In reply to Dorian Moore:

lumpily? elaborate...
i'm flattered however that i've been 'investigated'.

In reply to cs:

Well, you know, there are no secrets from the sysadmin .. you should put a link in your profile though, there's nice work there that people should see.

The lumpiness is down to the way that flash is loading in the image files, there is no indication of progress and it seems to load images to the right of the selector before the one in the current frame. So one does a lot of waiting (for what) before actually getting to see content. You could present some up front information in that space just to guide people.

Just my 2p ;-)

In reply to Dorian Moore:

hmmm...well all i did with my site was plug in the photos and arrange the text.
plug and play. i know nothing of flash.
i know what you mean though, i would be nice to have something besides just the spinning thing.
for me, my site loads up in a few seconds and then the photos can be easily scrolled through.
wait a minute, how come we're talking about my site. oh, that's right you took a dig at it to 'level the score' ;-)

i was just stating what i thought obvious about the new site and no one else was saying. i imagined that i wasn't the only one who found the new format much less friendly....especially when the dates weren't in order.

even when the dates are working though, i still think that the new design is overly complicated. it was much better to just go to the forum and see everything new all right there in front of you.
the subsections might sounds good in theory, but it really is just more trouble then is necessary.

i'm sure a lot of work went into the new format and all, but you guys seemed to take it a bit personally when i brought it up.....it's just a bit of constructive criticism.

the old format could have used some polishing up, but i just don't think this works for the casual browser.

In reply to cs:

Not quite levelling the score, also trying to offer some constructive criticism. I'm just a bit underhand in my tactis sometime ;-) Tone is everything in offering up criticism, isn't it?

Your comments, and those others, have been heard regarding the forums... the general feeling is the latest topics are burried to far down, and you would like to see the most active topics in a simpler, completer way (IE all active topics across each forum on one page).

The decision to make topic 'threaded' (the reply to this and indenting) was to try and make it easier to see how the conversations panned out, and allow a visual way of skipping past bits of thread that go off topic.

We added pagenation to topics so that that when images are added to topics the pages don't get really heavy to download. It would be possible to display the topics in a straight date order and I'm going to put that option in, with a change to set the default view for forums in your profile.

There is a plan to add a 'recent active topics' list on the main forum page. Indeed the codes written but we've found it visually complex. Obviously this needs to be added sooner than later as that would bring back a lot of the functionality of the old forum that people seem to miss. If would give you one page where you could come in and see everything going on

Ultimately there is a balance we are trying to create of something serious, but with it's own identity. We could have taken an off the shelf bbs and tried to fit that into our site, but that isn't really the SHOWstudio way, and we felt there were a number of things we could do better. But it's also a development process, and we're aware of that.

The problem as ever is one of time. So many projects to do, and other bits to sort out, that focusing on the forums has been difficult for the time being. We'll get there, just have a little patience please.

Cheers

_d._