WORSE 1. Nesting. Debatable whether it’s a good idea in theory, but in practice it means that nested new comments are too difficult to find. 2. No pagination. You can get a [mostly] chronological order by switching the viewing to Oldest. But then you have to scroll, scroll, scroll and keep scrolling because now there’s no pagination so you can’t just click to the last page. 3. Posts not dated. OK you can hover over where it says “a week ago” and see the date/time, but what was the benefit in hiding the actual date/time? It’s much more useful to be able to see the actual date of posts. 4. Number of comments. Nested comments don’t appear to be counted in the number of comments. So if you’re following a thread and you know it previously had X comments, you could miss nested comments because the thread will still show X comments. 5. No messaging system. Previously it was one click to send a private message. Now you can only message people by using several clicks via their Profile>Listing>Contact>Notaboutan item. 6. Finding your own post in Profile. So I’m scrolling through my posts to try and find a previous one, but if it was a “nested” one, it doesn’t show the name of the thread, just who I’ve replied to. That makes it more difficult to find the post I want. And even when I clicked on one of the posts, it didn’t take me to the post, only to the thread. BETTER 1. AI summary. Not very useful for general discussion threads, but could be useful when the OP starts a very long complex thread, particularly one which has no paragraph breaks and not very coherent. I haven’t got the patience to read those, but I might read the AI summary. 2. Images are easier to load, and you can now use .png images instead of having to convert the .png to a .jpg. VERDICT I’m sure the usual “people don’t like change” brigade will laud the new platform, as usual ignoring the fact that it’s change for the worse that people don’t like. I’m sure I posted previously (but I can’t find it) a comment that ebay might make the forum so difficult to use that it discourages people from using it and only people with a desperate problem will go to the trouble. If that was the aim, I think they’ve achieved it. Certainly I think the nested format makes it difficult to use and it’s a deal-breaker for me, I really can’t be a…. with it. EDIT - 18.6.26, 9pm Having used the forum some more since my first post, I can add several more aspects that are worse than the previous platform. 7. Titles of Unread threads used to be in bold. Now you can’t tell whether or not a thread has new posts that you haven’t read. It’s a nuisance. 8. Mentors are no longer identified, except in the M2M section of the forum. On many occasions I’ve explained to newbies that mentors can virtually always be relied on to give trustworthy advice (which isn’t to say that many others don’t also give accurate advice). What’s the point of having mentors if nobody knows who they are. Edit . It looks like the mentors have become “volunteers” now, but who knows what “volunteers” are, and their status isn't obvious anyway unless you click on their profile. It’s ridiculous! And in any case, we're all volunteers seeing as none of us get paid for posting here! 9. Can’t see who last replied to a thread. One mentor in particular has commented that it’s causing them problems and they might only bother with the M2M board now. I agree it’s a nuisance. 10. Autosave has disappeared. That’s another nuisance. 11. No Preview button. I nearly always used the Preview button on the other forum - I found that viewing my post as others would view it highlighted if it made sense or not, and I often made changes to make the meaning clearer. 12. Posts aren’t numbered. I sometimes noted the ID number of a helpful post so that I could easily go back to it. You can’t bookmark posts either on this forum. Again it's a nuisance. 13. Trying to find a post on Profile > Discussions > Comments is difficult because it doesn’t show the title of thread that the posts are in. 14. The emojis that have replaced the “Kudos” button are anonymous, so now you can’t see who has “liked” a post which is a shame. Seeing who liked what enabled you to get a sense of what people were like and help build the community spirit that forums are normally supposed to engender. 15. I’ve seen other people say that it loads faster, but it doesn’t load faster for me, quite the opposite in fact. It sometimes takes so long to load that I get a Gateway Timeout, or a blank page and the message “Something went wrong. Failed to load tags”. (Mac laptop using Firefox latest version). All in all, I think it’s a disaster, and I’m sorry, ebay, but I doubt if many of us are surprised because it seems that whenever you change something, it always ends up worse than before. AFAIK, nobody had complained about the Khoros platform, and whilst I understand that you may have had to change due to technical or financial considerations, why did you have to choose this Bevy one because it seems vastly inferior to the previous board, or any other board that I’ve ever belonged to. Somebody has suggested that vBulletin would have been better, and I agree, or ProBoards, or surely ebay is big enough to design & build your own board instead of buying into a 3rd party board. Anyway it’s just all too cumbersome and annoying for me now, and I’ve seen other people say that they no longer want to spend time here either. I may look in from time to time to see if any improvements have been made, particularly to the nesting nonsense and a few of the other major nuisances, but otherwise this is the only thread I'm reading seeing as I'm the OP. I still have a sneaking suspicion that the aim of changing to this board was to encourage a cull of users….
