Yeah -- one of the nice things about re-organizing in the way that we did is that the forum delineations, for the most part, is based on real information ... the posts. With only a couple of places that I'm looking into a crystal ball on.

I think that's the best way to go about it.

Thanks!

Neil

I think the moving threads thing won't be that big of a deal once the forums get finalized. The only people it might affect are those people who will only try and post in Stan's lounge and nowhere else.

The marker is a good idea. Don't think we need to worry about PMs.

I don't know. Reading that Adobe forum (which, yuck, is ugly IMO), it kinda sounds like someone who gets stuck in their ways and hates changes. But that's just how I took it and I'm sure I'm wrong.

Anyway, it may ruffle a few feathers (very few IMO), but I'm sure in time they'll get used to it.

Heh...You have NO idea the kind of deafening roar that resulted when Adobe tried to change from what you see there.

TWICE, they tried it...once with a crapload of boxes, and separator lines, and light/dark alternate colorings per line in the thread index list; and then by trying to use the slow-as-hell ColdFusion/Flash-based forums like the ones used by the post-Macromedia merger forums.

The folks who were longtime regulars on the original AdobeForums.com forums (myself most definitely among the most vocal about this) want NOTHING distracting (no background image, no structure lines, no avatars, no signature files of any kind), high information density, and most of all it has to be as wicked fast as anywhere online. When they tried to migrate the old pre-merger Adobe forums into the ColdFusion packaging, navigating between posts and indicies was painfully slow.

Unlike the migration from the M.M. forums to what we have here, which went amazingly smoothly, they screwed things up so badly they had no choice but to return to the current state, albeit with a few performance enhancements from WebCrossing (the forum script's authoring company) that aren't very obvious.

It may be spartan, but we're really used to it and it's usually as fast to load between pages as anywhere I've ever seen. Only those sites running on Slashcode may be faster, given the enormous size of the database. In fact, several of us geekier long-timers even lobbied for Adobe to look into using Slashcode for their forums if they were going to update, but the super admin/forums manager—who is a pretty accessible guy—never even commented on the suggestion.

I guess to each their own.

Heh, I actually liked that simplicity on the Adobeforums. Something 'dignified' and 'majestic' about it too, but that clear simplicity trimmed to nly the essence of it had a certain appeal to me, too. OTOH, on this forum and the predecessors I've liked the avatar stuff and whatnot, as this has always had a more personal and cozier feel to me.

I remember almost ten years ago I was always wanting to fill the white and empty space up constantly, and what I really disliked was the white background, nowadays I prefer more simplistic and the 'less is more' approach to all things design. And the white or light grey, and soft colors in general, background, depending on the purpose.

Do a complete reload of this page. (Command + Shift + R in Firefox, dunno the shortcut for Safari).

I have a pretty robust Comcast connection and it took about 13 seconds.

Even on mighty threads on those ugly Adobe forums it takes less than 3 seconds. Granted there's no loading of stuff from other servers (unless somebody posts a pixentral.com-hosted thumbnail, or something), but for the folks there who spend a LOT of time answering questions, every little bit of load-time savings is important.

True, if we have the marker the PM isn't really needed.

Whatcha' all think?

Also, how long should we leave the marker, a week?

6 seconds here to reload Firefox on a PC. (I'm at work using DSL)

A week maximum.