OK, so we now have a new forum; having spent some considerable time researching/experimenting-with/buggering-about-with all the various new options/settings, I still can't get it to do what the old forum did, ie: every new post was sent directly (verbatim, not just a notification) to my Inbox. [In fact, it doesn't even seem to consistently notify me of all posts anyway; just a random few......]

 

If I am missing something, can someone please tell me; if not, then how can this new forum possibly be considered an improvement?

 

getting more and more pissed-off with MakeMusic by the day...,

 

Gareth

The forum software we're using now is much more of a standard. Every where I go on the net I find forums that are very similar to this. There were a lot of reasons we wanted to get rid of the old forum. Here are a few:

1. It was broken and would have taken a lot of research and time to fix. You couldn't even get access to posts before a certain date (I think January of 2002 or so). The forum was also breaking down often and forcing us to devote valuable time to it.

2. It didn't fit the look of our new website at all, and it generally looked old compared to other forums on the net. It's important for a company like us to have a modern appearance to attract new users.

3. It did follow the almost universal convention of having new posts move a thread to the top. Threads which people were still posting to were constantly being moved off to the second page and forgotten or never seen. This was an embarrassing shortcoming, and easily the single biggest inconvenience I've ever found in a forum. I actually think we'll see more posts than before.

4. Formatting was extremely limited. And it's nice to have automatic integration of hyper links.

5. People were complaining. And we agreed with the complaints.

There will and obviously should be feature requests. I'd personally love to have a spell checker. I'm not sure yet what kind of modifications we'll be able to do, but we'll look into them when it's feasible to do so.

 

 

And while I'm on the subject, is there a way to find just the new postings without having to scroll through an entire thread? (Ah, here in the edit box, I see where the "post icons" come from. I surmise that thread initiators can highlight their messages. One mystery solved.) And "Last Seen"? What, and by whom?

Post Edited (Jon Delfin) : 10/6/2003 9:32:22 PM GMT

 

So far as I am concerned, I HATE the new forum, and I was very happy with the old format.

 

It was so much easier to keep up to date with what people were saying, when each time someone posted, their post was e-mailed directly to your Inbox. Especially if you were away for a few days, then you could catch up at leisure, confident that you were reading the posts in the order they were posted, With the new forum, if you go away on holiday, I can see no possible way that you can come back and have any idea where to start catching up.

 

Call me an cantankerous old reactionary if you will, (please, I've always wanted to be called cantankerous, especially if I could spell it) but I think the new forum STINKS.

 

Gareth

 

 

 

 

And I like the new forums MUCH better.

 

Paul

Go Gareth!

 As I have always said, if you can't be mean, nasty, and cranky, what's the point of growing old?