WTF with this forum these days

Timo Ulkuniemi

Timo Ulkuniemi

Junior
Jul 30, 2012
392
6
18
Tampere Finland
Hello

i was reading this forum with my iPad and found two interesting threads - marked them "subscribe" - they showed as "subscribed" on my iPad - now onw hour later I am on my desktop - only to find I have NO SUBSCRIBED THREADS - the old ones obviously disappeared when this forum changed.

Such a pity - I really really liked it and found lots of interesting reading.


Simply SAD - thanks for all the good while it lasted.
 
Timo Ulkuniemi said:
Hello

i was reading this forum with my iPad and found two interesting threads - marked them "subscribe" - they showed as "subscribed" on my iPad - now onw hour later I am on my desktop - only to find I have NO SUBSCRIBED THREADS - the old ones obviously disappeared when this forum changed.

Such a pity - I really really liked it and found lots of interesting reading.


Simply SAD - thanks for all the good while it lasted.
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Hi Timo,

Where are you seeing that you have no subscribed threads, and which threads were you trying to subscribe to?
Looks like you're subscribed to 89, both pre and post SW changes.

Thanks
David
 
David Karol said:
Hi Timo,

Where are you seeing that you have no subscribed threads, and which threads were you trying to subscribe to?
Looks like you're subscribed to 89, both pre and post SW changes.

Thanks
David
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Hello

Thank you for responding - like I wrote, I could not find the two threads, that I subscribed about one hour earlier on my iPad - next morning they popped out - so perhaps there was some kind lag or bugs bunny - who knows.

But I still have no clue of how to find the old subsribed threads - only those two newly subscribed are visible.

It would be nice to have them all in a list where the ones with new posts would be on top - like in those merry old days.

While I have your attention - can you tell us about the forum activity before and after the changeover - to me this seems like a quiet place compared to what it used to be. I might be wrong ... surprise me.

Thank you
 
Timo Ulkuniemi said:
While I have your attention - can you tell us about the forum activity before and after the changeover - to me this seems like a quiet place compared to what it used to be. I might be wrong ... surprise me.u
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Hi Timo,

I think it's a matter of bad timing, rather than reduced activity. According to our statistics from both Google and Cloudflare the usage is more or less steady, and "useful" activity (e.g. clicking links and looking at pages) is up - especially on mobile, since the new version of vBulletin is way better at mobile. Overall traffic to all forums has been slowing, as a lot of discussion has shifted to Facebook. Just the way things are going!

Please keep bringing us problems, bugs, etc. We pretty much had to upgrade to this new version of vBulletin to remain high performance enough on the modern Internet and not become a security problem. We delayed as long as possible, because vB has a small development team so earlier releases didn't have all the features we needed stable. Fortunately the developers are pretty responsive and David is getting regressions fixed as quickly as possible - and working on new features every day. The new software is also much faster and more efficient in most areas, and will become even better after we polish our integration with nginx and Cloudflare.

In the end the interface is going to take some adjusting for everyone, especially for us on the back end, but switching to vB Version 5 is much better in the long run for this forum. Many thanks for your patience as we clumsily transition, and make improvements. We love this community and are working on ideas to make this format continue to make sense for all y'all in a Facebook world in the future.

Thanks again to our wonderful advertisers as well who make it possible to keep this place up.
 
Sorry, Bennett. V5 sucks. Period. In many ways it's worse on mobile although the amount of white space makes it look nicer on small screens. As for functionality, on the user side it sucks.
 
I agree with Tim, this interface sucks balls compared to where we were previously.

Seriously, I want to know how other people navigate this site.

You are reading a thread and get to the bottom of the page. If there is another page, how do you tell what page you are on? If you mouse over the page buttons, the one that lights up blue is the page you are on, but why is it not blue to start with? Why should I have to mouse over it to figure out where the hell I am?

So I finally get to the bottom of the last page of the thread. Now what? The old forum interface had both a crumb trail where you could click to go back to the section you were reading or the main forum AND it had a combo box that would allow you to select the page you wish to view. Now, there is just NOTHING THERE. I had asked about implementing the crumb trail so we could use that to go back, and I'm sure that is on David's list of things to do... but in the mean time I have to scroll back up to the top of the page to navigate somewhere else (the "GO TO TOP" link helps with that). That is just retarded. I'm at the bottom of the page, this is the logical place for me to be after reading the thread, there should be simple navigation here to get me somewhere else. It should not be a dead end.

Ergo, how does everyone else navigate? Am I missing something that will make my life wonderful and glorious for browsing the forum? I ask because right now it feels like this interface was designed by someone who doesn't bother actually reading the content on the forums.

I know for a fact that I read less and comment less on this forum today with this new interface than I did with the old one. I'm not suggesting that we should go back, but we definitely need to improve the user's interaction with the site. Tim is exactly right that this user interface just sucks.
 
Josh Millward said:
You are reading a thread and get to the bottom of the page. If there is another page, how do you tell what page you are on? If you mouse over the page buttons, the one that lights up blue is the page you are on, but why is it not blue to start with?

The old forum interface had both a crumb trail where you could click to go back to the section you were reading or the main forum
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Josh,

Thanks for pointing out button issue. This will be fixed today.
Initial pass at crumb trails are set on our test server, we'll roll this out once it's validated with other bundled changes.

thanks
David
 
I agree it's pretty harsh right now, but I'm sure David and Bennett will fix things as needed. vb5 is an ugly beast and needs a lot of work to make it friendly.
But while we're all bitching... one thing I'm not a fan of currently is the fixed width. I use high-res monitors and having a little forum strip in the middle with tons of white space on either side is something I'd like to see fixed. I'd like to see the forum threads and posts adjust to the width of the monitor.
 
Andrew Broughton said:
But while we're all bitching... one thing I'm not a fan of currently is the fixed width.
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While I do understand what you are saying Andy, and I do understand why you might want it to be wider, I like the width that it is. Honestly, I have trouble reading lines that stretch all across my screen, my eyes have trouble tracking those long strings of text. The shorter width is appreciated by me.

Also, I re-read my post above and it seems to come across rather harshly. Certainly more harshly than what I was feeling when I wrote it. Sorry about that, apparently my morning caffeine injection had not taken hold to settle my nerves yet this morning. :lol:

Thank you for the work you are doing David. We all do appreciate it. I know I'm certainly looking forward to having better navigation implemented.
 
Josh Millward said:
While I do understand what you are saying Andy, and I do understand why you might want it to be wider, I like the width that it is. Honestly, I have trouble reading lines that stretch all across my screen, my eyes have trouble tracking those long strings of text. The shorter width is appreciated by me.
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My suggestion would not stop you from resizing your browser to whatever width you like.
BTW, I just checked, and I guess it's not really fixed-width currently, it just maxes out at a certain width. Try resizing your browser window to see what I mean. A change to a stylevar or two should probably fix it.
My suggestion allows you the reader to decide how wide they'd like it.
 
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Thanks for being there for me Andrew. Yea, I realized after I made that post that what I meant was a "New Posts" button as in posts made since my last visit. A function that the previous software did have. Unread posts is not the same thing as more posts than not are unread for a reason. Still, all in all I sense that this software change is for the people who use this forum on their phones and thus a bit too stripped down for my purposes.
 
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