New Forum Structure

for me its not that its dead just that you now get a forum section with the following threads next to each other

LOL: If this had happened in a US airport, compared to Glasgow...
Question :Holiday in NYC/Boston =D
and then
Serious: Police: Woman forced into sex with son

for me at least its quite a stretch to see commonality in the section, to a degree it takes away from the serious threads serious nature. However I'm now using multi tag filters in my favourites as a workaround and I'll have to remember to adjust them as tags come and go.

 

Serious as a heart attack my ol' son.

Still look at the odd post through my homepage (rss feeds, they haven't balls'd those up, yet.) and I decided to have a look today to see if it had been fixed at all. Can't help but say I'm disappointed.

Constructice criticism: You have far too many subforums now, admittedly you have renamed them tags/filters and thrown together a fairly garish interface to obfuscate navigation, but that doesn't help the fact that there are now far more subforums. They could really do with bing pruned down some.

A nested list structure that showed forums and subforums would aid navigation a fair chunk, keep tags if you so like, so you have the option to view the forums as a whole, or as subsets.

This will most likely be ignored, but I don't care that much anymore, I used to quite enjoy having a browse through the topics, used to do it alt least twice daily, mebby helping out in electronics when I could, I found it relaxing, whereas the new format just isn't, its structure is messy and unrefined, it tries to force feed me topics that I don't wish to read and swamps out slower threads. It looks slightly cleaner at the index at the cost of ease of use and that just isn't a comprimise we shoulod be willing to make. Substance over style anytime.

The argument that its new doesn't wash with me, a blank page may be new, it doesn't make it an imrovement or any good at all for that matter.

 

Its growing on me, but as of yet, I've never used the filters.

Also, do we really need the lists of 100's of pages per forum? can't we just have 5 pages of threads instead?

 

Er, if you set the 'From the...' setting at the bottom of the page to something other than 'the beginning' then it'll reduce the number of pages...

 

User Control Panel/Edit Options/Thread Display Options/Default Thread Age Cut Off

 

I'm finding I'm not really using the tags to navigate much, but that's mainly because I browse using the "New Posts" link and the tags are not activated.
Is this something that can be turned on?

 

At some point, are you expecting it to filter the new posts or take you to the forum with that tag activated?

 

I was thinking "take you to the forum with that tag activated"

 

mm sorry guys to find this BUT Bit tech must BE damm Perfect

here we go photos say what I mean



LOL fix it guys Come on.. plesase I can't be happy with it.. It must be damm perfect ...

WOOOOOOOOOOOT bit tech is the best

 

Thanks for spotting that Computerking, I shall fix it as soon as I can.

 

No problem man that is my work to help my family ( bit tech )... It's my job here watch my family and take care of them

yeah keep moving forword bit-techy

Don't worry I watch every damm thing going on here...

 

I have a suggestion, don't know if this has already come up, but it would be good if you could have multiple tags instead of just one on a thread. Say, you could have a question related to music, or need help with picking a TV. It wouldn't really help browsing I suppose, but it would make it easier to decide what section it should belong to exactly. It would also help my cravings to categorise everything as completely as possible

 

Me really.. REALLY not like.

 

Maybe suggest a way to improve it then? That would be slightly helpful.

 

Personally, I think the images for the filters look really cheesy. Also reminds me of a TV listings website type thing - Would be a lot niser if they were just words, or.. something.

Also the forum index page looks really really empty, and as well all know, this forum is FAR from empty - Would be cool to have that back the way it was.

I dont think the Quote etc buttons fit well with the theme, maybe just make them icons without the background or text.

Just my thoughts, I much preferred the old version!

 

I still feel hardware and software should be split.

 

In my opinion, thread tags should never be used for forum consolidation. The intended use of the tags is to further subcategorize data within their respective forums. Say we have the modding forum how it used to be and we could have "casemod" "electronics" "help" and things like that for example.

An even better example would be photography. You can still have subforums for special cases like the POTM in order to not have the photography section cluttered up by 80% of POTM posts. Then you could have "critique/feedback" "equipment" "technical" "portrait" etc etc as your normal photography forum and have a special place for the POTM.

Using thread tags in the way it's being used now can reduce forum index clutter and create a "clean" look on the main page, but the forums themselves are an amalgamated mess. There's less of a structure and too many categories overlap. Threads will start to drop off the main page a lot quicker (and not a lot of users look past page 1 of the thread index unless they're looking for something specific, which can then be found with a proper thread tag implementation) and it will reduce user participation in a lot of threads that show promise.

This brings to a head the "design > functionality" stage that the internet is going through right now in regards to web 2.0. I understand that it wasn't a goal to "web 2.0"-ize the forums with the new changes, but I do feel that it was done in the name of aesthetics rather than end-user functionality. The question you have to ask is "does it make the forums easier to use?" The answer, at least for me, is no.

 

Would it be possible that when you are viewing a thread you could make the tag at the top a link, rather than having to exit the thread then click one of the tags.

 

Fixed.

Done.

 

Now turned on.