It looks completely disconnected. Can't navigate. It looks nice, but it's not intutive and not easy to connect with people. Where's the friends list and the feed of what friends are posting???
Was the goal to direct people towards chat? Many people prefer slower paced discussion instead of everything looking like were competing, with these new things like trophies, it's all confusing. (I really mean no offence or anything bad, just giving my honest impressions.) And looks like there's so little activity on the forum now too... not that I'm too sociable but I like logging in to see what my friends are doing sometimes even if I don't want to talk.
The friends list no longer exists. The rep power system is gone also and has been replaced with a trophy system that is based on number of posts and likes received. The max amount of trophy points is 113 and I accumulated that amount within the first 2 hours of the change. System is meaningless and should be scrapped. PM's are now called conversations so basically they are the same. Each profile page is the same and cannot be customized, also it no longer tracks the last 10 visitors or the accumulated total since joining. You can still create threads but have to wait for mod approval before becoming public. I can understand as this will help in preventing trolls and scammers but it does inhibit spontaneity.
It is hard to determine a member's sex unless you first go to their profile page and click 'About". It was easy before as male names were in blue and females pink and this was displayed on each post along with the number of posts written, date of joining the site, and rep power. A lot of the screen names appear disjointed too and this is very distracting. There is a scroll arrow in each post that you can click to find the join date but it cuts off the year so you really don't know what year they joined.
It is extremely problematic doing multi-quotes unless the posts are on the exact same page. I guess that you can cut and paste from other pages but I tried that and it looked really messed up on the post I was writing so I don't bother to do this anymore.
I do enjoy the reaction icons but other than that I miss the old format.
I agree that the forums are superior for conversation because based on topic, time of day and the post that was written you can often receive a reply in minutes. I attribute the slowing of activity in the forums to members leaving the site because of the changes. I am not happy with them either but I still love the site and don't plan on ever leaving. Yes, it takes some getting used to, especially in navigating. Glad to see you back by the way and hope that you stick around.
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