[ALREADY DISCUSSED] Old versus New Hacks Layout

[futureal]

Hi,

Am I the only one who thinks that the new layout of the Hacks forum is horrible? It makes browsing for new posts much, much more difficult than it has to be, especially when you just want to come in and glance at what's new or see if someone has responded to your threads.

Now, I am stuck trying to remember which subforum contains which hack, especially when many of the hacks fit only loosely into the categories they are in. I seem to be pretty good at thinking a hack will be in one subforum only to find it in another.

Meanwhile, the "Old Layout" is just a search of all of the subforums, which means it's not really a forum at all. Once you click on a hack thread and post a message, you are taken back to that subforum, and you need to go in a roundabout way back to the beginning again.

Even worse is that many of the threads do not receive the kind of traffic they once did. When people could easily browse all of the new posts/hacks at once, they would often click things they had already installed, just to see what was going on. I don't see that happening any more. Thread after thread sits there unanswered for days, which certainly never used to happen. Sure, some of that is due to the impending release of vB3, but I think this doesn't help it either.

I'm not trying to be overly critical and I understand the idea behind dividing things up, but this has really, really made these forums less usable for me, and I can only assume for others as well. Years of experience in web design has generally taught me that a simpler design is a better design, and in this case, I think the simpler layout *was* a better layout.

Anyway, just one frustrated vB hacker's opinion. Consider at your own risk.