This New Format is Dreadful.

If

If it were not for my devotion to the Canon FD Forum I would be out of here.

mm partly agree, it does look sort of ok, but with all the fixed size comment boxes you now need to scroll a lot of pages down all the time if there are a series of 1 line comments. so now there is much to much "white space" without any tekst resulting in a total of 3 lines of tekst in smaal print at a time on a screen wherer theree could be at least 70 or 80.

Even the front page (when not logged in) is a "scroll circus" now

With my "trying to be supportive" hat back on (oh, and the "write your reply" text is here again), it does seem like a much worse use of space:

Here's a screen grab from (part of) a post of mine from the old site, which I still have open in some tabs:

Here's the new site:

That's not a better use of space or a legibility improvement. It's worse on mobile, where the avatars are interleaved with, and often larger than, the actual posts. Personally I take photos because I like being behind, not in front of, the camera, and have no interest in wasting real-estate and causing trauma by showing people what I look like. Maybe I'm unusual?

Imho I also liked the old version better. What happened to all the general comments on my portfolio over the years? I can not seem to find them anymore.

Is there a way for remembering the sign-in / login data?

Navigation is not intuitive. The site is not responsive - takes long enough to respond to input that you wonder if the page crashed.

The old site was not great and I'm glad to see an attempt to improve and update, but I think this is a bit of a mess tbh.

For what it's worth, the site seems responsive enough to me - but I've seen several people complain, so it's possible that I'm not looking at the "slow" pages.

Quick usability question: does anyone actually want their avatar images to appear? As in, are they willing for their post to take up more space because of the avatar? A fair chunk of the wasted space in short posts would disappear if the avatars were hidden (or if there were a user option to hide them). A significant chunk of us seem to have blank avatars anyway, and I've no particular intention of changing mine.

This new site format is complete overkill. It's slow & very difficult to navigate. The older format could have used a bit of rejuvenation. But, this is plainly awful.

Has PN ever heard of "less is more?" After well over 10 years, I'm debating about renewing dues in the spring.

Please, change this awful format.

For what it's worth, I gather from Glenn's posts that they're actively working on the performance issues. (I don't know why this wasn't caught before, but hey ho.) Let's see if they can fix it before we get too worried. As for navigation, I think there are three categories: things that have just moved (which could be "solved" if someone makes some documentation about how to do everything wee could do with the old site), stuff that's buggy (like most of the site navigation not working on mobile - I trust that's being worked on), and stuff that's a genuine design decision or functional regression. I think there's much less in the last category than the last site redesign, but there's certainly stuff there, and we need to work out what it is so we know whether the site has been permanently crippled for our requirements. This may take some time.

Glenn has said he's proud that his team won't give up. The dispiriting thing is that, for those of us who were happy enough with the old site, that's exactly what we'd like them to do. Since we're self-selecting as people who already used the old site, we have a bias towards wanting the old feature set - if we didn't want that, we'd have been on other sites instead, so we may be very unrepresentative of all the people who could be members. Still, there are reports of people leaving (although it's not clear to me how much of that was due to the site design) and difficulty attracting new members (which I concede may have been - it's not like I've surveyed potential readers). I remain confused as to how the existing membership apparently managed to be mostly excluded from the new design process despite claims that the site is moving to being funded by subscribers (so you'd think keeping the existing subscribers would be a priority over visitors looking at advertising), and there seems to have been a lack of use of a free resource of many people who could have helped the project for free. Still, we're here now. Let's see if we can make it usable.

I wish there was a rating system in place because as it is there are few or no comments on many of the new uploads. Much less traffic on mine anyway. As much as I disliked the old ratings system, I found I got more comments and interest on those I did ask for a rating and critique. I also miss top photos of 24 hours. I think the new look is ok, but its very slow. slow. slow. Compared to lets say 1x. But of course 1x. costs an arm and a leg to keep up.

Optimizations are occurring and will be rolled out soon, so speed is expected to improve. Thank you for your patience.

For what it's worth, I gather from Glenn's posts that they're actively working on the performance issues. (I don't know why this wasn't caught before, but hey ho.) Let's see if they can fix it before we get too worried. As for navigation, I think there are three categories: things that have just moved (which could be "solved" if someone makes some documentation about how to do everything wee could do with the old site), stuff that's buggy (like most of the site navigation not working on mobile - I trust that's being worked on), and stuff that's a genuine design decision or functional regression. I think there's much less in the last category than the last site redesign, but there's certainly stuff there, and we need to work out what it is so we know whether the site has been permanently crippled for our requirements. This may take some time.

 

Glenn has said he's proud that his team won't give up. The dispiriting thing is that, for those of us who were happy enough with the old site, that's exactly what we'd like them to do. Since we're self-selecting as people who already used the old site, we have a bias towards wanting the old feature set - if we didn't want that, we'd have been on other sites instead, so we may be very unrepresentative of all the people who could be members. Still, there are reports of people leaving (although it's not clear to me how much of that was due to the site design) and difficulty attracting new members (which I concede may have been - it's not like I've surveyed potential readers). I remain confused as to how the existing membership apparently managed to be mostly excluded from the new design process despite claims that the site is moving to being funded by subscribers (so you'd think keeping the existing subscribers would be a priority over visitors looking at advertising), and there seems to have been a lack of use of a free resource of many people who could have helped the project for free. Still, we're here now. Let's see if we can make it usable.

We had on many occasions invited people to beta test so to say members were not involved at all is just not accurate. I will be posting a daily update on what the dev team is working on and I will do my best to answer any and all questions that come in. We are working to make the site faster and have noted bugs reported here - as you can imagine we have to prioritize so please understand we're doing our best, more soon in my daily update this afternoon.

I used to know what I was doing, could find my way around and could get at everything I needed to do what I set out to do. Now I don't have a clue- can't find info I used to use. Still can't even post a picture in a thread ( ok I made it work twice, now it doesn't) And I'm afraid I see no benefit at all, and there's plainly insufficient resource to guide us through the changeover. Its just like a group of people have made themselves busy to no purpose and have just left us alone to find our way around.

Hi Dave - DM me lets see if we can't figure this posting a photo to forums issue you are having out together.

This new site format is complete overkill. It's slow & very difficult to navigate. The older format could have used a bit of rejuvenation. But, this is plainly awful.

Has PN ever heard of "less is more?" After well over 10 years, I'm debating about renewing dues in the spring.

Please, change this awful format.

Thank you for your feedback Ken.

I don't like the new format either. Somehow I got logged off, and when I signed in again, I was brought to "My Portfolio" page. I don't have a portfolio here. Also, there was no way to get to the forums. I had to change the url to just plain "photo.net" and refresh the page.

Please DM me your Browser and OS - we would like to recreate as testing here SSO (single sign on) appears to be working.

Navigation is not intuitive. The site is not responsive - takes long enough to respond to input that you wonder if the page crashed.

The old site was not great and I'm glad to see an attempt to improve and update, but I think this is a bit of a mess tbh.

Our navigation is actually streamlined from 9 main navigation tabs on old site to 3. If you include Workspace/Member Center its 10 to 4. There was significant overlap on 1.0 that made it difficult for new members to navigate. Yes - we know, that if you get used to a site for a number of years you know exactly where everything is - we certainly get that BUT we would get emails from new users daily asking where X is, where Y is (very basic functions like how do I upload a photo, where is it visible in the community, etc) and if you want a community to grow - you need new users to understand where everything is without a manual because we know that no new user is going to read a manual to use a site - it must be intuitive. We have 3 tabs now - Explore = Galleries, Learn = editorial articles, and Community = Forums. Then of course Member Center = Workspace. (which you could argue is the 4th tab)