To be proactive, I think it would be worthwhile to have a thread where people can post specific ideas about how they would like to see the board format develop to enhance its usability. Probably pointless to ask people to only post constructively here rather than venting, but I'll ask anyhow. Please!
For me, the big problem is that it appears that I can no longer quickly access as much information as I could in the old thread & hybrid views. I have limited time to browse around message boards, and following people, etc, only leads me to a small subset of what I'd be interested in reading. With the new format, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of the interesting posts I used to see, and I have a feeling I'm missing the majority of the ones that aren't from the few posters I follow. BlueMonster described concisely the way I was able to do this before, so quotes below are from him, The question going forward, is whether features can be added to allow me to quickly find all or most of what I'd be interested in reading, without having to go through every thread post-by-post.
--Quoted from BlueMonster (rearranged a bit):
Feature Suggestion: I want to see a SIMPLE LIST of the people who have responded to an individual POST
Feature Suggestion: I want a VIEW that shows anyone who has responded to or quoted MY post
I am very interesting in a topic but I simply don't have time or patience to slog through 30-40 posts to find good stuff. There are complex sub discussions within a thread that can be easily following in thread view that are a real challenge to follow in topic view.
When I look at a thread I can see which posters commented WITHIN THE THREAD and I can selectively read them. (I cannot do this anymore. I can follow a poster but I have no idea what the discussion was there were responding to without reading the entire thread)
In thread view I can also see in one second exactly who responded to my post within a thread. I can read ONLY those who responded to the thread (there is no way to do this in topic view)
In threadview I can see in one second which post WITHIN THE THREAD garnered a lot of responses and just read that subthread discussion. I can not longer do that without reading the entire thread and piecing together who was responding to whom. When thread get over 30-40 posts long that is too much like WORK because they are scattered throughout the thread.
--end comments from Bluemonster
For me, the big problem is that it appears that I can no longer quickly access as much information as I could in the old thread & hybrid views. I have limited time to browse around message boards, and following people, etc, only leads me to a small subset of what I'd be interested in reading. With the new format, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of the interesting posts I used to see, and I have a feeling I'm missing the majority of the ones that aren't from the few posters I follow. BlueMonster described concisely the way I was able to do this before, so quotes below are from him, The question going forward, is whether features can be added to allow me to quickly find all or most of what I'd be interested in reading, without having to go through every thread post-by-post.
--Quoted from BlueMonster (rearranged a bit):
Feature Suggestion: I want to see a SIMPLE LIST of the people who have responded to an individual POST
Feature Suggestion: I want a VIEW that shows anyone who has responded to or quoted MY post
I am very interesting in a topic but I simply don't have time or patience to slog through 30-40 posts to find good stuff. There are complex sub discussions within a thread that can be easily following in thread view that are a real challenge to follow in topic view.
When I look at a thread I can see which posters commented WITHIN THE THREAD and I can selectively read them. (I cannot do this anymore. I can follow a poster but I have no idea what the discussion was there were responding to without reading the entire thread)
In thread view I can also see in one second exactly who responded to my post within a thread. I can read ONLY those who responded to the thread (there is no way to do this in topic view)
In threadview I can see in one second which post WITHIN THE THREAD garnered a lot of responses and just read that subthread discussion. I can not longer do that without reading the entire thread and piecing together who was responding to whom. When thread get over 30-40 posts long that is too much like WORK because they are scattered throughout the thread.
--end comments from Bluemonster
