It's a Sad Story!

Sorry about that. I haven't been posting much since I went back to work.

Probably the move to the new forum will not help matters, if the archive fiasco of 2006 and earlier is any indication.

Wow.

I mean, wow.

This has to be the all-time worst forum site redesign I have ever experienced. I'd like to get my hands on the person who commissioned it, the person who "designed" it, and the person who approved it.

Thanks, AVS owners: you took the cleanest, most easily-read, most easily-navigated A/V forum on the web and turned it into yet another painful site clearly designed by your nephew on a broken BlackBerry tablet.

Bravo.

We will get used to it. What other choice do we have.

 

I just noticed they took away the ability to quote a message in a PM.

There are a lot of things missing. I assume that they will be slowly added back. I hope...

Multi-quote is now gone.

I don't see the pane of emoticons either as I'm typing this.

I agree, we'll get used to it. But I also agree with CitiBear. If it was working properly, why redesign it?

Myeh.....I'm not having strong feelings about the redesign one way or another. I was actually expecting something.....more different. Whatever. I'll reserve final judgement until I see if they add more and better editorial content. But I come here for the forums, so as long as all you guys still hang out here, it's fine.

If you want to see a once thriving, major forum that's just been completely neglected to death by its owner, check out the one at Sound and Vision Magazine. Hadn't been there for years because.....I found AVSForum.

Wajo - I'm not an expert at reading these site traffic metrics, but while the actual page views seem to be down a lot, the number of daily visitors seems to have stayed fairly steady. So I'm reading it that people still come here. They just click around less. Is that bad?

Maybe some of the user energy for discussion forums has been siphoned off by Facebook and Twitter?

If hafta say, I was feeling some withdrawal symptoms yesterday when I kept coming to AVS and hitting that "Temporarily Closed for Upgrade" page. Glad it's back.

Citibear - sorry for the disruption. Which pages are you finding hardest to navigate to? The Quickstart Guide may help, and I've found a lot of folks looking for their User CP are happy to find the "Subscriptions" link in the top right of the page. All of your existing subscriptions should have imported to help you find your usual hang out spots.


There is a quote button within the text editor for PMs, so you can cut and paste text in and reference it as a quotation, but no, there's not a single button click to directly export a post into a PM. Please spend some time in PMs and let us know if you have other feedback.

I created this post using the multiquote button that's found at the bottom right corner of each post. I can click "Multi" and after I've clicked all the posts I want to quote, I then click reply and they're assembled in my reply box. Give it a shot and let us know what you think. It also might help for you to try the Rich Text editor which you can switch to either by changing your forum preferences on any thread page, or by editing your preferences on your profile page (My Profile tab in the top navigation.)

I hear the, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" message, but as the start of the thread indicates, there were a few things broken. AVS continues to get incredible volumes of traffic, but needed a reboot to ensure it stays the #1 resource online. It's Day 1 of many - lot's of tweaks coming - thanks for bearing with us.

I'm using FireFox 13 and what I find annoying is that within any thread (like this one) the width of the first post is constrained to the leading edge of the "Currently Viewing" box in the upper right of the screen. All posts that follow it are displayed to the full width of the browser window. This is particularly annoying for any informational threads that have a long first post. I've gone through the profile settings and toggled the selections for thread widths, all to no avail -- the width of the first post in any thread is always constrained to a narrow width by that "Currently Viewing" box.

Is this just an issue with FireFox? Do other people see this with other browsers?

EDIT:
Never mind, I see the issue. I use AdBlock on FireFox and when I turn it off I see that all that blank space on the right side of the screen is actually filled with adverts. AdBlock may block them but the space is not recovered for the column width because that "Currently Viewing" widow is still open and place-holding the column.
Edited by Kelson - 6/6/12 at 11:34am

You must have an adblocker, as not only do I have the "currently viewing" box, but there are ads the same width as the currently viewing box down the side of the browser window. In my case, the first 5 posts in this thread are narrower.

I also use FF w/ad blocker and I see what you mean about the OP, it's a MESS! The width is now limited by that "currently viewing" window. Between the no editing time frame and the limited with of the OP I can see this new version is NOT meant for up datable OPs:(
And did I say how much I dislike having to push MORE almost every time to get to my most used emoticons? I also really dislike the 10 minutes(or whatever) since the last post. Just give me the time and I can figure it out myself. For example it was a PIA to figure out if Kelson had edited his post before dare2be added his post, since when edits are done it shows the actual edit time but posts show the xx minutes time

You can turn off that right column advertising, if you are an AVS Club Member.

See here:

Yes I do use AdBlock. I edited my post above yours to explain this before there were any replies but you were probably typing when I did so.
I agree with you about the post time stamps. As I noted in my post in the other thread you can mouse over the time stamp to see the traditional date/time stamp, why not let me select that as the default.

As far as the width problem messing up the display, it's not just the first post of the thread, but the first post on each page of the thread. Of course that goes for the forum page that lists the threads -- they are all constrained to the "main column" because of the advert column on the right. I found in the "Getting Started" post that if you become an AVS Member you can turn off the ads in your profile and regain the full width of the screen for all posts.

That might be worth it. Too much screen space is lost otherwise. Apparently the link to become an AVS Club Member isn't working yet.

Strange behavior - under "Activity," the fifth item was last posted in February. Under "Subscriptions," nothing actually new had a green arrow, but lots of things with most recent posts of a week or so ago, had green "First new post" arrows, that took me to their first posts, which were usually months old. I miss the "User CP" button. "Subscriptions" is not the same. I miss the forum nav at the bottom of the page. I am glad that we can now quote the quotes within quotes. My only real dislike with the old forum is that it timed out so quickly, and would lose track of things unread in ALL forums, when it timed out. I wonder if there is any chance that will be better? Also, the print in the reply box is smaller, just enough to be annoying to me. I miss the note telling me the last time I logged on. I'm not sure I like it that I can now edit posts that are many days old.

For me, the biggest negative by far is the lack of the retro blue color scheme. My eyes strain easily with PC monitors. The retro blue was very easy on my eyes for long periods. The two skins we are now permitted are just to harsh and not kind to my eyes.

And yes, like kjbawc, I find the text size of the edit window to be overly small. If it were at least the same size as the post text that would be OK. Unfortunately, there is a lot not to like with the new forum software,

Your posted reply did NOT show up on my Subscriptions thread list. Are we no longer automatically subscribed to a thread, by posting to it? I already miss "User CP" so much - it listed all new posts, in my subscribed threads, and all my most recent posts. I can't find anything that lists my subscribed threads, with new posts. UGH!

I, too, miss the old "retro" color scheme. Both new schemes are harder to read.
Many adjustments, which are not coming easy. I guess I'm old and resistant to change, but I have not yet found any changes that i have found worth it.

Yes! The default is absolutely awful! The black option isn't all that bad, but you can't seem to get it without logging in (I don't like to log in unless I have something to post - which isn't very often); and the white text is not as easy on the eyes as the yellow was. I greatly preferred the retro scheme.

While the majority here in the DVDR forum seemed to use RETRO apparently we were the oddballs at AVS(sound familiar.....I mean who else uses DVDRs....... ) anyway from the statistics I saw the vast majority either didn't care or never bothered to change the theme from default while RETRO was overwhelming at the bottom I'm using BLACK now but don't really care for it so much. Add to this all the missing features with this new version and all the extra work required to do things and I'm just not caring to post as much as I use to
AVS can do whatever the heck they want and they don't seem to be interested in longtime members comments so while I'm not going to totally go away I think I'll take this excuse to do other things with the majority of the time I spent here answering questions and adding comments. Kind of sad but again I've checked to see if some of my major complaints could have workarounds and the answer is always a resounding NO. No one seems to be answering my big question about editing old posts but it's my vivid recollection that in the near future we will NOT be able to update posts more than a few minutes old(again because of apparently a few bad apples that are deleting their posts or editing them down to nothing). I had always thought this site was visited by mostly professionals that would only update a old post if something is out of date or needed modification(such as what I used to do with my signature thread(which I had to remove because I don't want it on every post I made) or Wajos sticky thread or the many other reference type threads I see at AVS)) but I guess if this forum is being overrun with the type that would do such a thing I should probably think of moving on

I won't be totally going away but with this new version it's just not as pleasant to look at or add comments so I plan on taking more a viewing approach, we'll see how it goes
Oh Kelson, one advantage to not logging on(something I automatically did before) is that the post times are actual dates(not the stupid minutes/hours) without having to hover over the time. Well at least I got back one feature I missed from the past version.....

It's not that we are old farts. We are just well beyond the days of Windows 386 where each new version of the software was eagerly anticipated because what we had was so dreadful as it was being developed and there was little to no content. These days, the software is just the tool to create and access the content. The content is king, not the tool -- the tool should be "invisible". When the tool is changed so substantially that it disrupts the established flow of the content creation/access processes, people notice and get pissed. Nobody likes it when their tool gets in the way of their work and they have to readjust their work to fit the new tool. I wish all these software people would take a lesson from Apple -- they got the Mac OS interface "right" early on and left it alone. I confess I do get very annoyed with people who complain that a clean and stable interface needs to be updated because the "look" is "so 2000". Most often that update is nothing more than some glitz, a new color scheme and moving the tools all around so you can't find them. How would these programmers like it if they came into work one day and found that their entire cubicle was rearranged to fit someone else's idea of how they should work.
Totalitarian edit restrictions would kill a large number of living informational threads. I would hope they would recognize this and grant selective editing access to the keepers of those threads. I guess I don't see what the problem is if someone deletes a bad or erroneous post. And as for lost features, why do I now have to go to the AVS Home page to get into Messaging? We used to be able to click into Messaging from any thread page (was in the upper right). Now if I want to send a PM while in the forums I either have to find a post by my intended recipient so I can click on his name or exit the forums to the Home Page so I can get into messaging.

I log in automatically when I visit the forums. If I don't log in I get no information as to new posts in the threads I subscribe to or monitor. Without logging in, I am also forced to use the white-skin and cannot switch to the black-skin. Using the white-skin is like looking into the sun for me.

Just as I predicted, the archives from 2006 and before are now totally gone.

Before:



Now:



The tool that Kelson mentions is really sucking right now.

I also noticed the archives are now gone I hope it's only temporary until they get this new platform totally functional, although if the answer is the same as all my past questions the archive is probably history since no one other than us old farts care about electronics as old as 2006 hey man, get with the times, this is a disposable society.....

Kelson, you are entirely correct, by not logging on one is stuck with the even worse default skin but I suppose that's more reason to quickly browse and move on...
AFA updating old posts, I use to frequent another much smaller forum that had the policy of no editing after 20?? minutes, it sucked! If you posted something that was incorrect it was etched in stone(I suppose one could PM a mod to have it changed ) because of this restriction I rarely posted their, in fact just the other day I finally removed my bookmark for that site which is basically a death nail, if I don't see it I'll never visit it. I don't think I was the only one, at one time they had daily posts but within the last year (incidentally after a forum upgrade) their traffic came to a crawl. Lately the DVDR forum part was lucky to get a post every other week and the little posts they had basically weren't about standalone DVDRs anyway!

Maybe because I posted so much I was invited to try AVS's new forum a week?? before it went live, it was there that I became aware of the upcoming no editing policy upcoming for AVS and again unless something changes it will be enacted at a later date. As for the reason for our upgrade... it was stated it was for security apparently the previous version we used was very much out of date and prone to a possible attack by some board teen residing in Hungry, Nigeria or wherever. Again a few bad apples spoil the bushel

I am just now realizing how much you miss if you don't log in. in the past I would only log in if I wanted to post, but now I have to log in to get rid of the glaring blue/white color scheme (for the tolerable black/white scheme). I don't have my login info memorized; I use a password program. So, if I just want to read & don't want to suffer the blue/white, I have to open the password program and line up the login box. Only then will my eyes be soothed (till next time!)
BTW, asking to "remember me" has never worked; I have a cookie program, but have it set to allow all cookies from AVS.

I found a way to slightly mitigate the ad space issue...I set my posts per page to a higher number, so that a smaller percentage of posts per page are shrunk by the advertising. Since I follow most of my threads by using the "goto first unread post" button, I barely even see the ads at the top of the page anymore.

From reading posts in the support forum it appears that the actual hosting software and web management has been outsourced (turned over) to Huddle. Interface modifications like new skins, etc. will be up to them. The AVS guys will just concentrate on content issues. I'm starting to get used to the interface and how things work. It won't take long to get acclimated. However the two things I see that I will never get used to are the glaring white text on the black-skin and the eye-squinting size of the text in the edit window.
One of the first things I did was change the post display count from the default of 30 to 100.
This works perfectly. The currently visiting box and recent review stuff is all gone. The only thing to watch for is that the setting is non-specific for AVS so it remains to be seen whether or not this screws up the other websites I visit. If it becomes a problem, I suppose I could dig into the instructions and create an AVS Forum specific style.

It may be browser specific, but one workaround for the small text in the edit window would be to increase the zoom level of the browser while you are composing a post.

Other than the looks (which I'll get used to, as I have with every other forum that changed on me) and a few missing features, I kind of like the new forums. There's some added functionality that I like.