There were no problems until they tinkered with it.

It all should be fixed now

Hi. There were problems with the old format. People posting maliciously under false names had gotten out of hand. The new format is better, in that you have to have an account and you have to log in, meaning that ultimately you can find out who is posting as who if need be. But there are bad sides to the new format. It used to be easy to go through a category, checking only posts by people you've found informative, cogent and polite in the past, or just friends. The new format doesn't let you do that. There aren't many people on these boards who put basic, factual, not-widely-known information on line, so inability to search or scan for those people as a top organising principle can greatly reduce the relevance and quality of the stuff you have to look at to get at what you want. Posts starting threads in which nobody had any interest used to fall away quickly. That's no longer true. New threads, valuable or not, dominate the important position of first data scanned. Whoever is most active in creating new threads, useful or not, effectively dominates the forum. Their thread-starting posts, or at least the thread titles are unavoidable. This encourages the creation of redundant threads. (It's always better for someone who likes the look of their own online voice to start new threads than to contribute to existing ones where the topics are already covered.) Organising information retrieval by thread title, whether readers want it that way or not, is counterproductive and provides a megaphone for irrelevance. The position of the first post in the thread is too "pushy". It's enough if you know where it is and can easily get to it when you want to see it, like the first time you assess the thread. Putting it on the way every time takes control away from the reader, and that's poor organisation for information access. Also, the way for the first poster to take more control away from the reader is to make a long first post, so other posts in the thread won't be on the same screen without some or preferably lots of scrolling. It's one more little way the new system lends power to pointless blathering. Organization by thread works fine if you have very active moderators mercilessly locking irrelevant and redundant threads, and if there's a way to look for the people you want, and if you don't put the initial post in the way every time a reader wants to access a thread. Are such moderators contemplated here? Or is this just an experiment that wasn't thought through very well? I think the latter. By encouraging the mass creation of worthless threads, putting data you may not want to view over and over in your way over and over, and making it unreasonably hard to search for high-quality posters, the new system makes the boards less useful. David Blue

David Blue, The icing on the cake of your delicious review of the new system is that if you really, really wanted to read Joe Mendla's one-line opuses, you have you clear a pop-up ad to do so.