FWIW, we’ve had extensive FAQs for every iteration of forum software. We used to have a whole forum dedicated to FAQs. FAQs aren’t new to this platform 
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Yes, and they’re very basic and most users haven’t needed to reference them because the forum is straight forward. This forum upgrade is not.
I personally like the FAQ thread.
Not because this forum is overly hard to use, but because it gives people a place to learn about the forum without having to ask.
Heck, even the clearly now considered to be amazing most recent platform had all kinds of questions on how to do things.
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there are a million sites where some functionality isn’t immediately apparent. The scroll bar isn’t unnecessary, it has useful functionality for navigating with in a thread. Slide the bar to scroll (yes, I’m aware a few people are having issues with that), click it to jump to a specific thread # or specific date.
Hamburgers are a pretty standard way to access more navigation. A million sites have it. What other “buttons in random areas” are you referring to?
But it’s not the only way to go back to forum home, that’s been discussed dozens of times.
If you want to go to the top forum/category, click the hamburger and click Categories. Or click a specific category (ie Technical Help) if you want.
If you’re in a category, click the Category dropdown box, scroll up, click “all categories” if you want to go to “forum home”, or click into the specific category you want
Can you screen shot an example?
Discussed many times. We don’t need a tree. Not all forum platforms have trees. It’s one less navigation click which is a good thing. The author of threads IS here - it’s the first avatar next to a thread. They are looking into whether that can be shown as the username instead of the avatar
See above - it’s not just scrolling functionality, it is also nagivating to specific post #s and dates, and if you click the timestamp (1m, 2h, 5d) at the bottom of that slider section, you can go right to the last post in the thread
It is as clearly a link as almost everything else, with the cursor changing to the hand (or whatever your setup is, and I’m referring to desktop). Lots and lots of web functionality that has functions associated with it aren’t links as much as they are “your cursor changes so you know you can do something”. If you’re referring to mobile, I don’t use this on mobile so I’m no help there
I don’t know any website or forum where every single piece of functionality is crystal clear, in your face, how can you miss it.
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From what I have read, the knowing the author of the thread feature was something the COTH team added for us in the last platform. It was not part of that platform either. It was something we asked for and they added.
It is on the list of things to be added here too.
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Ah, it just hit me that’s what halt might have really been referring to. We CAN see who started a thread from the Category view - first avatar. But if that really was talking about being able to see within a thread who the original author is, then yes, that’s on the To Do list, just not a high priority at the moment.
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@halt I actually wrote several of the FAQs for the last board implementation. They were pretty extensive. I also reviewed the thread analogous to this one when we were beta testing this board. A lot of people had very negative feedback, and had considerable difficultly. It’s great that you didn’t, but that definitely wasn’t a universal experience, much like how people are having a range of experiences as we move to this new platform.
Your post makes it sound like you might think this software is home grown, something that the COTH developers wrote up? That’s not the case. Discourse is the software we’re running on here. It makes most of the “top discussion forum software” lists, and has won a few awards. (I realize you don’t agree 
) But a lot of the things you don’t personally like are intrinsic to this platform and cannot be changed. It’s not like the devs are sitting there with a button to click and the board will go to pages. I’m sure a lot of time, and money, and resources have gone into this implementation. Implementing an entirely fresh software package to return to pages isn’t feasible–especially when the bulk of users are adapting very well.
Mod 1 has made it very clear that things that can be changed to improve the user experience will be changed, with feedback from all of us users. It’s also been made clear that pages aren’t coming back.
We’ll all try to help you find some solid footing around here.
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Thank you for sticking with us. Most don’t like change (me included). I agree with you that the zippy performance does make, in part, ‘learning’ a bit more palatable. When it takes 45± seconds to move between screens, that just piles on learning a new interface.
FWIW, many of the ‘features’ that you don’t like are part of Discourse, the new software platform COTH chose to host our forums. The ‘Devs’ are using what is part of Discourse and, IMO, not backwards engineering to vB which pretty much had gotten to the point that no-one liked much…
Discourse
Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern Internet discussion forum should be today , in a world of ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter.
An added benefit (in my opinion) is that Discourse is open source so developers can make customizations.
You are right… this isn’t vB and never will be. This is an updated, fresh look at ‘conversations’ rather than stilted page-driven topics. A pretty large step forward from vB.
I think the FAQ was to help many of our less tech-savvy users learn how to navigate in this new world order with a minimal amount of frustration. We all expected both frustrations with the change and bugs. There have been both. But, I’m seeing so many users that were initially frustrated become less so over time as they became more familiar with COTH.
I’m also appreciative that the devs are focusing on login issues that some users are experiencing over fixing some of the ‘wants’ and ‘nice to haves’ that I know, over time, will get addressed. If I was one of those impacted by the login issues, I’d be more than annoyed that enhancements were being worked on over dealing with a user-related issue.
PS - multiple quoting in a single reply is a snap… I love it! 
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I agree on this one! Quoting has gotten a ton easier!
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The log in issues definitely should take precedence.
These are not things I “want” so much as things that are industry standard in functioning, accessible websites. Just bringing those things up to speed will help many users navigate this big change better.
Sincere question - What industry are you speaking of that you say it is an industry standard?
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Website content/design developers.
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Welp, I suppose if you have feedback regarding the accessibility of the core features of Discourse, you can take that to the people who developed it.
They’re the only ones who can make many of the changes you want.
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It’s open source. Just a brief glance @ github and several of the recommendations/scripts/plugins are available, they just need to be enabled.
And mod 1 has already said–several times–that those things (like original poster, hover to thread preview, etc) are coming. That’s been stated since the beginning.
But things like the thread slider or lack of pages, which you’ve been very vocal about in your opposition, are intrinsic to the platform, and are not going to change.
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“Industry standard” doesn’t mean stagnant or that things can’t be improved.
I get ‘industry standard’ but I also believe that innovation isn’t a bad thing.
Where was social media 10 years ago? What did browsers look like 15 years ago? Change isn’t always a bad thing.
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Now that the speed is fixed, that took care of a lot of frustration. The multiple quote function is so much better than the old board, and so is being able to just paste pics rather than trying to upload on the old site (which rarely worked for me.) I also like that when you hit reply on a particular post, it shows who you were replying to. On the old board that wasn’t apparent at all. There are some small tweaks that would make it better, but I think overall we’re better off than we were on the old platform, and we’ll have to get used to it. We really can’t go back to the archaic platform that wasn’t supported and would regularly go down when it broke.
ETA: also being able to scroll back and forth within the thread (or even go to other threads) with the reply window open is kind of great.
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One thing I like on the mobile platform that might be helpful on the desktop version (if possible) is the option to “Jump To” a certain post number, that you enter manually. If that were added to the scroll bar on the desktop it might make some people a tiny bit happier?
You can do that already 
Type #, then enter the post number
There’s another way, too, that involves a click on the thread slider, but I can’t quite recall as I’m on my phone! I’ll edit here when I’m back inside 
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This is a weird thing I just discovered, that I’m not advocating as a useful tool, but just a “huh, look at that…”
I clicked both my mouse buttons at the same time on the little box attached to the thread navigation slider, then left clicked it – then the box scrolled independently of the thread, so I could scroll the box to a certain thread number. If I clicked off the box, the thread moved right to that post number.
ANYWAY…a possibly more useful piece of information re: jumping to specific posts:
When you have the message composition screen open, if you click the light green box in the upper right corner of the composition screen (that shows what post you’re on out of the total number of posts), then click “jump to” in the lower left corner of the screen that pops up, you can enter in a post number from the thread to jump to -or- a date in the thread to jump to.
Or, you can just minimize the post composition screen (with the little down arrow in the upper right corner) and then type # like Simkie described earlier.
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