If you 've been paying attetnion it looks like the website will finally get an overhaul soon. Hopefully this update will include more ergonomic layout, and use of this site; forums, news layout, etc. The mobile site definetly needs treatment, to be cleared of all the wares that reside on there… It can become difficult when you’re trying to read a section of the site on your phone and get redirected to becoming the 1,000,000 winner of an iphone…
That’s a good question Mac. I’ve seen those “trains.com” alerts pop up, but it strikes me that they’re talking a bit but not saying much at all.
What’s changing? What’s staying the same? What are we gaining and what are we losing, if we’re losing anything?
Many unspoken things here.
see my post on the ‘new user experience;’ it’s the same thing. There is a link to ‘test drive’ the new version. I didn’t care much for it, and we lost Vince (miningman) over it forever, but it’s likely an improvement for Kalmbach which I spoze is what matters most.
Where’s your post on “new user experience” Mod-man? Looks like I missed that one. I was out of town several days last week and as a rule I don’t take the lap-top with me.
It was about 9 days ago.
I went back and pulled up the link from the version touted for Classic Trains ‘sneak peek’; I have no idea how to edit the secret tracking codes out of the URL but hey! check it out on my dime, as it were.
EDIT: Oh my, lookee here, they’re running a sweepstakes promotion to advertise the new changes. You may be the lucky winner of free access for a year!
Again I have no idea how you adjust this to your own specs or how to get the unredirected URL to the sweepstakes out of an e-mail on a phone. Perhaps Kalmbach can provide the appropriate links here, or to me, and I can edit this post appropriately to include them…
Thanks Mod-man!
I checked the links, and honestly it still leaves a lot of questions un-answered.
Have to wait and see, I suppose.
The trend on the internet is to get rid of the open and moderated forums. Note Yahoo no longer allows comments to their news stories. Military dot com dropped their discussion forums as well in favor of individual user comments. So we’ll see what happens.
PC culture rules the day… Google got the ball rolling years ago by deleting content and shadowbans on it’s associated platforms.
All I saw there was a (nice) video hyping what’s coming. But I got no sense of what’s coming. Maybe I missed something.
I too checked the links and stopped when I saw I had to agree to accept ads. I get TOO many already.
I don’t mind accepting ads IF, and it’s a very big IF, they keep them in their place. By this I mean on the periphery of the on-line content, NOT right in the middle of something I’m trying to read, and then having it jump all over the aforementioned content so I have to chase it with the cursor to eliminate it.
It’s what caused me to block ads to begin with. I can understand commercials, they pay the bills, but don’t pester me with 'em!
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You have to click on the button all the way at the bottom to get to the sample site.
Pretty much my thought, don’t mind ads if they’re not blocking the content, by having to do the cursor chase is really annoying - which reminds me of a joke Windoze error message from ca 1997, where the “yes” button remained stationary and the “no” button would evade the mouse pointer.
That’s funnier than either of the joke Macintosh versions, one of which had the clickable buttons run away from mouseover and the other of which kept moving ‘Restart’ with just enough lag that you thought you could click on something else real quick … but couldn’t. (There was also the fake page with no options but shutdown and restart that you couldn’t back your way out of, but that was just cruelty.
For a while I had a screensaver which changed your cursor into a butterfly which a little cat would chase around the screen. Simpler things were delightful then…
Yeah, nothing like having a bunch of racists or homophobes or whatever scum of the earth making 45,000 hate and threat-filled posts on every article posted. Do you blame google/yahoo/anyone?
You live in a country of free and unencumbered speech so you have to take the good with the bad. You can’t just parse what you feel is offensive. Yet people’s convictions are opinion. So treat it as such and move on if you disagree with their language. The exception to the rule would be death threats at that point you should be removed.
No, I don’t blame google/yahoo/anyone, but the cowards that hide behind the anonymity of a computer screen are here and will always be with us. Like Mac advises I just ignore the worst of what I see, not that I see much on the sites I go to. And I never rise to the bait and argue with the loons, you can’t win.
On the other hand, there are two sites I go to, northjersey.com and nj.com, both on-line versions of local newspapers. I like to see what’s going on with the home folks. Anyway, both had comment sections for the various news stories and both dropped the same. Since both papers lean in a particular political direction (I won’t say what) I suspect they dropped the comments because they didn’t like the " Who are you trying to kid?" back-talk they were getting.
A lot of that back-talk was well-reasoned and very well written, by the way. Sure, there were some dopes, but a distinct minority.
And it’s probably cheaper to run a website without a “Comments” section anyway, which I can understand.
Yup, my opinion exactly. The root cause is intolerance of opposing viewpoints and the fact some authors can’t stand to be corrected on their factual mistakes. On Military dot com it all started with the head of the News Department not liking very negative comments made about his articles. As well as the some of the posters would link to competing websites and/or quote from copyrighted sources without attribution. Would have loved to be a bug on the wall in some of those internal meetings to hear exactly what the complaints were vs getting it second hand.
Freedom of Speech only applies to the government. Private entities can put limits on whatever they want.