Would make it easier to proofread and organize one’s entire comment, without lots of scrolling.

OP, I don’t know if any of the discussion on my Support thread about how I’m having problems with this site in IE 11 would help you with your issue:
https://phatwalletforums.com/topic/967/functions-blocked-or-unavailable-tech-support

the reply, quote, up and down arrow, 3 dots, they are all miles away from the right edge of the comments. for me, it would be more comfortable if they were more to the left, more below the comment.

there is too much white and it kind of gives me a headache to see so much of it and try to concentrate on the text.
the text is kind of grey as well, not as dark and sharp as it could be.
It is visually unpleasant for me to read the site for more than 10 minutes. just my opinion.

maybe this is because i’m stuck with the default skin.
but I still think the page is way too wide.

I even think the comment text is a bit too wide, I’d decrease it. For example, in the image I posted, in your fivetalents post, I would make the right margin after the comma of “appearance of the threads,” putting “however, dangeru… did” on the next line down.

@fivetalents, a “pha-blet” sounds most appropriate for pha-twallet!

Thank you for your concern and encouragement, I appreciate it.

I am minimalistic in some areas of life - tech equipment is one - I’m a late adopter and a conservative purchaser regarding most tech stuff, so I don’t have a tablet, and I don’t have a laptop that can be spared.
I do have an old phone that I wiped and use for random stuff, but the battery is shot, and the screen is not big enough for comfortable reading/typing for more than a few minutes. Even though it has no phone number, I think it requires me to have a google email address for the phone, and sucks stuff into ‘the cloud’ although I’ve disabled everything I can. …I’m not brave enough or interested enough to “root” a phone, which seems pretty complicated!
If it’s demoted to being a secondary computer, I’ll need to keep my Win 7 laptop the way it is set up, because of old programs that don’t transfer over to Win 10, wanting to keep some files apart, etc., so I can’t make it a blank slate.

Alas, I may soon have to start using a new computer with Win 10, and it’ll have Edge
(although I think your site is having problems with Edge too, according to a Support thread)
(though I guess it doesn’t have a good reputation and isn’t a commonly-used browser despite the heavy/forced promotion of it),
and I expect that I will have to start using Chrome, whether I like it or not.

Plus, your site might be able to fix the issues with MS browsers.

I’m just glad that your folks were able to replicate what I have been experiencing, so it’s not a user-error situation at least

My monitor is about 19 inches horizontially and earlier in the thread when I said that the comment text extended too widely across the screen, the comment text as it was presented on my moniotr was 11 inches wide then, but now I see tonight that it’s 16.5 inches wide (which is worse).

It is not pleasant to have to swivel the eyes back and forth on a stark white background, when this should be an easygoing, friendly, relaxing, interesting website to visit.

I understand that one poster above likes the vast expanse of text, and says that those who don’t like it can just make their browser windows smaller, but when I make my browser window smaller: one, it leaves off some of the graphics and links and functions (for example, most of those little icons across the top of phatwallet’s template are not shown to me when my browser window is reduced). two, why should I have to operate the internet uncomfortably like I’m reading it on a phone screen when I bought a 21 inch monitor for the very purpose of being able to see my computer display well and comfortably.

It is not as if having an extremely-wide comment text section is a standard default in internet discussion forums, at least in my (mainstream internet user) experience. There are reasons that comment boxes are often boxed in and don’t extend across every centimeter of screen width, and that shades of gentle colors are often used to demarcate areas on the page to make reading a pleasant, intuitive experience.

The feeling that reading and typing comments on this site currently evokes in me is that of peering out of a car window and blinkingly scanning the horizon, trying to find a lost grey neck scarf in a snow blizzard (=visually chasing a thin, long line of grey, bland text on a thoroughly-white, off-putting screen background).

(“But how do you really feel, Oppidum?” ho ho ho)

I think that it was PIA, as marcopolomle mentioned, rather than Hide My As_, which a lot of people at FW had said they were using.

I just tried logging into the site and moving around in a standard IE window, not InPrivate Browsing, and nothing is different. I still can’t edit my posts or start a new topic.

If it helps you to know what happens, when I click the 3 vertical dots to try to edit a post that I wrote earlier, a red circle with a plus sign appears in the lower right corner of the screen, but nothing else shows up (like an editing window).
The same thing pops up when I try to reply to someone’s specific post using the “reply” link that is next to “quote”, the up and down arrows, and the 3 dots. I can only contribute to a thread at the moment by doing the general “post quick reply” window/button at the bottom of a thread.

At the moment, because I both tried to edit a post that I had written earlier and then to reply to a post by clicking the “reply” link that is next to “quote”, I have two red circles with white plus signs in them at the bottom right of my screen. They don’t do anything when I click them.

–
In good news –

For a good portion of this evening while I’ve been logged in, I have noticed that I have been able to go to a subforum’s list of threads and click on a link to a thread and be taken right to the thread’s page – I am no longer seeing the swirling circle in limbo and having to click “refresh” once on the browser window to get the page to load!

And, when I click the number between the up and down arrows, I can now see the pop-up window that says who has voted up or down for that post.

I’ve just visited your “Hot Deals” area for the first time, and I’ve looked over 5 pages of the deals.

With the way the threads are sorted, with the ones having recent replies being at the top of the heap, instead of the most recent threads that were posted being at the top, in the future I don’t think that I’ll have the patience to continue to sift through the pages of Hot Deals – as it continues to grow and grow – to try to figure out what threads I’ve already seen the title of, and what threads are new to me.

(I saw the earlier suggestion in this “support” thread of looking at the “unread” button that is up at the top of the template, but when I skim the thread titles of Hot Deals, I do not open each and every thread, I only open the ones that I am interested in, so, for me, having a list of “unread” threads is nearly the same as just looking at the jumble of threads in the Hot Deals forum itself, and that is not a workaround to not being able to sort threads by their posting date.)

I do appreciate that you are looking into the issue, and there is a plugin that is not working well with your set-up.

I like this new logo better than the previous one.

I would change the brown color, though. To me it’s a bit too yellowish-brown, and reminds me of diaper-poo.
[To be frank, but you want us to be frank… I think? ]

I guess you are trying to represent a brown men’s leather wallet, so I can see why brown was chosen.

If you need to have an image of a men’s wallet in the site-name logo…
(I would actually vote not to have the wallet in the logo, myself),
I’d make it a much darker brown.

Or you could make it black, but then it might look even less like a wallet than it does now.
(I don’t think you even need the picture of a wallet there, however.)

And I would definitely make the colors of “Phat” and “Wallet” the same.

Green as the logo color is fine, green stands for money (for US paper money, anyway).

The word Wallet is current a nice green color, but I’m not sure that this color is quite the green of US bills, so if you wanted to approximate the color of US bills, you might alter the green.

I expect that you were trying not to use the Fatwallet limey-green, to differentiate your logo.

The font to me is a bit old-fashioned, sort of like from the magazines TigerBeat and TeenBeat in 1979 – the headline of “Interview with David Cassidy!” would be in that font.
Maybe it’s so old-fashioned that it’s modern, the way you youngin’s in Hoxton and Brooklyn like massive beards and Victorian bicycles and that type of thing.

I’d pick quite a streamlined, futuristic font, that gave off the vibes of “Now. Modern. Intelligent. Efficient. Lifestyles of the Rich, Modest, and Smart.”

I am not sure if you have a separate thread about the forum name, but I am not hot on the name “Phat”.
It seems quite dated – when I see it, all I think of is that former model who was once married to a music mogul who had that tv show, the “Baby Phat” designer woman.

I also am not sure that this play on the spelling of “fat” would help anyone who was searching for Fatwallet in a search engine… I would not in a million years think, “I see that Fatwallet.com is dead, so why don’t I type in ‘Phatwallet’ and see what comes up.”

To the Mods (whom I can’t alert directly due to a glitch),

This post might be about the same class action as an older thread: https://phatwalletforums.com/topic/119/pharmavite-naturemade-tripleflex-glucosamine-class-action-settlement

If they are about the same class action, each post contains unique information and they should be added together in one thread for the topic.

@mikk1, unfortunately I don’t have a VPN that I recommend…

I had a terrible experience with one highly-rated, security-conscious, subscription one, which I described in detail a number of years ago on the FW Technology subforum. I can’t recall the name.

I also have used Witopia on and off. Based in Virginia just a few miles from some highly official sites, it is perhaps not private-private as far as really being Private, but it does a good job of being reliable, easy to connect to, with lots of international nodes, rarely disconnecting, good chat support, not too expensive, provides the latest connection options, doesn’t bug subscibers with unnecessary emails, etc. I don’t do downloading, sharing, iffy stuff, sensitive reporting, etc., so I am okay with the possible tradeoffs in using them versus being extra-safe with something that is more geared to real cloaking but is more complex to manage.

However, I might try another service, since a node that I had used a fair bit isn’t working now. It’s been on my to-do list to look into.

For some reason, it’s hard to get an impartial, Consumer-Reports sort of grasp of the VPN market, because so many rating sites are biased and work for commission, and even the more impartial articles (such as on Lifehacker and various major technology magazines/blogs) only mention a handful of providers when they compare and contrast VPNs, and usually those articles are years old anyway.

I did a lot of research (at the time, which was several years ago now) before I selected and joined the one that ended up letting some kind of menace in and screwing my computer up (which I mentioned at the beginning of this post), so I don’t trust online ratings in this area much.

Also, there is a vaunted VPN comparison chart on the internet that is recommended a lot, I think even by sites like Brian Krebs’, but I found a number of mistakes and omissions in that chart about VPNs that I had already researched and been signed up for, so I gave the chart up, after initially being so glad that someone had put together an overview of all the providers.

We had some threads on FW Technology about VPNs that people liked. There are a few main ones that most people seemed to go for. Maybe “hide my a__” was one of them.

Which have you used, and liked or disliked?