The users make me think
I mentioned back in January over at Liquid Designs that I opened a forum to allow discussion on fluid design with CSS and to accept site submissions (as opposed to the previous system of accepting submissions with a contact form). I figured this would end the trend of dozens of people submitting fixed-width sites every week, but I guess I was wrong. That forum has been up for a couple months now, and the only thing that has changed is that now I get less submissions… I still get just as many fixed-width sites.
If you don't know already, Liquid Designs is only intended for liquid and elastic width designs… it says so all over the site. The current continuous drove of fixed-width sites being submitted by users means that people are actually registering for an account with the site, activating the account via e-mail, logging in to the forum, and posting a new topic in the "submit a site" section, just to post a site that will never be allowed in the gallery. And apparently all these people speak and read English, considering that they manage to do all that.
Isn't this a bit ridiculous? I really don't know what to do next… I've run out of sites in my queue so I haven't been updating the gallery much lately, and I don't know where else to look for new sites (Liquid Designs really is the only resource for this on the net). Anyone have any ideas?
In other news, I passed the 3k mark today:
I guess that makes me famous, eh?
I get the feeling that all the gallery sites are increasingly about building pagerank for the submitters. Perhaps you get all these submissions because people see LiquidDesigns as just another link to their site. It might be time to view all those bogus submissions as spam, rather than people that just can't or won't read.
I think you should tell submitters to fix other probs with their sites as well. A fluid website should be not the only criteria …
That's a really good point and I think you are right. I just don't know what people are thinking… if I say I won't put fixed width sites in the gallery, I won't do it!
Johan: Unfortunately I just don't have the time to inspect every site submitted and get into a discussion with the designer about things to fix, especially when the person submitting the site is not always the designer and designers are busy people. Sites in the gallery are just examples, not signs of quality… there's a "hall of fame" for that. I actually like the idea that some of the sites in the gallery have noticeable problems… it reminds us of mistakes not to make.
would be fun to see how many liquids are to be seen in the 10 most known CSS showcase galls.
I can't help you with your resource but well done on becoming famous. Look out Tom Cruise.
I had exactly the same problem when my separate review site was open. Although there were two forms, one for blogs/etc and one for other review sites - both completely different with different criteria and a notice above them saying "this form is for [bla]" - I still got lots of blogs submitted through the review site form.
I don't have any good ideas on getting round it, but I thought I'd share the pain.
Well, i took up the challenge
Maybe people think that if their website is about drinks, the static-width layout doesn't matter. I think you might be able to explain what you mean by 'liquid' a little more clearly.
prof, you are giving me some insight here. The site you submitted in the forum is not liquid… it's 760 pixels wide, all the time. Maybe what I need to do is provide a visual definition of what a liquid design is…
Joshua: That's a good point, but since I have never received a website about drinks I can't expect that anyone would make that connection.
too bad, i indeed took liquid to be able to make the window smaller and still stay within the website
and indeed, my site won't go any further down than 760 pixels.. but it fills up your screen with black on both sides if you have a larger screen 
thanks for clarifying.