Ok Steven, much better navigation, functionality and useability. Blue reply text perhaps is consistent with the blue theme of the site, but blue is also visually one of the least-clear colors for human eyesight. Yes, I can resize the text for the BMWCCA site by upscaling the browser text, but that's one more thing I'd rather not have to do when my usual browser settings are typically fine for all other web-browsing. Black would be better, better contrast, and more easily visible, for the reply text. If that's a user-set configuration, ok, I just haven't gotten that far checking things out yet. It would appear that replying to a thread automatically quotes it - that's kinda ok, since there isn't a separate 'quote' option showing as on the old VBulletin forums, but, if the board isn't set to strip out the nested quotes of all earlier replies, a string of replies is going to get full of all previous posts being quoted, making thread posts really, really wordy, and harder to get to whatever somebody's most recent comment is. Yes, people can delete what's automatically quoted, but it's unlikely everyone will take the time and effort to do that _every_single_time_ they post a reply. Took me a minute to realize that on the 'What's New' thread listing, that you can click on the date of the most recent post to bring it up - with that, browsing what's current on the forums should be straightforward. Does the board still log us out after 20 minutes? Forgot from previous replies... any way to stay logged in? To compare the new vs. old a bit: Log in and switching forum tabs (say, between watched threads and what's new, or whatever) is patience-stretching laggy, although not impossibly, hopelessly laggy - any speeding that up on that front will be appreciated. I'm beginning to doubt the usefulness of having forum space for every chapter - It seems that many of the questions posted are area-specific (info or questions that are best answered by somebody from that chapter, or local, such as repair shop referrals and the like), and with a relatively small number of active users, it gets repetitive to suggest to folks to check their chapter website and contacts for the answers they seek, since we rarely have somebody participating on the board that happens to fall into their area who might have an answer. Maybe in time (perhaps a long time!) enough answers will accumulate to some of the seemingly-typical local-type inquiries, but then folks will have to be (repeatedly, almost assuredly) reminded to search that particular forum topic. I know this was a _lot_ of work to import the old forums, sorry not have been able to be of more help, thanks for all the effort! Waaay better than the first go around, we'll see how it goes now.
Thanks for the feedback. I don't know how long it takes of inactivity to be logged out. It seemed to be a long time when I was testing over the weekend and walked away. Quoting messages You can either click on 'Reply' under the post or use the 'Post Reply' button at the bottom of the page. Changing colors are easy enough. In time. Chapter sections We'll see. For chapters that have active forums, I would probably just provide a link to their own forum if asked. Chapters can also use RSS feeds to post to their websites or bring in posts here from theirs. Like anything, change takes time.
Old VBulletin habits die hard - since this forum has a reply box already up & ready-to-go, I see that's how to reply without a nested quote - will just take scrolling to the bottom of the page, vs. the vbulletin reply/quote buttons on every post. Clicking "What's New" comes up much faster after I marked all forums read, so any delay there appears to be related to how much the board has to search per user. The logout time question comes from generally losing a post reply (frustrating if it happened to be a lengthy one) by being automatically logged out without warning while replying, hitting the reply button, and being thrown to the login screen & simultaneously losing all inputted text in the flash/java/whatever reply box, because hitting the browser back button only goes back to the thread/post one was replying to and a blank reply box. Having been burned by losing long replies due to flash/java box wonkiness, I tend to write them in a separate app and copying/pasting them over, but people generally may expect to rely on the functionality of the boards to preserve their attempt to reply, but that's one scenario where a timeout with the other (most recent) forums had potential to lose one's reply.
