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[GCDEF]

Took a month or two for them to realize 2.0 screwed the pooch and back out of it.  What do you think the odds are they'll realize they did exactly the same thing again?    I imagine we're probably stuck with thie steaming pile of dung.  It would be nice if they do back out that they come to the conclusion a little quicker this time.  Seriously guys, get somebody that has a clue to make the purchasing decisions for you.  I can't believe you did it again.

[madrigal77]

They'll realize when all the members leave. A lot of us HCAFers are gathering at Rig Talk and openjam. Once everyone is done venting, this place will be a ghost town.

[smashingtime]

This is my first time back since the 2.0 debacle.

Ever since they ruined the review section I stopped visiting. It's a shame, it used to be a great place. This will probably be my last post until the next 4.0 disaster

[Marshredder2]

Unless I can get my username back, which was linked to an old email, I will be leaving as well for rigtalk and TGP.

Mods, its unacceptable that you didn't mention before the switchover about password resets, giving us the opportunity to review it.  There needs to be a workaround.

[blue2blue]

They can't go back to the old vBulletin system as it clearly could not keep up with the burden of the huge amount of old content, the traffic, and, especially, the continual barage of robo-spam that kept moderators busy chasing robot postings of cool places to buy counterfeit Ugg boots and such. (Almost all of it hidden from regular user view by our own anti-spambot bots. But a real burden on the system.) The new system providers (who provide social media solutions for a number of big companies including Intel and others) have a system-wide spam solution tha relieves HC mods and admins of that burden. We hope.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure there's no going back.

[Jazz Ad]

There are forums 10 times bigger than HC that run flawlessly on vbulletin.

What really happens is that they keep insisting on mixing forums and HC editorials, while people coming here want a forum and nothing else.

[moonlightin]

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GCDEF wrote:

Took a month or two for them to realize 2.0 screwed the pooch and back out of it.  What do you think the odds are they'll realize they did exactly the same thing again?    I imagine we're probably stuck with thie steaming pile of dung.  It would be nice if they do back out that they come to the conclusion a little quicker this time.  Seriously guys, get somebody that has a clue to make the purchasing decisions for you.  I can't believe you did it again.

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I like this place! It's got some good things going for it. I guess you can always explore it and learn to use it well.

[GCDEF]

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moonlightin wrote:

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GCDEF wrote:

Took a month or two for them to realize 2.0 screwed the pooch and back out of it.  What do you think the odds are they'll realize they did exactly the same thing again?    I imagine we're probably stuck with thie steaming pile of dung.  It would be nice if they do back out that they come to the conclusion a little quicker this time.  Seriously guys, get somebody that has a clue to make the purchasing decisions for you.  I can't believe you did it again.

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I like this place! It's got some good things going for it. I guess you can always explore it and learn to use it well.

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I have decades of experience in the IT industry.  Tell me this site has good things going for it is like telling Wolfgang Puck 7-11 makes a good hotdog.  From an interface design perspective, this forum has just about everything imaginable wrong with it.

[moonlightin]

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GCDEF wrote:

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moonlightin wrote:

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GCDEF wrote:

Took a month or two for them to realize 2.0 screwed the pooch and back out of it.  What do you think the odds are they'll realize they did exactly the same thing again?    I imagine we're probably stuck with thie steaming pile of dung.  It would be nice if they do back out that they come to the conclusion a little quicker this time.  Seriously guys, get somebody that has a clue to make the purchasing decisions for you.  I can't believe you did it again.

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I like this place! It's got some good things going for it. I guess you can always explore it and learn to use it well.

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I have decades of experience in the IT industry.  Tell me this site has good things going for it is like telling Wolfgang Puck 7-11 makes a good hotdog.  From an interface design perspective, this forum has just about everything imaginable wrong with it.

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Where can I find wolfgang?  It's a matter of perspective and knowing a few other details. You don't know the conversation people had with the designers, you don't know the amount of money there was to make anything happen... etc. There are some things that are different but that is to be expected. Sometimes you just have to let go of the old stuff.

[GCDEF]

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moonlightin wrote:

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Where can I find wolfgang?  It's a matter of perspective and knowing a few other details. You don't know the conversation people had with the designers, you don't know the amount of money there was to make anything happen... etc. There are some things that are different but that is to be expected. Sometimes you just have to let go of the old stuff.

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None of that is relevant.   Why let go of old stuff when the new stuff is considerably worse?  There's no excuse for software this ugly and counterintuitive.  This whole interface is a horrible design put together by people who lack the experience to have a clue.  There's no reason at all it should be this ugly.  It would have been just as easy and just as cheap, perhaps even easier and cheaper to write it properly.

[Kramerguy]

I'm by no means a fanboy of this system, I think I made more posts yesterday complaining about it than all other posts combined.

This is nowhere near as bad as 2.0. Not even close. I'm a Vbulletin believer- I loved the interface and style/look.

That being said, a few of my complaints did garner a response in PM's, they asked for screenshots, I provided them. They are working on "fixing" many of the display issues, so I'm willing to wait and see. I'm also hoping they add color back into it, or even offer a palette so we can customize whatever colors we want (and really.. that is old technology that was available in MS FrontPage back in 1997), there's no reason the interface can't be made to be more visually pleasing.

My biggest issue has been that they need to expand the width of the screen, especially on the topic indexes, where the ads crumple the reading space to less than 1/4 the total window space.

Also I hope they fix the quote functionality.. not that it's broken, it's just butt ugly and un-intuitive. The quoted text MUST be shaded or highlighted, else the entire post is jumbled and difficult to read.

So yeah, I have my issues, but I'm hopeful that they can work it out. I'm able to read and reply to posts without too much lost time, which is something I couldn't say for 2.0.

[moonlightin]

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GCDEF wrote:

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moonlightin wrote:

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Where can I find wolfgang?  It's a matter of perspective and knowing a few other details. You don't know the conversation people had with the designers, you don't know the amount of money there was to make anything happen... etc. There are some things that are different but that is to be expected. Sometimes you just have to let go of the old stuff.

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None of that is relevant.   Why let go of old stuff when the new stuff is considerably worse?  There's no excuse for software this ugly and counterintuitive.  This whole interface is a horrible design put together by people who lack the experience to have a clue.  There's no reason at all it should be this ugly.  It would have been just as easy and just as cheap, perhaps even easier and cheaper to write it properly.

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Because the old stuff was failing. Can you specifically give points as to what you don't like? You don't like the whole interface? Or just the borders?

For me... I LIKE that I can switch to html to post something and then preview it right away. Having said that... I seem to be having issues with being able to post a pic with the buttons provided. Good thing I know some html. But what about those who don't? And WHY is text automatically defaulted to grey? It should default to black so people can read. Visually trouble folks might have a problem with the grey text. However.. I don't expect to have things done for me. I know where the text box is so I can change the color as I want. Not having stuff done for me = more freedom for me. I think also that some of this appears to really be guaged towards more mobile apps. Wave of the future I guess, not that I'll be getting an ipad anytime soon... if ever.

[Floyd Rosenbomb]

There is no denying that the site appears to be very amateurish.  Go surf the web and then come back here, it's like "whaaaaaa."  That said, we can at least post, and I'm hopeful that they can bring it around to something that simply allows the community to do what it does, which is to generate it's own content without interference from the software.

[Jon Hiller]

Hmmm, quote seems easy and very intuitive to me, but I am a regular on the eBay forums and their quote function works exactly like the one here is now, so I've seen it before. It's definitely a LOT different than how Vbulletin is laid out, though, and for what it's worth, while I can work with what we have here, I do actually like Vbulletin's layout and appearance better than what's here.

[Axe_34]

[madrigal77]

The community will be gone. There's already a mass exodus.

[RoadRanger]

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madrigal77 wrote:
The community will be gone. There's already a mass exodus.

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Not to be a **bleep**in' **bleep**hole but the **bleep**in' **bleep**hats that can't write a **bleep**in' post without every other **bleep**in' word being a **bleep**in' swear don't add much to this **bleep**in' community, no?

[extollo]

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Kramerguy wrote:

This is nowhere near as bad as 2.0. Not even close. I'm a Vbulletin believer- I loved the interface and style/look.

they seem to be slipping in updates much faster here too.  i've noticed some minor updates here & there over the past 24hrs.  (e.g., quote appearance, video works now)

this board has layout problems which is easily fixed & a couple missing features here and there.    But I havent seen any major basic functional failures which seemed to happen every couple hours on 2.0 - that was a total disaster.

I dont see a need for a backout here.    Censoring blows though.

[blue2blue]

There were some rough spots in our first view of the new forums yesterday, but on day 2 things look a lot better, seems to me.

While I initially shrugged off the frequent suggestions to increase default text size in user prefs and/or ctrl-scroll wheel (or other browser page zoom) to 'push' the sidebars off the screen -- but, dang, when I tried them, it really helped.  I'm back and forth on medium/large text, since the medium looks pretty decent on my rig when the page is zoomed to fill the screen width. But with large text, the bolded, black links seem a bit more obvious (I'm of the opinion that they should simply have underlines but I understand that the current crop in the web design crowd seems to think 'sleek' trumps usability.  )

Now, about those thread titles... we REALLY need to be able to see the whole title.

[Phil O'Keefe]

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Jazz Ad wrote:

There are forums 10 times bigger than HC that run flawlessly on vbulletin.

What really happens is that they keep insisting on mixing forums and HC editorials, while people coming here want a forum and nothing else.

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That's true, but HC has always been more than just forums, and the contract with the company that was providing the software for the front end of the old site - the User Reviews, the Industry Press Releases, as well as the how-to articles, expert reviews and so forth - had expired, and there's no way vB can handle any of that stuff from a practical standpoint. We certainly didn't want to renew with that company for various reasons (think HC 2.0 - same vendor.) At the bare minimum, they would have had to replace that software with something else, buy a gripload of new servers to handle the spam traffic, and hire about three full-time IT folks with extensive vB experience to handle the backside maintenance, software upgrades, babysit the servers, etc.

Operationally it wasn't practical, and it wasn't just because we wanted to combine everything into a single unified site - although frankly, that's advantageous to you guys since it means a single login to post in the forums or user reviews or whatever... instead of two separate logins like we had previously. Also, it helps in terms of searching. If you want info on a particular guitar or pedal, instead of just returning forum post results, searching on a unified site will also return user review results, articles, videos, press releases and announcements, etc. etc.