I also liked the old page better, if only because you could see all of the most recent threads together. Like ddefina said, if would be great if there was an option to choose which home page format you liked better.
I'm all in favor of this new format. It's easy to see all of the recent postings and makes a great starting point. Just hit the "read latest postings" button, read, hit the backspace key and go back to this starting point makes reading and keeping up with the posts very, very easy. If your screen resolution is set high enough, much of the page fits on just two screens--it's an easy page up, page down to see it all.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'll briefly touch on a couple of points that were brought up just so we're all on the same page. Probably the most important thing to understand is this: On the last version of the site, there were the words "home" and "discussion" in the green bar at the top. The home page was basically eliminated, and the discussion front page was reworked, which is now what you are seeing as the new "home page" of the site. Why was this done? Two reasons: 1) Most of the site traffic happens on the message board, which is why forum descriptions and latest threads in each are getting displayed right on the homepage. Doing it this way also made it easier to integrate private message info and other personalized info on the homepage. 2) The way it was before confused new users. Since the old home page showed just a summary of threads, people viewed the discussion as being one big forum with threads. In other words, there wasn't really any indication that there were distinct forums on the board, which led to people constantly posting new threads in the wrong forum. So the home page was designed to highlight three things: that there are separate forums, what to click in order in start a new thread in each, and a view of the latest posts in each. Regarding the book reviews and broker ratings, those sections were not included in the layout this time around because they are currently in the "garage" getting worked on. By that I mean that they are going to be integrated with the membership system so that only registered members can post reviews and ratings. This stemmed from some problems we had with bogus/pointless broker ratings beging posted. It shouldn't take long to get those sections fixed up and back online. I have an idea about how to satisfy those who like the old homepage summary of threads. I was thinking about having a single link on the existing home page that says something like " Desktop Thread Viewer", which when clicked, would launch a small pop up window, that would list a thread summary similar to what you saw on the old home page. By clicking on any of the thread titles in the pop-up window, the primary window underneath would change to show the thread content. The pop-up could be kept on your desktop all day and I could program it to automatically update every 10 minutes or so, so you would always have a view of the latest discussions going on at the site. I'll work up something over the next few days to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Thanks again for taking the time to let me know what you think. I'll be addressing some of the other questions posted here a little later.
I am lost. How do you access broker ratings and workstation guide now? Can't see the last posts and most active thread either.
I like your suggestion on the pop up window. The front page of the old site does look like one big thread. It is nice to see everything in one place though vs. checking every category for me. Sounds like everyone will be happy soon.
To all those people who liked the old homepage because they could see all the new or updated threads in one place...that was never true, all you could see was maybe about 20 new threads. If you read this site several times a day, then perhaps that was ok, but if, like I did, you only read it once a day and you only used that list, you missed out on quite a few threads. That's why I always found the old page useless and nothing more than an obstacle - one extra click on my way to the discussion page. Also I never read the Professional Firms or Hardware sections, so the option to skip those is nice. The only thing I would change about the new design if at all is the table width. It's expressed in pixels not percentage, which means that on my screen the table takes up about 40% of the available space(the section with white background.) This means thread descriptions take two or three lines, and I have to scroll down to access the sections on the bottom, including this one. I didn't have to do that on the old discussion page (but then that page didn't have a summary of threads, which for me is still useless.) Would prefer if instead of 280 pixels it was...say 80%, so that the appearance didn't change so much depending on the resolution settings. Instead of the pop up window, which I don't like, I'd prefer access to a page that lists all new and updated threads, divided into sections. In fact I wouldn't mind if that was the home page. The number of threads listed on that page could be limited to say 20 per forum, so that if unread threads exceeded that number, each forum would have a link to the remaining unread threads in that forum. If unread threads were below the limit - no link. Also, each forum would have a link to a complete list of threads, so that I could go back to threads I already read. This would mean I would have access to all unread threads, divided into forums, on a single page, all the functionality I need in a single place, as others have asked for. I assume that sort of thing would put a lot of extra load on the server though. In any case, thanks for the great work you put into this site. voodoo
Now that I think about it, what I described is what's already on the homepage, with two important differences: 1. The current home page lists five threads, which is almost never enough for the Trading forum - I have to always click on the 'more' link. 2. The current home page lists five threads, which almost never change and are therefore a waste of space in case of the Announcements forum - makes the page longer and I have to scroll down. There are two ways of solving that, the first one is what I described above, use a script to determine how many threads should be displayed in each forum (basically all the unread threads up to some limit, and if no threads unread - no threads displayed, just a 'no unread threads in this forum' message.) The second one would be more simple - assuming that the current programming for the home page uses a constant but separate number for each forum which determines how many threads are to be displayed in each, you could simply vary that number based on forum statistics. Looking at the forums now I see that in the last 24 hours 13 threads have been updated in the Trading forum, 7 in Direct Access, 5 in professional firms, 6 in Software, 2 in Hardware, 1 in Options, 3 in Futures, 0 in Announcements, and 2 in Feedback. Add about 20% (rounded up, minimum one thread) to those numbers for each forum, and have that be the constant number of threads displayed in each forum on the main page. If the statistics change you can manually change the numbers. That way most of the time those who read the site at least once a day won't have to click on the 'more' link, and I'm guessing that's what bothers people, not the fact that the threads are organized according to subject matter - they can always ignore that if they want to. The only shortcoming the second solution has is that if the unread thread number was equal to the number of threads displayed, I would have no way of knowing that. I would then click on the 'more' link only to find out that there is no more unread threads (this is how it works now too, it's just that the number of threads displayed is always out of synch with the number of unread threads, so the above doesn't happen often.) If you went with the second solution, it would be nice if instead of the text 'more' the link description for that link would change depending on the number of unread threads and threads displayed. If there are 15 threads displayed in the Trading forum, and there are 17 unread threads, the link description could be 'more threads (2 unread)'. voodoo
I think there needs to be a thingamajig where after you read a post the folder icon drops off instead of you clearing everything. I don't read everything and I'm sure other people don't either. I think it needs to clear the folder once you have read it.