What's everyone think?

Like it a lot. Clean, clear, spacious, easy to read and easy on the eyes. A lot of work well worth doing and I'm thankful to all those who made it happen.  I like it much better than before.

I like the new forum look except for a few things.

I think the topic lists have too large of space per topic, I believe because of the avatar images are too big. I think this is true forum wide.

By and large, I am happy with it. The ease of uploading photos means that many more people will participate that way. Other tweaks will occur over time, as other matters are discussed.

How come when logging in on and I phone I cannot zoom in to see the text?

I have found that if you increase the size of your text, using Ctrl and your mouse wheel, the display widens to fill more of the page.

I have windows 7,Running IE 8 and everything works fine. Fills the whole screan,Fast,No problems at all.Just need to run updates when you get them instead of forgetting about them.Dont be scared.Thanks for all the hard work.

"You will note that if you select "Members" in the top menu bar, the entire list of active members is displayed alphabetically, and the original registration dates have been retained (that was a concern to some, as I recall)."

Not a big deal but I think it would be easier and faster to search the member list if it were possible tio scroll the alphabet along the top to bypass & find members in the middle of the alphabet.

Joe  

this would be nice although I did a search and it was a  lot quicker than scrolling the the entire list 

I did a little bit more playing with this, the link state works, but only when the cursor is over the Subject line.

Try this, visit a topic from the main forum page, then return to the main page. The text for the thread you visited will still be blue like you have never visited it. If you move your cursor over it should change to the visited magenta color.

Give it a try

You can dispense with the avatars, for starters.  Too soon to tell about anything else.

The new forum is like a new house, a new car, a new job, a new anything. It takes some time to get used to and to find out where things are. Over time it becomes second nature.

I congratulate OGR for the smooth transition to the new forum with the amount of data that had to be transferred. Anyone who has worked with system and data conversions knows that disasters can happen easily, but it looks like the disasters have been avoided. I assume that there must have been a lot of thought and planning that went into the transition.

To Rich and the OGR crew: Great job!

I have to agree with others who dislike the visual presentation of the new forum. All I see is blank white space on 2/3rds of my screen when I scroll down past the Forum Sponsers and Recent Posts fields on the right! The light is almost blinding since the forum posts only occupy the left 1/3rd of the screen and a large chunk of that is the avator column. Surely that can be fixed. If not, I would vote to return to the old forum format. The presentation was vastly superior to the new version.

If you want to see a forum with excellent presentation/format, check out RCGroups. You can find them at http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/index.php

They also have adds and other information when you first enter their forum. Then when you select a topic and subsequent threads to read, the format changes in such a way to fully utilize the full width of the computer screen for the text. And of course they still have adds but only at the top of the page at that point. I offer their format as food for thought to the OGR Forum owners and developers.

Regards,

Ken

In all honesty, I cannot say I prefer the NEW FORUM. 

There is a lot, more than half the screen, of wasted space. 

To find something other than using search every time is frustrating and fruitless. 

To go to next page you must scroll to bottom of each page and go ONE page at a time.  Really dumb, old forum allowed faster scrolling. 

The listing of number of views of each topic was a great idea and allowed me personally to see what topics were most interesting and did direct me to at least check it out.

With all the "IMPROVEMENTS" you still did not add a spellchecker, even as an option.

In all honesty, I find the new forum clumsy and clunky enough that it will encourage me to view less, which is probably good since I spent too much time here before. 

Disappointing,

 I hope you take critiques to heart and significantly improve the new forum.

mikeg

I'm thinking this might have been fixed, or maybe it's based on user settings.

Before I logged in to reply to this post, I checked my username, and it showed very limited information (no email displayed).

Unrelated, but it seems searches can be based on username (click on "people" under advanced search).  I saw some other comments about the user pages not being the easiest to navigate with just forward and backward, so thought this might be useful to someone.

Unrelated #2, I'm noting the quote function is of course a little different.  Previously I could somewhat easily break up the quoted text using the html tags for quoting if I wanted to reply to different parts of the text.  This is just more of an observation, not a criticism, will probably just take some getting used to.

-Dave

I know for some it isn't important,  but I frequent the page on my phone (android).. and it is MUCH better now.  The mobile version of the site is very well formatted and very quick.  

Overall the "normal" verison of the site is good as well.  

Change is not always a bad thing... This time it was great!

Thanks for the improvement!

I would like to see the contrast increase between the blue and white backgrounds. On posts where someone includes a quote it's hard to differentiate between the quote and the response.

I'm also noticing people are having a hard time responding to quotes without typing inside of them or in front of them.

I see improvements already just since my last post.  I think Rich has removed a lot the wasted white space and it looks and feels much better.  We just need to give OGR some time to tweak the forum and that is certainly fair.  I'm starting to like the new look more and more now.

I think I also read the signatures will be working in a few days to...

I like it. Navigating it is a bit different from the previous-generation forum, but the new features like font, alignment, bullets, etc. are a great improvement. Some will probably complain, but that's how it is with upgrades.

Rich and crew, you did a great job.

First time visiting our "new" forum.  Very impressive.  Thank you OGR!  Bill B.

Agreed. I just fixed this.

That used to be quite prevalent on the old forum too.  I remember seeing the quotes in between the red lines and wondering why the author of the new post didn't type anything new, then noticed they replied within the quote.

Good to see the white space improvement!!

-Dave

Changes and improvements are being accomplished every day.  I appreciate the efforts of Rich and others who have made this new forum possible.  Thank you.

TEX

Steve

I'm trying to get used to it. The old forum seemed a lot easier going from one forum to another. I also notice that several of the posts are duplicated. i am also disapointed that now you can't see where the person lives like the atleast the state.

Looks OK to me.

This is a 100% improvement for those that know how to use a computer. Thanks for the great updte to this site!

I'm kinda on the fence with this new site,it has it's good points and bad points.

Some features I like and some I don't,but the more I use it the more I'm getting use to it. It's kinda like when I signed on for the first time in 2005  It took awhile but I got used to it!

Doug

Thanks Rich. Getting better every day.

Answers...

• Wasted space - FIXED.
• Spellchecker - No one is building a spell checker into their web sites any more because it is not needed. All browsers (except Internet Exploder) have Spell Check built into the browser! Only Internet Exploder does NOT have spell check built in. Get Firefox and you'll have spell check available on EVERY WEB site you visit!
• Critiques - we are taking them to heart and we are listening. Several changes were made today as a result of critiques and listening. For example, there is a poll at the top of the 3-Rail forum that is the result of questions and comments I received via email today about the Recent Posts box. Head on over there and vote!

Rich

        thank you very much for taking the time and efort,to provide us with this great public service that you are providing us ,i greatly appreciate it ,you and your staff do an outstanding job THANKS AGAIN TECHMAN

Man, the new forum is really coming together.  You guys must be putting in some overtime.  Pretty much all the concerns are being addressed and it's only been 2 days.

Thought I'd pop in and try the new forum.

Easy to post a photo.

Rich,

Any way to get the old date and time on the post instead of just how long ago it was posted?  Also - I see the search function uses date.  It would really be nice to have a date.  I see that a post will have hours and then 1 day ago, 2 days ago, etc and of course I can find a calendar to see what the date was.  Makes it easier for us old folks to keep track of things.

KC

I was really used to the previous format so this will take some time to get used to. I cannot get it to work on my Windows phone. That is a problem to me.

IMO the only left to fix is how linked images (like photobucket) come in so small with no option to zoom.  In the reply box the image is full 1024x768 size.  But once posted, it gets miniaturized.  You have to right-click it and open in a new window to view the original size.

I do like the idea of keeping the quote boxes, and the image within shrunk-down (as shown above).  This way quotes and quoted images will be more obvious, and not take up so much of the page.  Especially if it's a great image that people tend to quote over and over and over in a thread.

Other than that, I think were about there.

After using it for a while, getting used to it.

Change is tough on some people - really starting to like it!

So far I like it. Anything new takes time to learn to navigate.

After a couple days I've come to a conclusion. If I'm on my PC with a 19" monitor the new forum is OK. If I'm on my notebook with a 10" screen, well like most websites it can be frustrating. If I had to choose between the old and the new I would pick the old.

I'll take the old one. We still don't know who's online by name, we still don't know who started the thread without going on it, And the font is small. From the start, I  found my way around ok and we won't be going back so here we are.