Pros and cons so far

My laundry list of desires and peeves:

1. Way to default ALL sections to a particular tab.

I'd like to set mine to always default to Discussions. I'd even like to reorder the tabs.

2. Turn off incessant mouseover popups.

I am thoroughly annoyed by all the mouseover popups all the time. This is one of the major causes of lags on the site. If the information is really important enough to know just because I happened run my mouse over it, its important enough to ALWAYS be showing. Give me a disclosure arrow below a user if I want to know a few more details. If I really want to know a whole lot about them, I'll probably click on their username to look at their profile page. Same idea applies for the 'Communities' list.

3. Lack of sections of Discussions.

As an example, in the Mac mini section there used to be a section for 'Using Displays'. This is an area I have particular experience with, and am interested in. Now if such distinctions even exist, they are not featured.

4. Big pictures on the main 'Communities' list.

This is a real space waster.

5. Unanswered Questions is just about useless.

I've seen and had discussions where the original poster will say 'Hey, that worked. Thanks.' and never award points or marked the question answered, then another person throws in a 'me too' post or hijacks the discussion. As long as all control of 'answered' status is in the hands of the original poster, nothing says there'll be any definitive use of the status as a sort mechanism. Is it perhaps the duty of a moderator of some kind to 'nudge' people to mark an answered question as such?

It seems the Overview, All Content, and Discussions tabs are fairly redundant right now. The Overview tab just has a HUGE search area at the top. At least I can choose another tab to get ride of that. Is there an intent to deliver more information to differentiate significantly between tabs?

If Apple wants to make this be more social AND be more effective as support, create a merit system for support provided that considers the ratio between posts made an points earned, and provide an area for non-question discussion of Apple products which would not count against the ratio.

Euchre wrote:

My laundry list of desires and peeves:

3. Lack of sections of Discussions.

As an example, in the Mac mini section there used to be a section for 'Using Displays'. This is an area I have particular experience with, and am interested in. Now if such distinctions even exist, they are not featured.

Try this:

Not quite what you want but better than nothing?

>I get that it's all to cater to the iPad and iPhone users

Actually they almost completely ignored those users. Cant do almost anything a desktop can in these forums.

I cannot find any place to click on that says my post has been answered.

How is that done?

I would have created a new discussion but I just get the spinning wheel so I'm posting here...

When viewing my posts under Recent Activity, I can't tell which ones have new replies, i.e. they are all bold blue. This was invaluable in the old forum for determining which of my replies had activity, i.e. did the OP have new questions.

Also, I'm not able to view ALL recent discussions for ALL iPhone communities. We had this capability before and it was the only 'view' I needed. IMO, all these other 'views' are a waste of space and programming.

Overall, IMO, the new forum is a big fail... much harder for us veterans to help people. Not sure how much longer I'm going to last if things don't change.

Certainly, others may feel different than I but I've only seen one poster out of hundreds that is defending the new layout.

Sorry if this is elementary. But what does OP stand for?

I find the biggest thing to get used to is the Navigation.

I'm still typing in the "ask a question" box like it is a search box. I'm not sure of the correct steps to do a search.

Here are some links describing how searches work:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3019712?answerId=15070865022#15070865022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3005641?answerId=15021776022#15021776022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3013394?answerId=15065404022#15065404022

OP refers either to the original post or the original poster in a topic.

thanks, both of you.

I will certainly check out these links.

hopefully after kinks are worked out and we all get used to it, we will like it! 😉

I really wish we had the old one back.

There are some "neat" ideas here, but they aren't working well in practice.

I find it slower, harder to navigate, and the layout is terrible. The default view does show me as much as it used to show, and it takes me longer to find things.

I also feel like the format encourages poor formatting and choice of where to post on the part of users, as evidenced by an increase in, well... poorly formatted postings and posts in the wrong forums.

Another issue I am seeing is that many times when I view threads, I do not see all of the replies. For example one thread I'm participating in, I see more messages in Safari than i do in Firefox, and neither browser shows all of them. This persists across browser restarts, cache clears, and three different computers running MacOS, Windows, and Solaris. I assume this is some kind of javascript errors.

All of this seems correctable, but I for one would like to see a reduction in javascript used rather than this rather large increase. The old discussion was already slow, the new one is slower still.

Removed