Reply To: New site is ok, new style is not
@Unseen, having the clock set to UTC doesn’t bother me much (though I had to experiment to determine the timezone). As I said, I’m used to using UTC in certain contexts. It could very well confuse someone else, however.
Non-threaded topics have a distinct advantage (which this forum *doesn’t* exploit properly, ironically enough) in that for a long thread, ALL of the new activity is at the end and it’s easy to get caught up. On the old site, when a thread got to be 12 pages long or so, it became very painful to scan each page of that thread for new replies. My email notification (which came out at midnight UTC) would give me links to the LAST thing every participant had said in the previous 24 hours, but it could be that, for instance, Unseen replied four times. Where are the other three replies? Time to do an exhaustive search. Oh, and each of those links opened its own tab, and having more than three or four tabs open to T|A meant the Chat facility would bring my machine to a standstill–my browser could even crash if someone typed “Hi!” in chat. As much as I love chatting with people, THAT chat applet just flat-out sucked.
I said that this forum doesn’t properly exploit the advantages of a non-threaded topic, and by that I meant that many forums actually have a page that will display a list of topics that have had activity since the last time you did the search, and give links to the first new reply in that topic. So you go directly to the new content, and only the new content, and don’t have to go there ten times if there are ten new replies. This forum doesn’t seem to have that feature (or maybe I just haven’t found it yet).
