After lurking > joining the SDMB for 20+ years, I’ve now spent at least 45 minutes with this new layout and I’m still not used to it.
Read My Lips: BFD
The only thing that has ever really mattered remains unchanged: What people are writing. The opinions, facts, discussions… the words are still right there.
Right. But some of the complaints are about this. People are saying (rightly or wrongly) that the style detracts from the substance, or that some of the characteristics of the new software (e.g. the characters-per-post limit) affect what people can and do write.
Ex----actly.
I’m trying real hard to be an optimist and give it the old college try.
I just love reading all the posts and threads.
The people make the Dope. Not the format or locale on the internet.
If we can just get thru the breaking in period without too much bleeding, I have high hopes.
This is the main idea.
And if these people are as great as I believe they are, they will show “them” what a great message board this can be. 
Cite? 
Ive had to change from reading based on the different forums to reading new posts. Not sure Im happy about it but im not that unhappy.
You can go directly to the forum you want. Don’t click on categories just scroll down to the invidual forum and click there.
I have to say that I’ve transitioned from BBSes to Compuserve to usenet to AOL to forums to metafilter to reddit to twitter. We can either accept that things are changing (hopefully for the better) or stay stuck in the past. Has the conversation changed a lot between platforms? Not really. In fact, I’d take the old 300 baud BBS over the shitty kludge that is twitter anyday but twitter, for better or worse, is where the conversations that I want to follow have gone.
And hey, some of those ancient BBSes can be telneted into these days. What I hope happens is that the SDMB sticks around long enough to be cool again, just like the BBSes. With that said, note that AOL will never be cool again. Ever.
Eh? That sounds like the way I always read them – select the forum category I want and then go down the list of threads topics to see what looks interesting.
I look at it this way: it’s like getting a new car. It has mostly the same stuff with mostly the same functions. Just nothing is exactly where you’re used to it. There are some great features here and many of the old, beloved features are still present but are accessed by different paths.
For example, on the old board, I’d click “subscribed threads” and then open each one in a new tab and work my way through them. Now I “watch” a thread (which is the same as subscribing), and when I check in, I click on my avatar in the upper right corner and all my watched threads are there. The ones with new posts have a different colored background. I open each one in a new tab and proceed as before.
Just poke around and expect it to take longer than 45 minutes to get comfortable. The community definitely is the same.
Have you even noticed: NO 502/504 TIMEOUTS!! 
Well, that’s what we have to keep bringing to mind. That, and the fact that (as I understand it) this move makes the SDMB financially viable again, at least for some period of time.
I hate a lot about this new interface (yes, even after trying out the different Themes, changing the font size, etc.). It feels as though it takes me three times as long to read the same amount of material, and I miss features such as mouse-over.
My biggest complaint is the way the page “jumps” when scrolling down (due to a new post having appeared? I don’t even know why that happens). I grit my teeth at the time it takes to get back to where I was before.
But: no 502/504, and the Board may be here for years to come because of the change. So those are the things to concentrate on.
ETA: Kudos to the OP for creating a thread title that forms a (partial) sentence with the name of the sub-forum!
The post limit is like 30,000 characters. Is that a problem?
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Straight Dope Dark has mouseover. That’s what I was getting at. A lot of the stuff you think is missing is still here, just not where you were used to finding it.
I like the dark theme because my eyesight is crap. I don’t know if Straight Dope Light has mouseover.
Interesting, ThelmaLou—thanks. I’ll give that theme a try. In the past I’ve shied away from dark backgrounds but maybe it would be worth getting used to.
I think so. That’s the amount of a well-sized essay, and do we want more in one post?
No, I don’t think it’s a problem if that change was indeed recently made. But recently the limit was 2,500 characters (I got an error message to that effect) and then apparently later 3,500, and both of those were way too short.
I’m using Straight Dope Light and yes, it does. Some other themes might have it now as well.
Mouseover also works in Vincent, another dark background theme, which is my choice. With that change, I can easily adjust to everything else here.
And there are new features I really appreciate, such as being able to mute entire forums as well as individual threads. If a thread is hot with lots of posts being made, the new posts automatically show up without need to refresh. I’m not experiencing the jumping around mid-thread mid-read on the page that you are, @Sherrerd. It does it a little bit at the end of a thread, but happily, not in the middle.
Hope you find one you like and works for you!
The phenomenon may be connected with thread length (just guessing, here). Happened to me once today in a thread over 160 replies.
Anyway, I’ll check out your suggestions—thanks!
Ugh. That would be maddening. 