Honest feedback: Sorry, this new forum sucks

[Zonie]

"Mr. McKittrick, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."

 

I used to click on "my content" and see what I wanted to see, only that and got my fix. If I had more time, I'd look at new stuff.

Now I cannot see what I want when I log in. Too much work. Tried to set it up but it doesn't show it how I want to see it.

 

"The more you try to overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

 

My drain is plugged.

 

Sometimes change is not good.

 

Losing interest.

 

edit: upon posting this, I noticed my avatar is clipped.

 

Edited July 18, 2019 by Zonie

[Albert]

I'm sorry you feel this way, but there's quite a bit of flexibility in the activity streams (as they are called) to fine tune what you're looking for you.  You can name and save new streams, and you can even set one of them as your default.  What is it you want to see?  I can help you see what you want to see.  Simply saying "this new forum sucks" isn't particularly helpful.

 

I had no choice but to update the forum software, it was four years out of date and this was causing a multitude of problems.  Overall I think it's significantly better than the old software, but as this version was completely rewritten from scratch, there is a fair bit that's different.  There are certainly some thing I don't like about it (such as the messenger), but there's unquestionably many improvements as well.  My choices were to upgrade the forum, move it to some other software (which would have been a nightmare), or take it down entirely.

 

 ..Al

[Deemar]

I thought it was just me, I haven't been here in a while and when I tried to view the newest topics, I got a bunch of strange posts in a list. I look at the topic title and read the post but I really just want the topics listed in chronological order like they used to be. I tried restricting it to just showing content but I don't see how I can change it to display only topic titles and not individual posts.

[+Psionic]

2 minutes ago, Deemar said:

I tried restricting it to just showing content but I don't see how I can change it to display only topic titles and not individual posts.

At the top of the list of threads in any stream, there are buttons for "Condensed" and "Expanded".  Click on the former.

[Albert]

19 minutes ago, Psionic said:

At the top of the list of threads in any stream, there are buttons for "Condensed" and "Expanded".  Click on the former.

Yes. And I'm going to make the "Condensed" view even more condensed when I have some time. 

 

  ..Al

[VectorGamer]

Has forum activity gone down since the upgrade? Granted I don't follow every single forum on here, but this morning when I checked in there didn't seem like a whole lot of activity like the old days.

[+Psionic]

I've been largely inactive myself in recent years but it doesn't seem like there's been activity "like the old days" in quite some time.  I don't think the forum upgrade has much to do with it.  A lot of people have just moved on.

[Albert]

Traffic on the forum has slowly risen over the past decade.  Even with the advent of social media, it hasn't impacted the forum too much.  It's hard for me to judge at this time how much of an impact the forum upgrade has made.  Certainly there are some people who are having problems because the site is now full-time https, so old browsers and computers may not be able to connect at all.  This was worse when I first moved the site to the new server, and that situation has been improved a bit to allow some older browsers in.

 

There are always people coming and going.  And I'm sure there are more casual members who are using Facebook to get their classic gaming fix.  But Facebook and Twitter also allow us to promote the AtariAge site to people who might not have otherwise learned about it.  Also, there are features I am not using yet in the forum (like social media promotion) that would allow me to promote content from the forums directly to social media.  I'll start taking advantage of that soon.

 

 ..Al

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

I think it is more just a case of getting use to it, hear me out, I use the same interface on a couple other forums that I visit daily, though I loved the old format here it was not completely foreign to me when it upgraded, AtariAge is worth it and it was a necessary upgrade, the best thing you can do is take some time, go through each and every setting and as you do just familiarize yourself with the differences and new features, I think given time, eventually, you will forget all about the previous design. ??

[Albert]

2 minutes ago, OldSchoolRetroGamer said:

I think it is more just a case of getting use to it, hear me out, I use the same interface on a couple other forums that I visit daily, though I loved the old format here it was not completely foreign to me when it upgraded, AtariAge is worth it and it was a necessary upgrade, the best thing you can do is take some time, go through each and every setting and as you do just familiarize yourself with the differences and new features, I think given time, eventually, you will forget all about the previous design. ??

This is usually the case every time there is a major upgrade of the forum here.  There just hadn't been one in a while before the recent upgrade.  Originally AtariAge was running "Ultimate Bulletin Board", which was a Perl-based forum system, and it was pretty terrible.  It was slow, and didn't have very many features.  The forum was then switched to phpBB, which we used for a few years.  There ended up being many exploits being discovered in that software, so I quickly moved away from it at that point, and that's when we switched to Invision, which we've been running for nearly 15 years I believe. 

 

Each of those transitions were a major change since those moves were to completely different software.  And there have now been at least two major upgrades of the Invision software, first from 2.x to 3.x, and now from 3.x to 4.x.  And Invision is already hard at work on version 5.0 of their software, although they haven't revealed anything about it yet and I imagine it'll be two years before it's released and mature enough to move to.  And probably another year after that before I'd actually want to switch.

 

With each of these transitions, there are always people who are resistant to the changes, but that usually dies down after a period of time.  As I've said before, while there are certainly some rough edges, I think overall it's been a good change.  And also as I've said, it was imperative that I perform the upgrade, for a variety of reasons I've spelled out earlier in this thread.  I really had no choice about it.

 

 ..Al

[TrekMD]

It did take some getting used to at the beginning, but I've figured it out by now.  It's just a matter of learning to use the new software.