I absolutely cannot believe what a horrible choice these new forums are. 1) There is no longer any alert on the forum pages for Instant messages. Great. Forums is where I spent all my time here now I cant even see when people are contacting me without going to another part of the site 2) I can no longer track the threads ive read. Ive got a mark all read, and mark all after 9:32am read (whatever the crap THAT is good for???) but any read link STAYS unread. Sucks. 3)I get no ebot alerts any longer, even with notification checked. 4)I have no "read new messages" link, now when I read a thread, I gotta go BACK to the forums then to the poser forum, or use the back button and not get any new messages until I refresh page. What was so horrible about being able to goto new messages from within a forum with one click that its been taken away??? once again, SUCKS!!!! 5)When im in the poser forum, and I click start new thread, first thing I have to do is to choose what forum to post in???? Where the hell would I want to post other than in the forum I selected to start a new post from??? UBER-SUCKS. I think my participation here is about to drop off dramatically. Its not worth the frustration. Everything was FINE. Ive read people complaining about the old search engine but every time I needed to find a thread, the search engine found it. Seems every convient option has been stripped from the site, or is "not yet" working immediately after the change, to fix something that was working fine all along. Avatars and sigs are SO worth the loss of ebots notifications and nice simple quick posting and awareness of people messaging me. Oh yeah.....

Give it some time, you will get use to it. It's just the shock of the new. PHP rulz!!!

be patient, logan - they're trying to fix things, even as we speak

:m_thumbu::m_thumbd: you also need to understand that we've seen people get very angry and threaten to leave every time there are changes here, but they always come back

Quote - 1) There is no longer any alert on the forum pages for Instant messages. Great. Forums is where I spent all my time here now I cant even see when people are contacting me without going to another part of the site

I just click "messaging" at the top of the page and see if I have any messages. It's a pain though. > Quote - 2) I can no longer track the threads ive read. Ive got a mark all read, and mark all after 9:32am read (whatever the crap THAT is good for???) but any read link STAYS unread. Sucks.

Just above the blue bar that has "Threads, Authoris, Views, Replies", there is a "sort by". Click that and you can sort by date posted or last post. With last post, the threads with new posts are moved to the top. However, don't ever click "mark all read", because that will mark everything read whether it's new or old. Instead click the "mark all read prior to XXX time", which is the time you appeared in the forum. It's not great, but at least we can have the new posts show at the top instead of combing through pages and pages. > Quote - 3)I get no ebot alerts any longer, even with notification checked.

Can't help you with that one. > Quote - 5)When im in the poser forum, and I click start new thread, first thing I have to do is to choose what forum to post in???? Where the hell would I want to post other than in the forum I selected to start a new post from??? UBER-SUCKS.

There are two options for creating a new thread. One at the very very top called "start thread", and another just below the banner box called "new thread". If you click the very very top one called "Start Thread", that is when you are asked which forum you want to post in. If you click the "new thread", below the banner box, you don't get asked that question.

Ack! I hadn't even noticed the missing IM system. This is ridiculous. The whole point of an IM or PM (or whatever other initials) is that it catches your attention forcefully and privately. If you have to remember to LOOK for messages, the entire purpose of the system is defeated.

IMs will be back when the entire site is converted over to Bondware 3.0. If you're no longer getting ebots, check your spam trap. The subject line of the ebots has changed and may be being filtered for you.

Hiya Karen, Im sorry to sound so ungrateful to the people who host my Gallery, but this is a lot of change to have to swallow at once :/ My spam-emasculator is set to tag anything from *@renderosity.com as friendly and ushered to front row, so that wasnt the issue, I have in fact just recieved a mini-flood of ebots for every respondant to this thread, and thats a welcome relief. Ive no idea what prevented the ebots from previous thread participation from reaching me.

IMs will be back when the entire site is converted over to Bondware 3.0. But.. you told me yesterday that this was in the "a few months" range. That's simply not good enough. The IM's MUST be back (or restored to working order or whatever) FAR FAR before that! I rarely browse the gallery, but that is currently the only place I can SEE if I've got a new message. I was shocked yesterday to go there and find I had 3 waiting for me, one of which was from a customer with a question! The customers here willl rightfully expect answers from the merchants, and they're used to the option of PM'ing them for a fast reply. Now it can take days, if not weeks, before you're aware of it. Sure, I can go click on "Messaging" a few times during the day, but... honestly... that's not really an option, is it?! So, together with the abundance of ebots, the missing status change of the stars and the AUTOMATIC post bumping (without having to click the "sort by time posted"), this should be a TOP PRIORITY!

I oly receive email notification of the new posts. No one about the replies. This is for me the first priority. I haven't time to enter and open each thread to see if I have replies. The icons at the top of the forum aren't working, so I don't know if there are new posts or not

Oh, and I hate the text 'Joe Doh has posted to the Poser forum on Renderosity MarketPlace!'. The forum is a thing, the marketplace a different one. Feels like we aren't artists but merchants, buyers, sellers... Unconfortable. Ugly for me

Sorry but the multiple ebots and the other, 'well you can do it you just have to click here while before it was there without having to click anythings' are not a sign that anything "rulz," they are simply a sign of poor design, and lack of forethought. If a process is less efficient, requires more work or runs counter to what most people want (how many want multiple ebots?) then no amount of fan boi enthusiasm is going to turn the sow's ear into a silk purse.

Sorry :-(

It's not your fault Karen. You're in this along with the rest of us and having to put up with bugs, fixes and work arounds too. No need to apologize :)

"4)I have no "read new messages" link, now when I read a thread, I gotta go BACK to the forums then to the poser forum, or use the back button and not get any new messages until I refresh page. What was so horrible about being able to goto new messages from within a forum with one click that its been taken away??? once again, SUCKS!!!!" Have you tried to use "top of forum" link ? This brings me straight to Poser forum, displaying new messages also. Should work for you too.

was just about to suggest the top of forum, link as this takes you to the top of the poser forum only. I'm picking my way thru this change slowly as well. as for "PHP rulez" yes php is awesome when it's done right as a php developer i spent a great deal of time running a second site called "testing.mydomainname.com" and having multiple people test new code before i pushed it out so that it was as bug free as possible. here's the diffrence. I am a web developer. The staff here are for the most part NOT. They implimented new software by the hosting company utilizing PHP, because the old forums had issues and they thought that this new software would resolve them to better please thier customer base. I doubt most of the mods or for that matter even most of the admins KNOW php. Thier job function here isn't to write code. It's to impliment it, and moderate user participation, in order to maintain a web site and promote user growth to increase sales in thier marketplace. Renderosity is a business. How many managers and executives know everything there is to know about production and development. They make choices based on the information provided to them so that they can make the best descisions they can for thier customers. Since loss of users affects advirtising of their marketplace products I'm sure the forums will recieve the attention they need quickly. So just bear with them.

I find it easy to open the forum and then open a thread in a new window. I can then close that window and still have the forum open in the background. I can also have several threads - or forums - open at once. I miss the feedback of the "visited links" color that was in the old forum (the equivalent of the yellow star turning to grey as soon as you've read the thread. @Casette It sounds like you've got the "Notify" checked in the "Edit Forum Options" on your "My Options" page. That appears to notify you of every new thread. However, what you want to do is to make sure the "Notify me when someone replies" is checked on the threads you participate in. That can be found under the text entry box on the Thread page. There's also a "Subscribe" option unter the subject line of the Thread page. If you select that you should get ebot notifications when someone posts to a thread even if you didn't post anything. In other words, no more having to post something just to bookmark a thread. Once you've subscribed to a thread, it turns into "Unsubscribe" so you can stop getting ebots.

Moved to Community Centre.

I agree with just about everything logansfury said in post #1. I used to be able to type my name into the search box and come up with a list of all my recent postes to check if anyone had added to the thread. This was one of the major reasons why I spent more time as Rosity than the other Poser forums. Alas the new search function sucks big time! What I would really like to see are options to:

• Search by author.
• Search by title.
• Search by text string.

And have all these listed chronologically. But I would be reasionably happy just to go back to the old search function, before I had to enter a year and month. There are very many other issues with the site update that I dislike, like read threads displaying in the same colour as unread, etc, etc, etc, but the search function is by far the most important to me.

Hey lesbentley, If you go to "My Stats" it gives you the option to "view user's posts" right under your statistics. That'll pull up every post you've ever made (broken into pages of course). They still come up with the first line of the post replacing the Thread Subject line (like any other search right now) but you can at least find your posts quickly.

The whole search function is completely useless!!!! Relevancy?!!!! What the heck is that? I should be the one to determine the relevancy of what I'm searching, not a search feature. Also, you can't search by user name now either.

"relevancy" is standard search engine terminology, and it's rather important. and of course a search engine needs to have a decent relevancy algorithm, or you might as well not bother using it! it determines how the engine ranks the results with which it presents you.

pleonastic - um, that's only kinda sorta true. with unstructured data, then it's really important and without it, the results are ordered meaninglessly. but this is instead quite highly structured data. it has a subject, an author, and a date just for starters. not leveraging those is idiotic. the fact that the search does not order by date, does not allow searching by author, and returns results by reply and not by thread without an option to do so, along with several other meaningful and useful functionalities makes me think this isn't phpBB, which i think is what everyone is assuming this is. like right now, i can't see the thread to double check on your name (edited to correct for your name, sorry). i think the forum developers (who ever they are) took the style of phpBB without thinking about the function. i don't care when or how frequently you post unless i can PM you where I can see your posting history. or go to look at your web site, gallery, or store. so that's just noise at best and a source of bias at worst instead of pertinent information. i cannot state how much i loathe these new forums, and i've watched and applauded the growth of phpBB use. and if they don't switch off the override of my personal preferences... well, i'm just not going to come here much. not because i'm going to purposefully avoid this place as retribution, but because my nice, comfortable settings have been replaced with what i see as horrendous design choices that make my experience so unpleasant i now have to force myself to stay by telling myself i don't want to miss any pertinent information. i had a nice black background, and this change has been equivalent to having my nice, comfortable dimly lit bar which i frequented daily turn into an computer lab with fluorescent lighting. for me, this forum now literally induces migraines, and i can only stand it for a few minutes at a time. whereas previously, i would keep a window open to this site all day and check back every now and then. and i won't even get into the usability problems that having a right-handed nav causes. did they think every other designer on the web was just an idiot? oh, and no matter what, everything shows up with a yellow star. in a forum with as much activity as this, didn't they realize that there would be yellow stars everywhere, even if that feature worked properly? it looks hideous and stupid. once an indicator is on everything, it doesn't actually indicate anything, and should be at least made less consipicuous. sort of like the choice to bold every forum post title in a list of titles. it's about as useful as typing a message in all caps. sorry for all the negativity, but i'm really hating these changes. ok, better go before the headache actually takes root instead of just extends tendrils.

[...] makes me think this isn't phpBB, which i think is what everyone is assuming this is. i don't know why so many seem to assume this -- it pretty obviously is not. i also get the feeling that most people here confuse php for lots of things it isn't -- it is just a scripting language; there is no reason why a board written in php should look and work a certain way. one of the programmers has stated that not one bit of code was taken from elsewhere, but that it was all written from scratch. that does explain a whole lot -- this looks and feels like an alpha version, wry grin. it's not very smart to test one's alpha code on one's entire customer base, but it's pretty typical for places like this. as to the negative feelings you have, i understand. you're not alone; the kvetch brigades are out in full force, and y'all have good reason. but i am more interested in finding work-arounds and working with the rosity folks to make things better, so i am gonna bow out now instead of arguing minutiae. :)