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[iBetOnBaseball]

HC, Stop. Just stop. This website is horrible. I used to come here several times a day , but I stopped coming when you went to the idiotic new format and your once industry leading traffic PLUNGED. I now drop in every six months or so to see if you have come to your senses and returned to the industry news friendly format that made you famous, and evey time I'm shocked to see you're still stuck in this rut. CUT YOUR LOSSES AND RETURN TO THE OLD SITE or REDESIGN completely so the site focuses on industry news and highlights contributions from your pro contributors. It's not too late!!!!!!

[blue2blue]

I'm thinking you're not that frequent a visitor, or you would have seen that HC did go back to the old vBulletins software after the HC2.0 fiasco. And for several years, we tried to keep it going. But in the last 4 or 5 months it became increasingly clear that vB running on the hardware allotted to it could not keep up with the mega-spam assault that HC had been increasingly under over the past few years.

Many regular users probably didn't realize it, but moderators were spening much of their onsite time simply trying to weed through spammers and spambots. Regular users didn't see it because most of it happened 'in moderation' -- out of sight of the public... but every time you tried to ban a spammer, it would tie up the whole system. 

You could start a new process, see it lock up your browser, open another window in a different browser and try to access the site -- and not be able to get in because banning a user or an IP address was, for whatever reasons, tying up the whole system.

This new (third) system, from Lythium Software, who do forum software for a bunch of mega-corporations for their CRM/customer support is not ideal out of the box, there are some real head-scratchers in the UI design, but its performance is, overall, very good, and, because they use the same anti-spammer blacklists across all their customer base, we get the benefit of that, which is crucial to keeping the place running.

[TheFigurehead]

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blue2blue wrote:

I'm thinking you're not that frequent a visitor, or you would have seen that HC did go back to the old vBulletins software after the HC2.0 fiasco. And for several years, we tried to keep it going. But in the last 4 or 5 months it became increasingly clear that vB running on the hardware allotted to it could not keep up with the mega-spam assault that HC had been increasingly under over the past few years.

Many regular users probably didn't realize it, but moderators were spening much of their onsite time simply trying to weed through spammers and spambots. Regular users didn't see it because most of it happened 'in moderation' -- out of sight of the public... but every time you tried to ban a spammer, it would tie up the whole system. 

You could start a new process, see it lock up your browser, open another window in a different browser and try to access the site -- and not be able to get in because banning a user or an IP address was, for whatever reasons, tying up the whole system.

This new (third) system, from Lythium Software, who do forum software for a bunch of mega-corporations for their CRM/customer support is not ideal out of the box, there are some real head-scratchers in the UI design, but its performance is, overall, very good, and, because they use the same anti-spammer blacklists across all their customer base, we get the benefit of that, which is crucial to keeping the place running.

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Thats all fine and well, but it doesn't make the actual forums any less shitty. I'm glad your job is easier. While it may benefit you, the forum experience suffers. 

To put it another way, if I am buying a car, I care about the overall experience... how easy or difficult it might be for my mechanic to change the oil filter does not really factor into my decision.  

[GCDEF]

I can see both sides of it, but from the user perspective, it's clear that whoever wrote this doesn't use forums.  The entire home page is useless.  Nobody cares what the most recent topics are as most people are only interested in a few forums.  Nobody cares who the top authors are, at least it certainly isn't one of the things everybody needs to see on the home page.  Don't care who the most recent people are to log in, or the newest members.  Don't even care what the top posts are.  All of that is irrelevant and of little to no interest.  Likewise, when listing threads, the number of views is marginally useful, but I'd much rather see the number of replies.  That's a much better indication of how interesting a thread is and how much activity it's getting.

Also, with navigation, just give a list of the forums, and maybe the last post like we're used to.  Also, when listing threads, give the date and time of the last post.  "yesterday" isn't particularly useful.

[andreas]

TheFigureHead wrote: "To put it another way, if I am buying a car, I care about the overall experience... how easy or difficult it might be for my mechanic to change the oil filter does not really factor into my decision."

It might be a factor if the car needed an oil change every week, and the job took three days to complete...

GCDEF: I agree with some of the things you say - a lot of the stuff that now features on the front page is (to me) less relevant than, say, a proper forum "tree". Hopefully, over time, the UI will change as the people who run things get a better grip on which features are useful and which aren't. But some things are also user selectable - the date/time format is one of the things you can change yourself. Make sure you uncheck the "use relative dates" option (on the "preferences > display" pane) and you should see the exact date/time for each post.

[baob]

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GCDEF wrote:

[...] It's clear that whoever wrote this doesn't use forums.  The entire home page is useless.  Nobody cares what the most recent topics are as most people are only interested in a few forums.  Nobody cares who the top authors are, at least it certainly isn't one of the things everybody needs to see on the home page.  Don't care who the most recent people are to log in, or the newest members.  Don't even care what the top posts are.  All of that is irrelevant and of little to no interest.  Likewise, when listing threads, the number of views is marginally useful, but I'd much rather see the number of replies.  That's a much better indication of how interesting a thread is and how much activity it's getting.

Also, with navigation, just give a list of the forums, and maybe the last post like we're used to. [..]

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Agree with all of the above. I'd add the listing of "new solutions" as another completely spurious feature. A new solution is of no interest whatsoever if you didn't have the OP's problem in the first place.

[lefort_1]

If GC REALLY still wants to have those areas on the Front page (New Topics, New Solutions, Top Kodu Whores) then they could either

1. give the user's a visibility control  in their profile for various items on the Front Page, or
2. make those things a "click this button to reveal the" type functionality on the front page. That way the user could get right to that stuff, but not have it clutter things up if they weren't interested.

[Lou Speed's Alt]

It's too late. Too many people have already jumped ship. I suspect as soon as the novelty of kudos wears off many more will follow.

[Minning Around]

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blue2blue wrote:

I'm thinking you're not that frequent a visitor, or you would have seen that HC did go back to the old vBulletins software after the HC2.0 fiasco. And for several years, we tried to keep it going. But in the last 4 or 5 months it became increasingly clear that vB running on the hardware allotted to it could not keep up with the mega-spam assault that HC had been increasingly under over the past few years.

Many regular users probably didn't realize it, but moderators were spening much of their onsite time simply trying to weed through spammers and spambots. Regular users didn't see it because most of it happened 'in moderation' -- out of sight of the public... but every time you tried to ban a spammer, it would tie up the whole system. 

You could start a new process, see it lock up your browser, open another window in a different browser and try to access the site -- and not be able to get in because banning a user or an IP address was, for whatever reasons, tying up the whole system.

This new (third) system, from Lythium Software, who do forum software for a bunch of mega-corporations for their CRM/customer support is not ideal out of the box, there are some real head-scratchers in the UI design, but its performance is, overall, very good, and, because they use the same anti-spammer blacklists across all their customer base, we get the benefit of that, which is crucial to keeping the place running.

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Thank you for the explanation. Was that info ever "stickied"? It should have been, if it wasn't.
Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact that this new design is horrible. I've been looking around for different forums lately.

[Minning Around]

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GCDEF wrote:

I can see both sides of it, but from the user perspective, it's clear that whoever wrote this doesn't use forums.  The entire home page is useless.  Nobody cares what the most recent topics are as most people are only interested in a few forums.  Nobody cares who the top authors are, at least it certainly isn't one of the things everybody needs to see on the home page.  Don't care who the most recent people are to log in, or the newest members.  Don't even care what the top posts are.  All of that is irrelevant and of little to no interest.  Likewise, when listing threads, the number of views is marginally useful, but I'd much rather see the number of replies.  That's a much better indication of how interesting a thread is and how much activity it's getting.

Also, with navigation, just give a list of the forums, and maybe the last post like we're used to.  Also, when listing threads, give the date and time of the last post.  "yesterday" isn't particularly useful.

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Precisely. Whoever designed this needs to find a different job.