Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.

[ccexplore]

Is it possible to stop the whole page jumping around when the news ticker changes?

namida's probably more knowledgeable in this.  Collapsing the news section may be your best option for now, and the forum seems to remember your preference so you don't have to do it every time you are on the home page (well, except to actually see the news...).  Things jump around because different news items take up different heights so the news section's height isn't fixed, and the ticker cycles through the news.  I'm not sure there's a way to make the browser minimize the amount of jumping in those situations.  I think there are admin settings to disable having the news ticker cycling through multiple news items, or to increase the amount of time (currently 15 seconds I think?) between cycling items in the news ticker, but they are stopgap measures at best.  The latter setting could potentially be something we try though, if expanding/collapsing the news section yourself gets inconvenient.

The interesting thing is that I never noticed it myself until you point it out, because I rarely stay on the main page for that long.  I started drilling down into recent posts or boards pretty quickly.

[ccexplore]

Okay, I sort of "fixed" this by making all 4 current news items take up the same number of lines (3).  It's not perfect as things like emoticons can affect line height as well, but close enough that the jumps should be less noticeable at least.  Note:  on small devices like mobile phones it may still not work due to word wrapping, I haven't bothered to look.  As part of doing this, I need to move the news item with the staff contact information into a post since it's too much to try distilling into 3 lines without getting cramped up there.

It is not the permanent solution we want for obvious reasons.  Admins with better skills/time than me can perhaps look and see if the default style can be updated to make the news section fixed in height rather than based on how many lines a news item needs.  This approach of course has its disadvantages too, so I'm not honestly sure that's the way we want to go.  It would be interesting to see how many people actually pay attention to the news ticker (ie. for its usefulness), and how many people are getting annoyed by the news ticker's cycling causing the main page to jump.  There's no point in working hard on this if for the people who are actually annoyed, collapsing the news ticker section is an acceptable solution.

[namida]

It's something I can look into at some point. My guess is a fix would need to use CSS, which is something I'm still quite new to, but there *should* be a way hopefully.

[Clam]

I don't read the news (the years-old "news" on the previous forum rather turned me off it ) so just collapsing the ticker works fine for me . Thanks for the tip - I just assumed it'd reset to displaying the news each time you loaded the page.