The new look: Should it stay or go?

[catya d]

I like the new board OK--I use a few others which are like it so feels familiar enough. But I also had gotten used to the old one too so either way's fine with me.

I do have 2 big thumbs up for some of the other layout changes incl. the more consistent, less haphazard sidebars and headers. Thanks, I feel listened to and am finding it easier to navigate around the site. Hope those changes will stay regardless of what happens to the message board part of it.

Me, I like these little guys......

VINYL WINDOWS

[Andy in NH]

Glad to see things are starting to fill in on the board. Can one assume that "sticky" (as in the icon for this thread) means troublesome and controversial, or something that just won't go away?

One more suggestion. It would be great if reply notifications had the body of the reply in them. i.e. I have the notification set on this thread and I get email messages that say that there has been a reply and give me a link to the thread. 'Kinda clogs up the inbox - which I don't need. Having the body of the reply in the notification messages would make better use of my time.

'Getting used to the new format - I'd keep it.

[Lisa (ND)]

Ok, after cruising the site for a couple days, i'm getting used to it and actually like it. Does seem like fewer posts though.

[BobG]

Glad to see things are starting to fill in on the board. Can one assume that "sticky" (as in the icon for this thread) means troublesome and controversial, or something that just won't go away?...'Getting used to the new format - I'd keep it.

Sticky refers to a sticky-note or Post-it note ... it's something that won't go away till the moderator feels it needs to come down. kinda like the yellow sticky notes I have all over the place to remind me to do this or that ... but I digress ...

[HB]

I use several other boards that have this format, although it was sort of nice to come to the old house web and see the familiar "original and unique" looking format.

One thing that's nice about this format is that with one click you can read all of the responses to a subject instead of havingto click and open each individual post. (unless it's a hot topic that spills onto additional pages)

I'm still having trouble seeing what's a new topic since my last visit though. It was nice to see the Bright Red NEW next to postings so you could quickly see if there was any topic of interest to you.

The old fromat also seems like it was more conducive to conducting a "chat" since you could reply to any individual posting within a topic, rather than replying to the whole topic. That way if the person you most wanted to communicate with came back to the site they could see your post directly below theirs and know that it might be a direct response to their comment, while the rest of the conversation just carried on further down the thread.

However, I'm not one to pass up free information unlesss it REALLY REALLY becomes ponderous to work with, so I'll still stick around.

PS. decreased visits on my part have been due to a corporate takeover and shakeup of my company from the top down in an order to completly revamp our corporate culture, coupled with the fact that the holidays have taken a lot of my time and have virtually stopped all restoration activities (so I have no questions to ask)

Happy Holidays!

[catya]

[quote="HB"]

The old fromat also seems like it was more conducive to conducting a "chat" since you could reply to any individual posting within a topic, rather than replying to the whole topic. That way if the person you most wanted to communicate with came back to the site they could see your post directly below theirs and know that it might be a direct response to their comment.
quote]

HB if you want to respond to someone specifically you can go to that persons post and click on "quote" in upper right, as I have done with your post. Not quite what you had in mind but still a nice feature, I think, being able to quote & respond directly to what someone's said.

[catya d]

Ken, I tried to reply to HB w/ quote --see above. Looks like a little glitch in the system.

Usually the quote will be bold or a different color and in quotation marks, and above the quote you'll see something like "so & so wrote on December 20 at 7:30 p.m."

[Lisa (ND)]

I like that you can tell by the yellow shaded page icon that there are new posts in a certain thread.

But, unless I'm missing something, once there, you have to scroll down all the posts on the last page and check the dates and times to see which ones are the new posts.

If there is a way to mark the specific posts that are new at each visit, that would be great.

[oldhouse]

I like that you can tell by the yellow shaded page icon that there are new posts in a certain thread.

But, unless I'm missing something, once there, you have to scroll down all the posts on the last page and check the dates and times to see which ones are the new posts.

If there is a way to mark the specific posts that are new at each visit, that would be great.

Lisa: When you're logged in, the index page of each section shows (as you note) a little yellow shaded page icon which indicates there are new posts in that thread. If you click on the same little yellow shaded icon, it takes you to the new posts that you haven't read yet.

This is all a bit too subtle for my taste ... it's easy to miss the new posts, and not obvious how you find them. This is something we will work on.

On a more general note, I just wanted to let everyone know I've been keeping up with this thread, for better or worse -- and I'll share some of my other thoughts tomorrow.

[Brunton]

Everyone else has pretty much said it all, so I'll just make my opinion short -

New look should go.