I just joined the forum and am a bit surprised by the default behavior of the editor: it uses an obnoxiously-large font. Is there a way to fix this? I'm using Firefox 3.6.15 on Windows XP.
That is obnoxiously large. But I've never seen the editor look like that. Are you sure you didn't do something to your browser (like zoom the text size up) when you were on that page? (FF 5.0 here.)
No, I've done nothing special -- it is using the same settings for the other forums I visit and they have no such problem. I just changed the options to allow web sites to use their own fonts instead of my choices, but it made no difference.
Of course, someone will say "upgrade your browser". That's not so easy to do anymore when one uses lots of plugins -- I've learned the hard way that sometimes your favorite plugins don't work with the later versions of the browsers...
I don't feel that's worth the effort -- it appears to be something specific to this board and its setup. Two other boards I visit also use vBulletin and don't have this behavior. If you folks haven't seen this before, I suppose I'll just live with it -- but it is annoying...
That's always possible, of course, But since nobody else seem to experience this annoyance, if you took the suggestion and tried your browser in "safe mode" (I know what this is but I have no idea how to do it), at least we could rule out your browser as the source of the annoyance. (Or not.)
OK, I thought you meant to restart Windows in safe mode. Instead, there's a safe mode for Firefox which I had never heard of. I started it (via a command line of 'firefox -safe-mode') and I still have the same large-font behavior.
At the top of the Firefox window, click the Firefox button, go over to the Help menu and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled.... Firefox will start up with the Firefox Safe Mode dialog.
For Windows XP, click the Help menu and select Restart with Add-ons Disabled....
Note: You can also start Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down the shift key while starting Firefox.
If you do a search, you'll find out there are numerous ways of entering safe mode. There was no menu entry "Restart with Add-ons Disabled", so I had to use a different way. You do get a Safe Mode window when starting it as I did; regardless, it didn't help with the large-font problem.
It's not gremlins -- there's a real cause for it. Since others don't suffer from it, I agree it's probably some configuration setting on my end. But why does this site behave this way on my computer and other sites using the same vBulletin software (perhaps different versions) don't exhibit the problem?
Update 19 Sep 2011: I'm still running the same version of Firefox and have not updated any add-ons to Firefox in the time since I posted this problem. However, the problem has disappeared and I didn't really notice exactly when, as I had gotten accustomed to the problem. The only things I know of that have happened in the intervening time are a few system reboots (which didn't fix the problem originally, as that was an obvious thing to try).
Thus, the cause was probably local (because others don't see the problem) and remains unknown.