jcink font is too small

[Nebulous]

Noticed this on lots of jcink forums. The font is extremely tiny.

Of course I know I can fix that in my browser zoom settings, but I wonder why the tiny font is the default?

 

[Cory]

The default font size is 12px, which according to a lot of websites is indeed pretty small. I think most responsive web guides recommend a font size of about 16px for the body.

It probably was 12px by default for IPB 1.3 and John just never bothered to change it.

 

[Nebulous]

Tell him to get on that

 

[Arantor]

12px was the default 20 years ago when IPB 1.3 came out, but also especially in the roleplay world tiny fonts is still - sadly - trendy.

 

[Nomad]

When I visited jcink forum for the first time, it was really difficult to read the text, I was not used to that kind of text size on websites.

 

[Arantor]

It was all the rage in 2003 when screens were much smaller - 1024x768 was still pretty common, 1280x1024 was fairly common too - we hadn't gone widescreen at that point.

 

[Cory]

Tell him to get on that

I doubt he'd change it if it's been that way for this long and just leave it up to the skin designer to choose.

We have a font resizer script on my board that allows users to increase/decrease the font size, it was necessary after many complaints about how hard the text was to read.

 

[Cedric]

Not to mention Google is penalizing websites that have to small text to read. Screen sizes have changed and it seems Jcink is a bit stuck in the past on that matter.

 

[Sarah]

I have started to set my font on themes bigger to 16. We have a few members on ours who need the bigger font due to eye issues.

 

[Arantor]

There's actually not a lot of reason to dip below 16px (aka 1rem) for body text these days; with devices with ever-higher DPI counts and ever higher density of pixels, they tend to need to be scaled to be properly visible.

It's estimated that a third of adults in America and Europe have some visual impairment, and bigger text inevitably helps.

 

[Nebulous]

Not to mention Google is penalizing websites that have to small text to read. Screen sizes have changed and it seems Jcink is a bit stuck in the past on that matter.

Are they? No wonder I've never seen a jcink forum pop up in any search results.

 

[Cedric]

Are they? No wonder I've never seen a jcink forum pop up in any search results.

Yeah because back in the day people abused small fonts for black hat seo and masking keywords. Nowadays it's because of the screen sizes and how everything has to be big enough to comfortable read content.

 

[Arantor]

It also doesn't help that, by default, any style changes you add via the backend just get shoved in the page headers, causing you to load the entire CSS every single page which hurts some of the Core Web Vitals scores.

But my experience is that a significant proportion of the denizens of Jcink don't care, nor do they need to care because search engines are not their primary source of traffic.

 

[Uncrowned]

I didn't even know what Jcink was, but I now agree that the font is too small to use.

 

[Cory]

The designer of our skin thinks the small font is what makes part of our design flow well. I talked to her about increasing the size, but she didn't seem too concerned about it. Little members have complained about it thus far.

 

[Heatman]

Noticed this on lots of jcink forums. The font is extremely tiny.

Of course I know I can fix that in my browser zoom settings, but I wonder why the tiny font is the default?

Seriously, it's always very difficult for me to deal with such forums with small font. I don't read a lot of books including novels because of their small fonts. Trying to read anything in small fonts hurt my eyes very bad.