Website problem

I find the new forum good but noticed even though i have fast broadband it takes 15-20 seconds to log in, ok when in though.

Must admit I donā€™t like the new website format at all.
I used to visit every couple of days or so but now itā€™s probably once a week if that. Just seems some much harder and less intuitive than the old oneā€¦

I really found the old site very easy and logical to use,i am not a great computer buff but think the new site is a load of rubbish and nearly imposs,no pleasure at all to use and find anything,so do not really bother a lot now such ,just a big mess compared to old site

When I click on the MX-5 Owners Club icon I see what you have shown in the screenshot which is why I am confused I think.

So for me, clicking the MX-5 Owners Club icon displays this:

I donā€™t actually know how to browse to ā€˜Categoriesā€™ā€¦

What does the page look like when you click on the MX-5 Owners Club icon?

I just get ā€˜Latestā€™ as a whole screen. How odd. I wonder if Iā€™ve changed a setting? I wonder how many other people have changed the same setting and weā€™re all seeing slightly different things when we click on links! It seems to do for you what I think it should do but doesnā€™t for me. How odd! :smiley:

Preferences > Interface > Select Home Page

Done! Had no idea Iā€™d changed that. :smiley:

This confirms my confusion, I have been enjoying the new forum but that sounds like it could be down to me having a different experience all together compared to others!

What device do you use to access the forum? It may be down to screen size or something along those lines.

It was a setting Iā€™d changed without realising Iā€™d changed it!

On Firefox 74 here with no issues, but running on Ubuntu 19.10 rather than MS Windows

This is the view I have with Categories down the left and new posts on the right.

Categories have flags next to them if there are new posts within and then thereā€™s the new posts/active topics since last visit on the right offering a variety of ways to see whatā€™s going on, some very like the old forum in factā€¦ though a bit more colourful perhaps :sunglasses:

Or I had changed and you had the standard experienceā€¦

@IanH do you know what the defaults is for:

Those are the features I like so much about that view!

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Indeed, which is why I find the animosity from some puzzling. Aesthetically itā€™s different, but actually itā€™s pretty much the same. Just faster and with more features.

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One minor annoyance when viewing a post is the Suggested Topics below it. But I work around it, ignore it.

If one makes the mistake of clicking on a Suggested Topic then the immediately useful menu bars get lost because of this detour and the quickest way out of this trap is home via the MX-5 OC button, or sufficient hits on the browser back button.

Normally my default page is Latest and I find it is quickest to hit the browserā€™s back button to leave a post and return to the Latest list, or only if near the top of the list then hit Latest to refresh the page and list.

I notice little changes happening around the top of the page as well and assume there is some tinkering going on behind the scenes.

Despite being quite active on here I still havenā€™t managed to find a valid ā€œtutorialā€ suitable for newbies although I managed to be completely sidetracked on the Discourse website several weeks ago.

Here using latest FF on a fast PC with very big screens. But then Iā€™m on the side of the dinosaurs.

However I did try the Android phone on decent wifi while away and gave up each time after only a few minutes.
This is significant when a figure I saw from a friends hit counter for their website (a holiday business) a couple of weeks ago suggested that last year PCs only accounted for about 10%-15% of hits, the vast majority of interactions were from Smart phones, Apple devices were down in the noise with a few percent each type.

This post from my Android phone with screenshots taken from it. I find one of the major pluses of discourse is how easy it is to use from my phone, particularly when the previous site was effectively impossible to do so.

For a newbie tutorial have you tried the one in post 8 above, itā€™s quite straightforward

I have to say I am very much a fan of this new platform. Of course when it is first looked at, itā€™s new and ā€œdonā€™t know what I am doingā€ :thinking: but after a little while it is quite easy either on a PC or phone.
A couple of issues that new users might find distracting and difficult is the system messages which are quite overloading to start with. If they could be turned off I think new users would have an easier time. The second one is a bit of a quirk but to be honest I have not looked to see if it actually the case. That is that there is a lovely feature that allows you to all the new topics and or the new replies. However it appears most obviously at the bottom of a post, so effectively you need to go into a post to see the new posts easily. It probably is on the landing page somewhere but I find it easy to do it this way. And once I post this, the new post link will be under this message on my phone.

One of the options for the default home page is ā€˜newā€™. Would that help solve your issue?

Ah, a logo thatā€™s actually a link :slight_smile: not immediately obvious so thanks for pointing it out!

Would be handy if it was more clear it was a link to the Forum Home :slight_smile:

Thank you. It has improved since I last tried the phone almost a month ago from Austria.

The ā€œTutorialā€ is what I looked at before, it has the philosophy, but not the relevant detail for this website. OK if you know what youā€™re doing and are familiar with the contexts, but an incredibly steep learning/association curve for a newbie fresh to a new site and about to learn a new language of context.
It has a flavour reminiscent of when I was learning Unix - you had to know what you were searching for and in its weird Unix name before you could look for it to learn about it in ā€œMan.ā€ I gave up on Man and bought a book (Coffin) which included a 25 page chapter on Understanding Unix Documentation.

I frequently see links to 2019 posts in the Suggested Topics. OK if I was a new user and would benefit from some history, but Iā€™ve either seen or decided not see those before. I would prefer to have that as an on/off option, default on for new users but with the option to turn it off.

.
However, on balance this website is a vast improvement on the old one and I much prefer it.

I like the post editor a lot, and how it will remember an incomplete posting and allow you to resume if something happens to disrupt the process.

I like the picture adding ease.

Once I figured it out, I like the basic simple quoting process on a PC (highlight a block of text anywhere in other posts, click on the " symbol that then appears, with result as below where the cursor had been).

And I really, really like having a black screen and white writing. Restful on the eyes, zzzzzzz.