1. The red print at the top of the board - Sentence one Registration is not required to post - Sentence two/ must include first and last name when registering or posting - confusing.

2. What does "New" in red mean on subject - it does not go off after reading.

3. Field width in Subject widening would make it easier to read and cut down on the variation in lines required - some post titles are requiring four lines for subject. Looks like you have allotted 46 characters for this field - quite a lot. This will allow posters much latitude in titles and will make searches more difficult. You can gain some field width adjustments by removing the redundant "last post by" on the second line of the Last Post By field in the last column.

4. Is it really important to the sponsors to know how many people viewed a post and did not comment. This field is not important to me -I am only interested in how many posts to judge activity on a particular thread. If this field was viewable in the subject column or removed the view screen would not look as "busy".

5. My vote would be to slightly darken the shade for more distinctive break between threads. Reading text on a slightly shaded screen seems to go better on my eyes than the start bright white background. The present shade level you have on the sponsors screen is perfect for my reading comfort. Still can only see Anchor Bay and Rocky Mountain -

Looking Good

Gon Fishn

Bill, your email is "Hidden", no one can email you privately. Go to "My Control Center", "Edit Email", check the box validating your email to change this. (The rest of you registered users: click on your own name sometime to see if you are "Hidden" also.)

You're not fully reading the instructions in red. Go back and read them fully and I don't think you'll find them confusing. Note the difference in what you wrote and what it actually says -

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Sentence one Registration is not required to post - Sentence two/ must include first and last name when registering or posting - confusing.


Registration is not required in order to post, but doing so will allow you a greater variety of viewing options. Regardless, you must include your actual First and Last name and a correct email address when registering or posting.

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Don't get married to any of the features of this site. It's doubled my workload and I cannot continue in this vein. Steps are being taken to improve things and hopefully a more simply and better user interface can be created. Nothing is set in stone right now and more changes are likely on the way.

Tom Kirkman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Don't get married to any of the features of this
> site. It's doubled my workload and I cannot
> continue in this vein. Steps are being taken to
> improve things and hopefully a more simply and
> better user interface can be created. Nothing is
> set in stone right now and more changes are likely
> on the way.
>
------------------------------------------------------

Tom,
I vote for: Make it easy on YOU we'll all get used to the changes --
It's the content that counts.

Ken

The site upgrade wasn't done voluntarily. The company that provides the software for what we were using had stopped supporting that particular version and introduced a new forum package with better security and better (supposedly) features. We had to move to it, like it or not.

The additional bells and whistles are just headaches for me and the more I can trim the "features" back down the better things will be. But it's still too early to know what can and can't be done with this software. In my opinion, the very reason that so many sites get so little traffic has a lot to do with the forum software packages being too cluttered and difficult to use. And it's likely to get worse before it gets any better.

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It has always amazed me Tom that the people that design and think up these programs, do it in a way they understand and think is easy,
Its like designing a car and selling it to the public, after the dealer gets it they find out you can't remove the starter without taking the engine out.
things should be designed with the knowledge that not everyone is a computer expert.
it would make your life easy and ours.

The doorknob is the most intuitive invention in world history. Put anyone, even some animals, into a room behind a door with one and without any instructions most can figure out how to use it in a matter of seconds.

More people and companies need to think about doorknobs when designing things for broad public use in non-technical areas.

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One of my less favorite tasks over the past week and a half was doing an assessment of a software package for Uncle Sam. It was really slick - tons and tons of neat things to play with changing fonts, changing language characters, morphing colors, expanding views, rotating images in three dimensions, noises you could set for different tasks/actions - unfortunately most of them were not applicable to fulfill the desired tasks/actions. That's what happens when a bunch of really bright folks sit down and brainstorm without a user in the picture - or an understanding of what the end user's requirements are.

had a diesel engine once that the starter was on the back, at first glance you thought you had to pull motor to replace starter, it was easier than it looked but to the general user it really looked like engine had to be removed, after several years of complaints the engineers changed it. they took a one man job and made it a two man job and even then it was harder than the original.
funny thing was they could not understand why everyone was even more upset.