Close to being reasonably usable that is…

The color changes are a big improvement. Here are a couple of other things I’d like to see tweaked – and then I’ll stop logging on with reluctance…

1. When, for instance, “General Discussion” is clicked in the “recent discussions” left hand column, it opens up to several topics. Great. Click on one of those topics, however, and those topics close right up. So, instead of being able to toggle back and forth between a thread you’re finished with to a new one that interests you under that same subject heading, it requires re-opening General Discussions again. I’d like to see the topics list in “recent discussions” remain open after they’re clicked open.

2. The left hand column (I seem to have many complaints about this thing!), in my opinion, should stay fixed and not move when a thread is scrolled through. As it is, once you’re finished reading a long thread, you need to go back up to the top in order to re-orient with the left column. If that column would stay fixed, you could just slide the cursor over to a new topic.

3. Left hand column again! Why is a thread topic affixed with the name of the last person who posted to it? Why isn’t the person’s name who posted the query or comment to begin with under that topic?

4. OK. One more and we’ll call it a day. The old forum used to exclude from view comments that you had already read when you opened up a topic you had viewed before. The entire thread was still available, but only the new posts were visible at first when you opened the thread up again.  That was a handy feature, and cut down on the time it (now) takes to skim through a thread in order to determine if you read it before – and where you might have left off when you did last read it.

Do any of these suggestions make sense to anyone else?

As I said at the beginning of this post, I appreciate the changes that have been made so far. But, again in my opinion, I think a few more things could be done to increase the usability of the site.

Zolton