Wow, I never thought I'd agree with Marco about anything, but...

The new design is a bit too busy. The navigation also strikes me as being confusing for the forums, but OK for the rest of the site. And the speed of the site is pretty slow compared to the old version. I hope they (quickly) decide to throw faster hardware at the problem to reduce the very pregnant pauses between page refreshes. If this is still run on a single server, the addition of an object cache like memcached might help quite a bit by reducing the database churn, which is likely the source of the slowdown.

As for the logo, I kinda like it.

Cheers,

Contrary to the title of this thread, I think the new TBJ is looking good. It's easy on the eyes, nice layout, more attractive and professional. That said, I miss having the direct link on the reply page to the smileys and it looks like the quote function may be trickier, though I haven't used it yet. Also, it would be helpful to move up the Preview and Post Reply buttons closer to the reply section.

Hopefully, there will be revsions and modifications made in the near future in response to members suggestions.

What was wrong with the old layout? If it isn't broken, why fix it? Now, it is confusing and you have taken away some ad posting options. It looks like a child designed it. Don't you have a professional web designer, or shouldn't you hire one? This is amateurish at best. I could design a much better website using a free service such as zoomshare...(In fact, I did). Man, anyone can see that this website is all messed up....same font, same colors, same size text everywhere...it look as if you took the old "The Beijinger", put it in a blender, added some vodka and kaluha, hit frappe, then guzzled it all down and puked it back onto the screen....absolutely terrible.

Why is it so sssssllllllooooowwwwwwwwww?

It's slow, slow slow. Fix that first and foremost.

Also when I view my classified ads, the thumbnails load incorrectly.

third, why did you drop the max file size to 75k? 100,000 bytes wasn't small enough? Honestly you should be giving us more than that in this day and age--megabytes cost pennies.

Obviously a website needs a redo of the look every 1.5-2yrs orso. With the old site they have been pushing it way too long, so a new look is very welcome.

HOWEVER, I definitely must agree with the rest of waterman1969's comment and original poster, this site sucks big time.

I agree with the comments of (lack of) choice of font.

Your servers are way not up for the task and that is a stupidity that could easily have been taken care of BEFORE going live! I mean after so many years you do have gathered some stats on daily usage of bandwidth, right? Then why "invest" in a new layout and forget the most important of all: the servers???

To come up with an excuse like

is a very lame excuse, because it is you who have been creating the momentum yourself with posts and signatures in the first place! Perhaps it would have been an idea to first test your server's capacity before going live?

Another thing I noticed when "browsing" the classifieds. That is not possible anymore! Say I want to look for an ayi or cleaning service for my home. I click on the first ad that seems ok, I read it and then want to view the next.

NOT POSSIBLE. I have to go back, search again for an interesting one and click on that one.

I'm sure that Raincity is a very capable company (offices in SH and Vancouver) and have designed many "people-powered websites", but this is a mistake that goes totally beyond me. It serves no other purpose than making the traffic to your website less instead of more!

Furthermore I still find there are too many rotating gifs on the site which distract and serve no other purpose than to irritate me. I know this is personal taste, but as admin writes

A simple solution can be to not have them rotate indefinitely, but stop after let's say 2 rounds!

I have seen a post in the forum where many people are quoted, have you seen how that looks? CRAP that's how it looks and I use a euphemism here!

Really, Drupal can be a cool platform to build your site on, but it would help if the developers really understand you and your needs!

I suggest that if you don't want to receive too much bad publicity, you'd better start acting fast!

Good luck!

This is really pretty bad.

Very slow. It took four tries just to get here.

Confusing, even to a first or secodn time visitor, let alone the many who used to come here.

Dress up the rest of the site if you want, but you really should have left the forums alone (and I mean more alone that you have been for the past month or so, even before the disasterous site changes).

This site reminds me of New Coke.

Also on FF2

hi why can my raccoon avatar not move anymore??

also having a problem with pm's. anyone else?

Yes, it is. And it's a security nightmare. However, hardware is cheap so it could be made LOTS faster by caching the bejeezus out of things with memcached and throwing a faster machine at the problem. This isn't Amazon.com and doesn't get that much traffic. That is the easy part.

The usability issues are pretty significant and a more difficult nut to crack. Thanks for the heads up on which web design firm NOT to use. I really don't want to heap on the schadenfreude, but this is a pretty serious screw up.

Again, cheers on the new logo...raspberries on the lack of usability.

Cheers,

love the scheme and new colors but the implementation is lacking.

basically, I agree with everything Frank Joseph has mentioned above. Speed is a major major issue right now between a CMS that is as non-efficient as you can get and forum software on its last legs...

also... this whole having to preview the reply before posting it just makes it worse.

Let's look on the bright side. The frame on the left side of the home page is no longer cluttered with ads for/from hookers. My god, this is slow. It took almost 3 minutes to get to the preview page when I clicked "preview". Feh.

Cheers,