Why do I see scroll bars?

[artlover]

Hi, I'm having a small problem. Most places on your new site everything works great. I registered right away and I've wandered around quite a bit already and I'm amazed at how much stuff is here. All-in-all, it looks real good. But when I come to the forums and display a thread, I suddenly see left-right scroll bars at the bottom of my screen. Why is that? Is there any way for me to get rid of the darn things?

By the way, I love your new web site! What a great idea this was. I can see it'll be a great resource for just about everyone in the New Mexico arts and entertainment community.

Thanks!

[webmaster]

Hi, artlover...

The answer to your question is really simple the let-right scroll bars you're seeing are almost certainly caused by the fact that you're running at a fairly low screen resolution (something like 800 x 600) whereas our portal really wants a higher resolution than that... at least 1024x768.

We did a lot of work during our development and testing phase in an effort to lose the scroll bars everywhere; but the truth is there are still a few places where they do show up. The simple fact is that at 800x600 our forums software sometimes wants and needs just about every pixel it can find just to fit into that small screen size. And when you add the width of our portal software's sidebar column to a screen that's already set at low resolution to begin with, it makes it nearly impossible for everything to fit in the width of your screen.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of possible solutions to this problem... The easiest is just to increase the resolution of characters you see on your screen from 800x600 to 1024x768. It's very likely that your screen will support that resolution and doing that will give you much more room on your screen but the things that appear there WILL be a about 28% smaller in size.

To do that, minimize all of your windows and then when you see your windows desktop again, right-click on it in any blank space where there is not currently an icon. When you do that a pop-up menu appears and the last option on that menu is "[Properties]". Left click on [Properties]. When you do that, the Windows "Display Properties window will appear.

Next look at the top of the new window for the tab labeled "[Settings]" and click on that. When you do that, a new page will display that includes your current display settings. On the left side about halfway down that window, you'll see a block labeled "Screen Resolution". It shows you your current screen resolution and provides a slider bar to let you increase or decrease it.

If my guess is correct, you'll see that the screen resolution window says you're currently viewing everything at 800x600 resolution. To increase your resolution, just left-click to the right of that slider anywhere on the slider bar itself and the slider tab should move to the right.

If it does NOT move to the right, then left-click on the slider tab itself and HOLD your left mouse button down as you carefully drag that slider to the right. When the new resolution shows 1024x768, release your mouse button and the slider should stay there. Then click the [OK] button at the bottom of this window and the window will close.

If all goes well, everything on your screen will immediately be displayed at the new, higher resolution and of course you'll notice right away that things have gotten smaller and much more compact.

Now, go look at our portal and forums. I'll bet your scroll bars have vanished now, right? So now you know the first and best solution to this problem. As time passes, more and more PC software packages and websites are requiring a resolution at least this high anyway. So, you might just want to leave your PC set that way. If you find you're having a hard time reading some sites at that resolution, you may want to consider putting a larger 19" or 21" monitor on your Christmas wish list. Maybe someone who loves you will spring for the $300 or so that a larger flat screen monitor costs these days.

There is a second option as well. You can also temporarily disable our left sidebar and remove it from your screen while you're working in our forums. That's easy to do too, but what id DOES mean is that you won't have all that helpful information or the features of our sidebar available to you in our forums. Still, you CAN turn the sidebar back on again whenever you need it, so that's not a bad alternative either.

To temporarily remove our sidebar, just left-click on the "[Quick Links]" button in your Forums menu bar. Near the bottom of that menu, you will see an option labeled "Sidebar Off" Just left-click that option and our sidebar will temporarily go away and everything should once again fit on your screen without left-right scrollbars at the bottom.

Later, when you need the sidebar back again, just return to the [Quick Links] menu again and click on what is now a "Sidebar On" option and your sidebar will suddenly reappear!

That's all there is to it. Now you know how to eliminate the left-right problem in at least two ways!

Good luck to you, friend. I hope you continue to enjoy our new site. Have fun there and thanks a lot for the kind words about the site. As you may realize, we've worked very hard to create the finest new website that we could!

Best Professional Regards,
T.G. Platt
Steppin' Out WebMaster