Re: Memorial to the BBS


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Posted by Leland on March 20, 2004 at 22:58:15:

In Reply to: Memorial to the BBS posted by To the BBS..... on March 20, 2004 at 11:29:09:

Not afraid to speak my mind, either...

Just so nobody ignores my first point, I'll say it right away -- the TubeNet community is NOT dependent which software is being used to run the site. It's about the people who contribute, the people who ask for help, and everyone else. TubeNet will BE TubeNet.

I look further down on the main page of this BBS, and I see the ridiculously long thread titled "TubeNet is moving soon!". If I want to see any new posts, I have to hope that my browser remembers the history well enough to correctly show which links have been followed (it's half purple and half blue right now, and although I've read every post so far, I have to dig into each post's date to see if a new one sneaked into an old, now-blue-again sub-thread). I would also have to click... let's see... SIXTY-EIGHT different posts to read the entire thread.

Now, in another week or two, that thread will be pushed off the bottom of the page and into the archives, where it will languish like a dusty newspaper under glass. But, right before it gets pushed off the bottom, someone may have one more response of vital personal importance, but nobody will know since it's old news.

About the only thing I like about the old BBS is that I can see the nature of the conversation, and who's responding to whom, without reading the posts themselves. Other than that, the new one is superior in every way.

To repost what I already said on the new site:

It's still easier to see everything that happened on this site since I last logged in.

I got home, started my browser, opened up the front page of this site (among several other sites), clicked the "View posts since last visit" in the upper right, and all 21 threads popped up that were active since this afternoon (including this one [that I posted in]). To do the same on the old BBS, I'd have to try to find every post I made to see if I got a response, or do a "Find in page..." of today's date to see if anybody posted something new in the last couple feet of the page, and then I'd have to CLICK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM to see if they're worth my time to read.

As much as I also liked the simplicity of the layout & low-bandwidth friendliness of the old site, I'm happy to see it on this [new] software now. What once took me twenty minutes to check is now taking me five -- including typing this reply.

I no longer have to read, then ignore, the For Sale posts, since I'm not in the market for anything. I can read twenty posts in a thread with just one click. I've already been IM'd by someone on the board, which, on the old board, would have required one of us to try to catch the attention of the other, exchange email addresses, and proceed from there. If I choose, I can be informed of when someone adds to a thread in which I posted (VERY helpful for those of us asking for opinions or selling things).

We all learned to walk, use forks, drive cars, and type on keyboards. We can learn the new website. Even the act of learning to play an instrument is more difficult than any Web surfing I've ever seen.


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