As I really like the Trains staff who appear to be good, knowledgeable people, and I think the website they provide here is awesome, I am probably going to regret this post in the morning. Moreover, the details of this post will probably reveal the fact that I have an IQ of 80 . . . on a good day and depending upon my sobriety.
However, why on earth does Trains make the changes to the forum/website like this? It took me 30 minutes to figure everything out--the biggest problem was my discovery that the password to unlock my user ID was not in fact my password, but was some random *&%*#$&!)(&42 rather than my actual password. Moreover, this password changes for every, well anyway . . . big mess.
I just don't understand. Please tell me that Trains saves 20%, gets better advertising, or makes some profit as a result of this website change.
I have to imagine that 80% of the contributors on here are similar to me and think the number one attribute of the forum is its convenience--time is money. Plus, this website is my escape from having to think--figuring out this website is like working during your vacation. I was so close to walking away and just saying forget it. Was the status quo so bad? I can't tell you how disappointed I will be if there are some members on here who are good contributors who leave because they think it is not worth the hassle.
I realize that this website is provided for free and I appreciate it. But, I subscribe to Trains and am more likely to buy Kalmbach products due to my appreciation of this website. I also suspect (or even hope, as I generally wish Kalbach well) Kalmbach receives an indirect benefit from this website. I think it will realize more of this benefit if members don't have to deal with teething issues every couple of years.
Ugh.
Gabe
P.S. The shadow really gives me good incentive to post a picture there--it seems so dark. And, how did they know that that is what my shadow looks like?
Gabe, I have the feeling your IQ is probably closer to 160 than 80. It certainly is higher than mine, or Trainfinders, if that matters. Thanks for sticking around.
Could not these guys have sent out an email to all of us telling us our passwords were going to be changed, and we would have to apply for new ones?
As of right now, all of my trackside guides have been destroyed. Thanks guys.
While I'm ranting, am I the only one that was offended last week when Kathi called us "Kiddies"?
Sorry, guys... at this point I believe that message about needing to register or unlock your old screen name is an error. If you see that large yellow box at the top of the forum, simply log out, then login again, everything is fine. I know it doesn't help what you just went through, and I'm sorry for the inconvience.
I'm trying to put out a bunch of small fires right now. I'll try to come back soon to address your concerns. For now, I'll chalk it up to progress.
Bergie
Dale,
I am glad to see that you were one of the people to jump the mote, scale the wall, fight with the guards, storm the castle, swing from the rope over the snake pit, and name the capital of Azerbaijan to get in the website. Losing you would have been a huge loss.
However, given that you have to be one of the 10 most knowledgeable people regarding Trains that I have ever had the pleasure of talking to, I think your name and Trainfinder's should not be used in the same sentence when it comes to discussing intelligence.
I consider the loss of your trackside guides to be significant.
If there was some big reason prompting this, I guess I can understand. I just really hope that we did not just do this "just to do it."
gabe Dale, I am glad to see that you were one of the people to jump the mote, scale the wall, fight with the guards, storm the castle, swing from the rope over the snake pit, and name the capital of Azerbaijan to get in the website. Losing you would have been a huge loss. However, given that you have to be one of the 10 most knowledgeable people regarding Trains that I have ever had the pleasure of talking to, I think your name and Trainfinder's should not be used in the same sentence when it comes to discussing intelligence. I consider the loss of your trackside guides to be significant. If there was some big reason prompting this, I guess I can understand. I just really hope that we did not just do this "just to do it." Gabe
Well ***! Someone should have warned me about that snake pit! I nearly fell in it!
This new site is going to take some time getting used to! At least it has that "New Website Smell!"
nanaimo73 As of right now, all of my trackside guides have been destroyed. Thanks guys.
Hi Dale,
Are you absolutely sure about that? All posts from the old forum were supposed to be moved over. Please let me know if they were not and I'll let our tech guys know about it.
Believe me, that was not the intent.
I "lost" 29 posts as well. Dale's probably read better than mine tho!
Dan
Here's the latest on old post that may appear to be missing.
I was just told that the new forum's search database will need a day or more to build up the cache of old posts. So, they're still with us, the search just hasn't found them yet.
Your patience is appreciated.
Prrr
Any chance you guys can buy the next higher web service and loose all the advertising on the right edge of the screen?
That does nothing to enhance the site.
Also how about losing the blank avatars, if you have an avatar display it, if you don't leave the area blank and lose the "witness protection" profile.
Dave H.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
AS I said somewhere else, I hope my old posts do come back, I use them for reference and to see if anyone replies to my meanderings. I haven't had any problems otherwise.
I'm with gabe on this one.
Took one heck of a time to get my screen name working. Couldn't decipher the emailed passwords. The type face is hard to fathom; the numeral - 1, the lower case letter L -l, the upper case letter I - I , are too similar for a random, non-user-generated password.
Now compound that with a - "14, count'em fourteen, 14" - characters consisting of upper case, lower case, and weird characters coupled with the laws of incipient error rates, it is close to an impossible task.
If I have to punch in a 12 digit credit card number, 1 out of 20 attempts will have an error, and this is with a number that I know practically by heart. Most people have a 5 percent error rate; better than 2 is rare
What are you guarding? the gold in Fort Know or some secret weapon that allows control of the world? Wouldn't 8 be sufficient to guard a screen name? Good gollies Gertrude, how much security is enough?
And why the the narrow space for replies and the crappy ads on the right? I know prices have to go up, only the stock market goes down, but I can remember getting a good David Morgan issue for less than 50 cents. With all the advertisements in your magazine, why must you milk the forums? At least it only wastes space on my computer screen, not paper.
Boy, if those ads have to show up on a dial-up, I would really be slightly angry.
I, too, was surprised to learn that there was a separate password to unlike your screen name. The first time, I got it wrong but the second time, it occurred to me to copy and paste and that did the trick. Truly, did we ever have passwords for both screen names and log-ins?
I wanted to post myself and then the forum or my laptop acted up on me but I see I lost at least nine posts. I'm never going to make even 1,000 this way.
Now, I don't seem to be able to edit my reply above, which ended unintentionally abruptly. Hmmm.
Took about five minutes to figure it out...with the help of my 15 year old daughter...who now is holding me hostage for favors if I want her to explain the rest of it!
Should have stayed with raising horses...at least they do what you tell them to.
23 17 46 11
The more I browse around the less I like it. I don't like how long the pages take to load and the ads seem very distracting. I hate to say it but I forsee myself coming here less than in the past.
I love it! The smart guys on here have a hard time getting back on the new and improved forum. And yet, the dumb guy on here (me) manages to get on without a hitch, and without a clue how he did it. Nanner-nanner!
ps. I like all your new avitars. I never would have guessed, that so many of you look so much alike.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
I am going to appologize to Trains (for the record, I did not receive a nasty email from them--only the proffessional posts listed above).
Upon reflection, I still think the decision to change the forum might be a questionable decision (for instance, did you know you have to go through the same process AGAIN if you use a different computer). But, chances are, the reason that Trains did this was because they thought they were providing us a better product. When I think of this, I feel pretty shallow.
I think the most accurate thing I stated above was the estimate of my IQ. I guess I got deffensive when my "escape from the world" that I have come to apprecaite was threatened.
Trains, please consider this an appology.
Yes the silhouette avatars have got to go. For something intended to mean that no visual identity statement is being made, they seem to make way too much of a statement.
dehusmanAny chance you guys can buy the next higher web service and loose all the advertising on the right edge of the screen?
That's funny, Dave. What, do you think we Googled "web hosting providers" to find our hosting solution and went with the cheapest one with the catch that we had to run ads down the side? Sorry, it's a little more complex than that.
You may notice that all those ads are targeted to the interests of Trains.com users. You may also noticed that, in our magazines, we also only accept advertising targeted to our readers. Is that a coincidence? No... it's been a long tradition at Kalmbach, and it's driven by our readers' wants. In other words, our readers don't want to see ads for untargeted products (think male enchancemnt drugs, cigarettes, etc.) Trust me, I sold advertising for our company for a few years. I had to turn down ads because they weren't targeted to our readers. And trust me, there are plenty of companies that would love to target our markets. We don't let them. Why? Because our readers don't want it.
So, in closing, I'd like to encourage you to keep an eye on those ads... they're targeted to railroading and railroading only (you can't get that on TV or the radio) and you might actually find something you'll enjoy.
Thanks for visiting the new site, guys. We're still ironing out some bugs in a effort to get this baby working like a well-oiled machine.
After cruising the site for a while, I came to several conclusions.
First, nothing really changed; the advertising you see on the right is the same advertising that was on the header banner on the”old” site.
You get to the new site pretty much the same way you did the old site, and face it, most of us will click on the remember me thing, enable a cookie, add the site to our favorites list, and still get here on one mouse click, the same way we used to, so that didn’t change all that much either.
The look is a little different, but the forum really didn’t change all that much, although it seems that people do tend to get used to a thing, even though they may gripe about it, but when that thing changes one itty bit, they gripe about the change too.
I mean, for me at least, the forum is just a basic tool used to facilitate discussion about our common like of trains and the railroad industry…it really doesn’t matter what it looks like, so long as it allows us to pursue our discussions.
Last, I checked out the “Meet the Staff” section…and was wondering.
Do any of you guys live in a city or town that someone from Texas can pronounce the name of?
I mean, geeze guys, buy a vowel or something….
and the "paste from Word" didn't seem to function, at least not for me right now.
If fluff non-rail related advertisements helped the continued viability of Trains or allowed Trains to spend more money to do more/enhanced articles, or even helped Trains turn a better proffit for that matter, I would have absolutely no problem with Trains including it. It is not hard to simply skip over like I do 99% of advertising.
That having been said, were I advertising in Trains, I would pay a bit more knowing that the magazine only included trains-related material--as that kind of advertising would make people like me much more likely to read it than to skip over it.
I recall one incarnation of this forum , that had advertizing to the right that varied. It was tied to some key buzzwords in the thread or thread title. There was a long running thread about light bulbs, and the side advertizing seemed to show every website to buy lightbulbs from direct.
The best one, was a thread where somebody called another poster the town idiot. The sidebar advertisement said: "Locate communities of idiots in North Dakota". I never understood why, but was afraid to check out that link.
CNW 6000I "lost" 29 posts as well. Dale's probably read better than mine tho!
I lost at least 15!
RJ
"Something hidden, Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges, Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go." The Explorers - Rudyard Kipling
http://sweetwater-photography.com/
Well, first of all, just for the record, I had no problem getting in here. Just log in, and tada, I'm logged in. Teething problems are always gonna happen, even if things are well-planned-for. Hopefully most of those gremlins were swept away between the first posts here and the time I logged in; otherwise, I was probably just lucky!
Woot, I switched my font to Verdana! Ordinarily, I'm a fan of Arial, but I think Verdana works much, much better for a forum such as this. Okay, moving on now...
In general, I like the overall look of the new site, with the color scheme, the pretty banner, the myriad buttons at the top of the page (though I'll get back to that shortly). So far, I also like the way the posting screen works, with the interesting Preview "tab". But now, on to some critiques...
I'll start with the pretty photo banner at the top of the page, and all the buttons surrounding it: It's huge, and a condensed version would be much better for most forum pages; the current banner is so huge, there is absolutely no forum content whatsoever (well, okay, maybe a title, but nothing of the posts!) "above the fold", that is, what I can see when my browser first brings up a page. Something about the size of the very top banner would be at most the largest banner for the forum pages, though I would actually prefer something even smaller. Sure, it's a lot to cram into a small space, but it can be done.
Okay, now the ads on the right side: I understand the need for them, but I really don't think that's the right spot for the ads. The biggest problem is that they only extend down to the second post; for most topics (that can sometimes get somewhat long-winded on here -- a good thing!) the rest of the posts have a huge white space to the right. The upper part of that ad area -- with the profile and search info -- would also be better placed in-line.
Of course, I know these things do take time, and with any changes, there will be plenty of complaints. A beta version, entrusted to a number of select users, would go far to appease many, and get rid of any bugs and other issues before they end up in the live version.
And finally, on to a couple of smaller issues:1. The <title> says "Train.com". Missing something there, or did you guys pick up a new domain name. 2. I know HTML (and several other such languages), so I didn't have too much of a problem, but how does Joe Average Forum User change fonts?3. I agree with other comments on this, the "default" avatar has to go!
Regardless, keep up the good work, we know you'll get things straightened out in no time!
If it were any other forum I probably would have been gone long ago, but it's the Trains.com forums, home to the greatest magazine EVER!
I keep coming back despite my busy schedule, my locations, my relocations, my internet connection (and lack there of, most the time). This is probably the best addiction ever.
The only feature I'm missing is the Forum Jump, so I can hop quicker between here and mayber the Classic Trains or Model Railroader or whatever. With limited time I have online sometimes and slow internet connection it's good to go straight to the next area of interest instead of backtracking through the forum tree waiting on pages to load, but I'm not upset, just missing it.
Also I don't know how my post count jumped up, but who's counting? I'm not, I can't remember the number but know it was lower.
yad sdrawkcab s'ti
I was hoping they'd bring back the stars.
What, you don't like the little green "signal-strength" meter?
Brian (IA) http://blhanel.rrpicturearchives.net.
Overall I like the new look and feel of the site. I have no problem with the ads to the right, they pay the bills for me to use this forum, but it seems like the placement has resulted in a lot of wasted space. Tosee what I mean, take a look at the bottom of the page of a lengthy thread (like this one). If you can find a long post in the thread you'll really see what I am talking about. There is a blank grey column (below the avatar), then the post text, then a wide blank white column (below the ads). Without actually measuring, it looks like the total width of the blank areas is greater than the width of the post text. This causes the posts to be narrow and taller, requiring more scrolling. Jamie
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