Jeeeez.......wish you didn't mention that.......i thought you made improvement......now that is damn ugly

Guess i prefer the full fat one....regardless of the cholesterol

the lite has always been there, just not promoted, i used to check it on the psp.

EB. Are you actually reading your thread here?

Pretty crap format. Does not entice you to want to read it. Maybe better to adapt all your other sites to the old EF format. Kind have lost my enthusiasm to read it so much - which will keep my boss happy.
So long and thank you for the fish.

I guess what we need to keep in mind is that if it wasn't for TheLocal, there would be no more EF, as it was purchased at a time when EF was teetering on a brink.

That being said, I'm less than impressed with the reaction from EB on this thread. I know his style is to let us get to it ourselves, sort things out on our own, but this was his change, seemingly untested (perhaps the mods had a go at testing it beforehand).

The change was slipped in over the holiday period when I'm sure it was hoped that people wouldn't see it and there wouldn't be an outcry, with the hope that once everyone was back to work/at computers, that those who had already seen the changes would be used to them and poo-poo those who were complaining.

I feel the same - to dump this change and then ignore the feedback was at best rude and at worst....

I'm guessing that EB (who is one of a very small few who gets paid to work on EF, as the mods to it for free) was on vacation when the feedback hit.

Actually, EB and the tech team and the owners of TheLocal should be doing the stat checking. The mods are powerless to change anything.

Remember, they aren't all EB's sites.

__________________

I'm happy for another reason to visit here less I think I'd have been more vocal a few months ago but as it stands I rarely get time on here and when I do it needs to be quick and easy so I am glad the new posts link takes me to the same 'old' format and I'll be bypassing the silly front page (I do however like the calendar overview feature)

Way too much noise and I can't turn off the advertising..a classic case of fixing what wasn't broken.

I'm outta here. Last one to leave please turn out the lights.

And keep your userbase informed of the change implementation plan. Otherwise unscheduled, uninformed changes are met with negative perception and if the users are completely ignored from that point on from a communication perspective then they won't remain loyal to the site as they will feel a level of bitterness towards it's administrators.

I'm off to shoot cheese for a while.

I'm not sure this is strictly true. Mark's brother sold it to TheLocal, but I'm sure there would have been others who could have financed EF - had the subject been open for offers/discussion...

The "noise" is likely for even more improved search engine recognition/ranking. I doubt the home page is for humans to read...

<edit> and as for "last one leave please turn the light out. I see from the members list that 36 new members registered yesterday alone...

(sigh)

Does anyone think Mark would be happy with this? He funded this site for years by himself in order to prevent advertising banners and the like.

Sad times indeed.

Still not bad enough to cure my EF addiction though

Well, with all objectiveness in mind... while Mark clearly did a fantastic job, it's no longer his site any more, it was sold to someone else. The new oweners are a commercial entity, don't have the same passion Mark did, thus will not fund it themselves. Commercial entities and big sites like this do cost money, and a common way of supporting those based on the interweb is with ads. I know VERY few forums that don't have them. If you want to turn them off then use Firefox and adblock, voila, no more ads.

Personally I think there a a hella lot of overreactions here with all the "im leaving" melodrama... the forum is still more than browseable, and we will all likely be used to it in a month or two.

18 of which were spammers (banned).

Despite bannings (and I deleted two accounts this morning already) there remains 38 new members for yesterday - see http://www.englishforum.ch/members/l...oindate&pp=100

Agree with this.

That's true, I am not sure on all of the details of that time, but I do know EF was perilously close to being closed when sold to TheLocal.

And, yes, I'd have to agree that the noise is for search engine results....

I've always entered this site through http://www.englishforum.ch/usercp.php and it doesn't look too different to before. There is no horizontal scrollbar when using a small screen, but apart from that, going around the forums (using the above link, then clicking "New posts" when I'm done with those) is ok.

Really? I remember that there were plenty of "charity" activities and most of the discussions had nothing at all to do with money - so if there were financial troubles a common user as me was not aware of it. Various people in the mod team had copletely different ideas in which direction the EF should develop... that was more of a strategic fight than finding a way of financing the website.

Anyway: I find it stupid to ask for feedback, then ignore it, then switch the design, then get a load of negative feedback and ignore that as well... till now.

I am not against ads at all. I can fully live with EF being a website that makes a profit. But as a marketer I have to say that it is a very stupid idea to not listen to the customers... especially if you are in a market where a number of alternatives are available for said customers.

I'm not a customer. I'm a poster!

Ok, strictly speaking are the advertisers the customers, they bring the money. But they only do so if there is enough traffic. And traffic, that would be us posters... so listening to us is still not a bad idea if you do not want to lose traffic and therefore money.

(bloody pedants.)

True, without the posters, the forum wouldn't be so popular and people wouldn't get answers so quickly! In that case, ads would be useless and not profitable.

So a bit more respect to the posters wouldn't hurt EB and would certainly be more profitable for him.