I feel completely lost. Change is hard! New Forum

Can you talk further about why the thread slider tool isn’t working for you? There are a whole lot of ways to do things here, and we can help you find a way that works for you.

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Change is hard. I don’t like this software, but it does do the things I need, probably, when I learn new ways to use it. The old software isn’t an option; there’s only forward. The COTH team can and will do some more customizations to make it work a little better for us, but mostly there’s going to be learning.

What makes this community great are the people and the information here. As long as we can figure out how to get what we need, it will continue to thrive.

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There doesn’t seem to be as much posting going on, so I doubt you’re the only one. I don’t like the one page thing either. I hate not being able to hover over the title and get an idea what is in the thread, or see the latest topic in each category.

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I don’t know. It seems that every time COTH changes the discussion forum software it creates a worse user experience. This latest is horrible.

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Really need to remove All Those Sticky Posts from the beginning of every forum…If They Are Really Needed put in Forum of Sticky Notes

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Easy enough, @clanter :wink:

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This is a known issue, and will come back once the larger pieces are ironed out.

Known issues are listed at the bottom of the FAQ in the help forum, or at the top of the large ongoing thread of feedback on the help forum.

What do you mean with this one? From the categories page, you can see the three most recent threads on each category.

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Good idea to put stickies in their own forum, but then, who would notice, much less read them?
Some seem to have missed the sticky notices in the old forum, in that same place as these, on top of forums, telling of the coming change!

The stickies are supposed to be one time thing, notice them once.
That is why they have an X on the right side you can click to make them go away.
At least in my format, that is how is working.

thanks… this place is like solving an Agatha Christie mysteries

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You can read ahead and find the killer early if you just go check out that FAQ :wink:

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Yes, a big puzzle, why NO ONE is liking this, but it is what we have now.

Many didn’t like the old one any more also, it was failing so badly, beyond repair.

Some times we don’t like any of our choices.
We seem to make do and carry on, more than give up and quit.
I think real life right now has everyone already sore and tired.
This one more change and a difficult one is not welcome, especially now, sigh.

I imagine that is double tiresome for those trying to get this up and running, to add to their problems fighting against the general grumblings.
Lets try to make our complains a bit more palatable for them and hope for everyone’s sake that things here will improve for all as fast as they already have, until it becomes the new norm.

COTH is still COTH, even in new clothes that don’t quite fit well yet for everyone.

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After just reading this thread, I went back out to the Off course list, and the first topic heading I see is “Integrating a new horse into the herd.”

I think this thread is about “integrating a bunch of old horses into a new herd.”

I like the new forum in a lot of ways: I like being able to see the icons for the people who’ve posted on the thread, I like having the threads that I’ve posted on being tagged if there’s been a new post, and I definitely like how much faster the whole system seems to respond.

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:laughing: :laughing:

Old dogs CAN learn new tricks

I was helping beta test this new platform. The first several days I was very lost, though a lot of that was for reasons you guys will never see because, well, that was part of why we were testing :crazy_face: But even once the worst of the “omg what IS THIS?” was straightened out, it still took a couple days of playing around to get used to it. Even THEN, it was harder because there wasn’t real world activity, we were hunting and poking to make and react to activity.

Only by consistently getting in and clicking around to see what buttons do what, does anyone get used to a new format. This really is pretty simply once you familiarize yourself with what’s what. Moving around Categories (forums) is so easy. Seeing notifications is easy. Quoting is SO MUCH easier. We can do screen shots and paste them right into replies! Search is way better. So much functionality is way better, it’s just arranged differently.

This too shall pass :slight_smile:

When you’re in a Category/forum, either read the sticky if you want, or click the pushpin and it will turn upside down and you won’t see that sticky again.

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The only way to get past that is just set aside a little time to work through using the board. It’s a new game to be learned, and setting aside frustration and approaching it like a puzzle you’re choosing to put together, makes things much easier and faster :slight_smile:

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The posts that are pinned at the top of each forum/category have always been pinned there. You now have the option to unpin them yourself. Mentioned above, you can either click the pushpin icon next to the thread title to unpin, or you can click “unpin this thread” at the end of the thread.

There’s also a setting in your preferences that you can customize to decide whether or not you want pinned threads to unpin automatically when you’ve scrolled through to the end of them (read the thread).

You can do this. We currently have the home page set to take everyone to a general forum/category list that resembles the old site. However, there’s a Latest view tab that will list threads with recent posts. There’s also a New tab that lists new topics that have been created in the last few days. Using the Categories drop-down menu on the left you can sort either of those options by a specific forum. Here are screen shot showing Latest and New in Around the Farm, for example:

There’s even a red line to show you what content is new since your last visit to the site. Does that help?

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Yeah, these are things I miss.

But hang in there, @bingbingbing!
If this septuagenarian ( :grimacing: There, I said it out loud) can figure it out, you can too!
For me, daily visits - oftime more than once :roll_eyes: - have gotten me more comfortable navigating.

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What I’ve also found is that the improved performance encourages me to visit rather than where it was getting to the point that I dreaded visiting because of how time consuming it was.

I’m all :tada: :clap: over both the functionality (and finding many different ways to navigate as opposed to the more ‘structured’ single way to navigate that vB offered) and significant performance improvements.

Yeah, glitches and things that aren’t working yet but I’m willing to wait for the short preview on the title hover while the dev team works on things of more significant impact (like fixing user’s usernames and such).

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I realize that’s the intent, but in practice the thread titles are all cut off and not really readable or usable.

My suggestion would be to consider:

  • Make the left side of the table with the forum heading shorter, even if it has to wrap
  • Make the right side longer and also include the whole title for each thread, even if it has to wrap
  • Include the author name with the thread if this can be made to work
  • Another way to do it would be to make this display more of a block for each category, with the category title in a headline format, the inner content indented a bit, and not have the left-right split, but that might be a harder ask.

The 4/week, 2 new portion of the display is IMHO not useful and if anything makes the forum look less interesting and less active than it really is.

The threads listed also tend to be sticky threads, which (a) don’t change and (b) have old start dates on them. Thus, the home page looks like we have categories that haven’t had new posts for 2-3 years, which is very much not the case.

I think some adjustments here are very doable, will make the place look much more active and much more like home.

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Click the pin to unpin those.

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Once we got past the initial slowness, I have been enjoying the new format. So it’s not accurate to say no one likes the new forum. I think we just tend to hear from the people who are unhappy or lost.

Rebecca

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