Admin

What do you mean? Avatars are listed on each post as they were before.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Cheers! Perhaps with a What's your favorite poison option!

I'd also vote for the smilies be a default on/off preference setting. They don't take up much scree real estate, and if they are there to use it reduces clicks, and if you don't like or use them, set default to off.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

They do not show in the section / topic headers by default. I truly think SS has a point. This a very significant change in the way that some people navigate the site. When I look at watched topics for example, I see text of the thread title, but no avatar. I'm probably not going to bother to read the list.

If I do a quick scan and see SS avatar, or MT shooter, or your crazy bird brain image, then I make a value judgement to read it (or not). If I see just a title like "what do you mean" it doesn't catch my attention. It is also more difficult to track back to topics later.

So far, there are some benefits, but also some potential show stoppers. SS has an excellent point. In this day and age we all expect instant gratification, and for some of these new changes instant gratification takes too <expletive> long so we don't bother.

Sort of a Facebook vs Myspace thing. Anybody still use Myspace? Or at least, anybody that matters?

RWR Loc: La Mesa, CA

You do have a way of making things sound so simple!! As for the new layout, I think most of the changes should be easy enough to get used to.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Tell us how you feel in two weeks. That could be valuable.

DGStinner Loc: New Jersey

Another quirk I hope gets corrected is the body of a post shows up under the avatar so you wind up with all this empty space to the right of the avatar.

Admin

Right. But that's also how it was in the old software. That part hasn't changed.
Avatars were only shown next to posts, not on topic lists pages. The same as now.

blackest Loc: Ireland

is there anyway you could use a desktop css along with this css for mobile. it's quite readable at 3 inch wide which is great for a tall narrow screen but it isn't very good on a widescreen monitor with plenty of width but more limited height.

The Best New Feature :)

One more thing is it possible to limit the height of images to say 90% of the browser window much nicer to see all of an image at once.

btw this thread is well worth a look
http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-386929.html some great images there 32 pages so far :)

RWR Loc: La Mesa, CA

Actually, I saw your post "Request To Admin," and thought I'd comment there after a week or two. I agree it's too early to pass judgement yet.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

That may have been the intent, but it isn't what I am seeing from my perspective....

This stuff is complex, and may vary from browser to browser, but I'm definitely seeing a change that I interpret as making the site harder to navigate....

BigBear Loc: Northern CT

I think it looks like any other blog. Change isn't always better.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Some changes are better, i really like the newest photo link, there are some very good images that you might often miss on the older software.
I don't like using a mobile orientated format on a desktop. It should be possible to write css to allow both types of view and keep everybody happy.

NealB Loc: Lowell Indiana

Not impressed so far. I understand that it is aimed at the smartphone users but us golden oldies can not use a smart phone for web surfing. The screen is just to small. All of the scrolling needed now makes it not user friendly now. Hope it gets improved soon.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

OK, I think I have worked out the thing that is causing me grief. Every topic takes up many more vertical inches. With old layout I could see many more topic headers per page, the density was much greater so I could pick what attracted my attention and who it was from. The new format I have to do much more scrolling and there is a lot of wasted space. On an smaller device such as my old iPhone 4s it is almost unusable rather than an improvement.

I can't do a side by side comparison, but the information density is much more sparse with the new layout and contains a lot of information vertically that I do not care about and many fewer topics. I know have at best 10 topic headers per page instead of (at a guess) 30 or more.

Too much scrolling, and much less usable, on an older mobile device much worse. I won't even bother.

I'll maybe check back in a week or so to see what's changed, but the UX has been severely degraded, not improved. The older layout with multiple horizontal panes provided much more information density and better usability on both a large desktop screen and a mobile device.

Dealing with this new layout is probably an order of magnitude more time consuming and the content is no more valuable, so the site is worth only one tenth of what it used to be in term of effort required to find and peruse information.

Oops? Hello Big Bird, I think you have a layout problem!

juicesqueezer Loc: Okeechobee, Florida

Well, I can't see the home page, but did upgrade My Profile and can click on the Active Post page and read and comment. Not sure what is going on with my home page, as it goes to xfinity.com home page. Very strange and this is the only site that does this. Help!
Change, like anything else, you get use to it. Heck, I'm 71 and if I can go from 30 plus years of using a PC to a Mac, I figure I can handle this as well. Just saying......................