I neither like nor dislike the new format. The new search engine is slightly more versatile – e.g., you can now search for only the threads started by a given user. Beyond that, I see no real improvement and I can’t imagine what the point of this “upgrade” was supposed to be. It’s like dealing with a highway that jams up every afternoon by mowing the grass on the shoulders and putting up nicer lamps. This board is still TOO SLOW. In fact, it seems to me that it’s slower than it was before. Not only does every page take twice as long to load, but, twice as often as before, I can’t get taken to the page at all, or I can’t even log on to the board at all; and, in addition to the old familiar “Page Cannot Be Displayed” message, I now sometimes see a new one:
There seems to have been a slight problem with the database.
Please try again by pressing the refresh button in your browser.
An E-Mail has been dispatched to our Technical Staff, who you can also contact if the problem persists.
We apologise for any inconvenience.
The one time I tried the e-mail link, the message was returned as undeliverable. Apparently, when you can’t log on to the board, you can’t e-mail the tech staff either.
I also find that, with the new format, I’m twice as likely to get a post eaten – that is, I write a post, hit “submit,” and then I see “Page Cannot Be Displayed” or “There seems to have been a slight problem,” etc. – the post is gone, no way to get it back, unless I had the foresight to block it and save it with Ctrl-Alt-V. Which I rarely do. This particular post, I have been trying to make for the past half hour, getting blocked several times as soon as I hit “Post Reply,” and then not even being able to get back the previous page.
I second notquite wholeheartedly. Location is often also very helpful in GQ, especially w/r/t the frequent legal questions. One other thing I’m sad to give up is the reply box at the bottom of a thread, allowing you to save a click (and the concommitant page loading time) if you weren’t quoting. While I love the speed that this new upgrade has brought, if my past experience on the SDMB is any guide, that won’t last forever, and the ability to post without having to reload the page can save a lot of time – not to mention placating the hamsters.
You shouldn’t be surprised by this. Consider how often, of late, the board has been down. Now consider how many people read these boards. And then consider the fact that the techs probably find out about the board problems even without those e-mails, both from reading the boards themselves and from the mods e-mailing them directly. Honestly, would you want to get ten thousand e-mails a day telling you something you already know? Putting a fake e-mail address (and an obviously fake one, so that the intelligent members here should be able to figure it out) into the database for “technical staff e-mail” is probably the easiest way for Jerry and company to keep from getting swarmed, so naturally, that’s the way they do it, since they’ve got so many priorities higher than finding a more elegant way to handle it. It’s not a symptom of an unhelpful tech staff, rather it’s a symptom of a tech staff stretched far beyond the limits of any sane human in their helpfulness.
Chronos I’m not surprised. Merely a tad disapointed.
You’d think that, with all the suggestions about paying for this board, or other ingenious tricks to make this a faster and better place, someone would actually acknowledge the - what; 200? 300? - posters on this board.
[Yes, I know it’s free. I’d rather pay for something good than get a crappy free thing]
I used to be able to Save As HTML only a thread, when I wanted to keep a copy on my hard drive for future reference. Now when I try to do this, I get an error:
Are you using IE5? It did that to me even before the upgrade. My solution was to install IE5 over IE4 in compatibility mode, or instead you could use the “show printable version” link and save target. (If the thread has many replies you may need to click the link first, then save target where it says “show all X posts on one page.”)
One extra step–and I’m not sure it’s feasible, but it would seem reasonible–would be to change the actual message to indicate what is actually going on.
By the way, I just noticed in this thread that a lot of the early posts are attributed to guest. Has that been mentioned before?
I’m using IE6 at work and AOL (whose browser is IE-based, I believe) at home, and in both cases I have this problem now but never did before the SDMB upgrade.
