Hi,
I have been a UBB forum creator since 2002, starting with the old classic forum and moving to the Threads forum. My forums have over 10's of thousands of registered members, and I have grown to love the 6.x version of Threads. I just wanted to make a few comments on the latest version I see.
1) I don't really understand why people would want to clutter their forums with the left and right columns that now appear by default. They simply distract the eye with information such as "Who's Online" and "Featured Member" and "Top Poster". I don't know why anyone would ever want to see this information, apart from, say, once a year when they were especially bored.
2) The new version of these forums reminds me of the Yahoo website, with information overload. There is not enough whitespace. Perhaps at a stretch I could quote Mozart here, who said "Silence is very imporant. The silence between the notes are as important as the notes themselves." I believe whitespace is like the silence in music.
3) The "Who's Online" used to be down the bottom right? (along with the "Forum Stats" section). This is where it makes sense to put it (at least it makes sense that way to me). You see, if you put it in a column at the left of the screen then it constantly distracts from what the user actually came to do... read a post.
Please let me know any comments on the above.
I want to know if I should stick with this software now that it looks so different.
Also, I tried to join this very forum using the usernames 'chuckee' and 'chuckeee' but was told that neither were available. I think went to the 'forgot password' page and entered both of these usernames only to be told that neither of them exist. Both pages cannot be correct.
Cheers
