Tom, let me state up front I hope you stick around. This rant is not about you.
Gentlemen,
Cleaning out cookies will get rid of settings/logins/preferences in a bunch of sites, not just this one. I am extremely security conscious, and I am yet to zap out my cookie file. I will look at it in the browser once in a while to get rid of ones that I do not recognize. But getting rid of them all creates too many unintended consequences.
I’m sure Kalmbach did not engineer this software themselves. It is an off-the-shelf package. The idea of creating a package that would do what the survey says would be a fairly costly endeavor, even if you started with an off-the-shelf package and had the rights to modify it. It is amazing how many latent software bugs get uncovered when someone starts customizing code. Been there, done that in other applications. “It ain’t fun, and it ain’t cheap.”
If you did survey the users here, do you really think you would get a consensus on anything? Do we keep the stars or get rid of them? Do we keep polls, get rid of them or start a poll to decide? What do they want it to look like? What are their five most desired features…and least desired (some items might be on both lists at one and the same time). Even establishing user settings (things as simple as the color and default fonts of the pages) are going to be hated by nearly half the folks, no matter what you do.
I’m certainly not one who blindly sings the praises of anything. Nor am I a Kalmbach apologist. I am a born skeptic, some would argue a cynic. But in all honesty, the new forum is no worse than any others I belong to and is better than several I can think of.
For those having real technical issues, I sincerely hope you hang in there and they get fixed. I know it is very frustrating (again, been there, done t
First off I think that you need to chill, Dude. Come’on, the guys are right when they say that it has only been less then a month and I’m sure that all of the bugs aren’t worked out as well. You have to have a little more trust in other people before you go jumping to conclusions. Personally I don’t mind the new style. The old one was good and all but I see nothing wrong with this one. In due time it will be great, but “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” You have to treat it like moving in with a woman, sure it’s different and nothing that you’re used to but you see past all of her strange ways and know that she’s hot and worth it. Dude, you have see past all of the short comings that on this forum right now and know that it’s “what’s on the inside that counts”: MODEL RAILROADING. Nothing else should matter but us sitting at our computers talking about our great passion. Focus on that! I say get over it, humble yourself and spread your knowledge of model railroading to us unlearned.
I think that it’s just because you’re from NORCAL ( ha, ha, funny Southern California joke). I had to throw that in.
Bob Boudreau wrote: ““Everyone is out of step except me!” “So I’m leaving!” he says. Seems to work for hundreds of others, photos and all. Maybe, just maybe, you’re not doing something right?” He’s not the only one. I’m having exactly the same problems as Tom described. “Are you using a MAC?” Don’t know about Tom, but I am. So what? Mark.
That assumes that it wasn’t broken. The most we could ever say from this end is that it didn’t look broken, which isn’t exactly true in this case, either. From the people on the administration/maintenance end of the server, it might have been a complete trainwreck.
I work with a couple of guys that held a web server system together on old software at their customer’s request because they did not want to spend the money to upgrade. From the user perspective, other than sometimes being slow and once in a great while unavailable for a few minutes, but it was not broken…right up until it gave up the ghost. They got it back up and running, but it was pretty much a goner. The truth was it was broken all along, and from the administrator/maintenance end it was obvious.
The irony of all this is that there was a thread going around about 8 or 10 months ago asking Bergie when they were going to do something about the forum software. The old system was often slow, sometimes unresponsive for minutes on end and apparently not very secure from attacks. As I remember, the problem reached its climax with an attack from the outside that shut down the forum for a couple of days. From a computer perspective, the symptoms do not support the statement that the old system “ain’t broke.”
As for Spacemouse, he was on vacation but was back last Saturday or Sunday. I don’t know where he has been since.
As I said on the Trains forums, i am not thrilled with the new format either and find some things confusing. I hope it just takes some getting used to.
Come on Tom, don’t leave us. You offer a lot to this site and all its members. What’ll it be like without you?
There are a few things with the new forum I do not like, but then there are other things I do like. I think I may have preferred the old forum moreso than this one, but hey, it’s a change, and it seems to work a bit better than the old one did, performance wise. So, I don’t think I’ll even bother listing what I like and don’t like, because it’s not going to bring back the old forum.
Id hate to see you leave Tom. You helped all these people. I mean when you first arrived to the old Trains.com you had to get used to it right? Oh well i get confused sometimes but Ill stay.
The main problem with the new forum is the loss of tool bars and the ability to paste in images, and the quirky faults at login. Other than that, sure it works a bit different from the older one, but this is just different not necessarily worse.
For those who say they can post images using the [*img] … [/img] tags I say good luck to you, but it doesn’t work for me (and NO I don’t use a Mac, but that shouldn’t matter either). Its a fault and it needs to be fixed, but I wouldn’t stop posting over it.
Mr. White, please allow me to add my [2c] to the fray. I had some problems with the new forum, as well. But, I realize that with anything new comes glitches and the learning curve. We were all comfortable with the old forum, and change takes us out of our comfort zone. I would ask you to give it a little time If not, that’s your prerogative, and as you can see, you WILL be missed.
Don’t leave Tom, I never would have built the bridge or the canyon without your encouragement. You have done the same for others.
I do wish you could get your pics posted, that is a big part of the fun.
As for the wrangeling, I am trying to learn to live with that, but I was disappointed that over 1/2 the posts on the huge bridge pic posting had nothing to do with pics of bridges. I do hope you can get a few of your great bridges to show.
I think that in Tom’s post you are seeing the feelings of many older, longtime hobbyists, those not intimately familiar with computers and new forum systems…just like myself. As I alluded to in another thread, I whole heartedly believe that the dramatic drop in postings since the forum change over (as well as in forum subscriber numbers) are the result of older hobbyists - the guys who are not computer geeks but really know their modeling - throwing up their hands in frustration and walking away and not to any degree just the usual summer slump. I don’t expect to see the situation change come September…in fact, it may decline further as the kiddies go back to school.
More and more, this is becoming a forum composed almost exclusively of newbies, most of the experienced modelers having packed their bags and moved on. The old forum was reasonably servicable and far simpler for most of us non-computer types to get around. Like Tom, I find the new forum a distinct step backwards, in every way.
LOL! Good reply… Yep I use the Mac also, I have had no problems with the site since about day 2 when they fixed a couple of the bugs. I really don’t think the forum is either better or worse, it is just different. I have been here with both Safari and Firefox, and find they both work. If you are having problems with the forum, one option is to try a different browser. I highly recommend Firefox, and its a free download. As has been said before, give it some time and chances are the bugs will be worked out and you will get used to the new look and feel of the forum.