The more time I spend on this new software SDMB, the more depressed I become because absolutely every single thing about the way it functions is a total feeaking nightmare. Not o ne single aspect of this software improves a single thing about the old software. Seriously! I have tried to see something, anything better. Nothing. It is all irritating, non-intuitive, horrible to read or follow, and honestly I would cry about it except I haven’t been around as much in recent years.if this was back in my old days of furious posting, I would have become downright hysterical.
And I realize there is nothing specific cited that might be improved, but this is for site feedback and this is my honest same. It makes me so sad, honestly.
I was unimpressed initially, but the “new” software makes the board at least as easy to navigate as in the past. A major improvement for me is the ability to construct a tentative post, do a search to find links to include in it, and come back to insert them without the draft post being lost as it would’ve been with the old software. A secondary benefit is the extended time available to make corrections once posted (in the “good old days” there was no such feature).
If the “new” SDMB is such a ghastly, soul-destroying experience, it’s hard to comprehend why anyone would stick around, even briefly.
It’s hard to take such an extreme view seriously. There may be some design aspects that you don’t like, but objectively it’s much more stable and most things work better here. I think your reaction is to change and unfamiliarity. If you’re willing to stick with it and play around with it some more with an open mind, I think your opinion will change.
Quite honestly, by now I can barely remember what the old site was like. I certainly can’t remember anything that was better on the old site.
Remember when the old board crashed regularly? Or was knocked out for some reason? That sucked.
It sounds like you’re working through some stuff that the rest of us dealt with at the time of the switch. I don’t miss the old board anymore.
Stick it out, you’ll get used to it.
?Errr?..I come for the humans, not the software. But software makes interacting with the humans easier or harder. This software makes it insanely difficult and frustrating.
I envy you. I found it clean and instantly obvious, especially over the years, as it improved. I always found the various flavors of BBedit and clones vastly superior to every other messageboard software I have encountered, and I have been using messageboards since before the internet, way back to early days of local dialup bulletin board systems, so I do have a pretty solid variety of messageboard styles to measure it against.
Meh. I adjusted to this one pretty quickly, and now I vastly prefer it to what we used to have. Links work better, stuff updates instantly, the instant-preview function is fantastic. It’s good stuff. The problem isn’t in the software.
Same here. When the changeover came, I was annoyed that I could no longer do some things that I used to do, but … it’s just a discussion board. It’s not rocket science. You can still have discussions on it. I got used to it, and I can now hardly remember most of the complaints I had about it at the beginning.
Wait wait! I do enjoy the fact that my little avatar is one I personally provided. It is in fact a cartoon of my actual face created for me by a friend who was a Disney animator. I sent him a photo to work from of me doing my best to do the surprise face emoji. So that’s fun.
I have used many messageboards over the last 20-25 years or so. Honestly, as soon as I stopped using something, I basically forgot about it. I couldn’t tell you anything substantive about the message board software I have used in the past. It’s just not important to me. It’s something that has always been in flux.
There is none so blind as he who will not see. We must not close our minds; we must let our thoughts be free. For every hour that passes by, we know the world gets a little bit older.* It’s time to realize that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
And everything is beautiful in it’s own way. Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day. Oh, sing it children!
Personally, I have a harder time with doing that now than I used to. With the old board, you simply had to open up a new tab and grab whatever links you want. Obviously you can still do that here, however, if you’re trying to grab links or quotes or just reference something from same thread (in a different tab) the text box pops up and starts giving you warnings.
That doesn’t have anything to do with the new board vs the old board. TPTB set the time limit to 5 minutes. There’s no software based reason why it couldn’t have been longer. It was a choice they made. I’ve used plenty of other vB based sites with considerably longer edit windows, including one that had no time limit (and it always felt strange to have the ability to edit a years-old post).
Same with the old board crashing all the time. That wasn’t a problem with vB, that was a problem with the server. I’m assuming if this software was on that server, it would have similar problems. Just like if we had moved the old board to a new server, the problems would, I assume, have gone away. Other vB sites don’t crash constantly.
Having said that. I’ve gotten used to it. There’s still plenty of things about it I don’t like, but whatever.
If there’s anything you’re having trouble with, just ask about it. We can help.
I wish that they had chosen something other than Discourse, but we had to switch away from vBulletin. At least now, you can share your thoughts and read others’ thoughts without the board constantly crashing. And that’s really all we need, isn’t it?
“And I said that’s one thing we’ve got” 