This forum is making me more and more frustrated every week! Not just the Canon SLR forum, but any forum on DPRreview to be honest.
How about that? Although I visit this site for a long time now (since 2000, the year I bought the Coolpix 990), I’m now reading forum posts on a daily basis. I just bought the Canon D60 in a shop (!) a couple of weeks ago (I’m working on my ‘from 990 to G2 to D60 from a user point of view’ essay) and there are MANY posts that are extremely helpful. I’ve got the 28-135 and I’m thinking about the justification of buying a 28-70 (like many of you who are a little insane), I’ve got exposure problems (like many of you) and I’m working on my digital workflow (like many of you). The information posted here has been a remarkable input for my life with the Canon D60. Thank you all very much for this.
So what’s the problem? The forum layout is very frustrating in a situation where there’s too MANY information to gather. Oh no, not another ‘get rid of the threaded forum layout’ message. Well yes, I haven’t seen one here for a couple of weeks, so its time again.
What is my experience?
TIME
I takes me several hours to read a couple of long threads here. I sometimes read this forum at my workplace at the end of the working day, and many times I can go home one to two hours later, after having just read 10 to 15 threads. Every time I get frustrated to see how many time it takes to read so ‘little’ information. It’s even worse when I just want to read five threads before I go to bed. At least one hour goes down the drain every time.
MONEY
My internet costs have been rising dramatically. I’ve heard that local calls often don’t cost anything in the United States, but I have to pay approximately 1 eurocent per online minute. That’s 60 eurocents for an hour of visiting the forum. Because you just READ messages most of the online time, these messages are relatively VERY expensive.
QUIT THREAD
There are many threads I would like to read, but the time and costs keep me from doing so. When I find an interesting thread which has 100 messages, I don’t bother start reading it even if I really want to, or just stop reading it after a small percentage of the messages.
ONE BY ONE
I would like to read my threads on by one. With the current forum layout I’m reading five to ten threads at the same time. I read a message, click ‘next’ and immediately switch over to the following instance of the Internet Explorer to read the next message on another thread. Not doing it this way, would cost me even more time and money.
MORE FORUMS
I only read the Canon SLR forum now. I would be interested in other forums too, but I don’t even THINK about doing this. Then my social life would be gone forever.
ALTERNATIVES
When I visit the forums at Rob Galbraith’s or Fred Mirandas’ site for example, I can search the forum, select twenty threads from the search results, disconnect my internet connection an start reading them offline. Every time I’m amazed how little time it takes to read complete long threads over there. I also have the possibility to SAVE a complete thread with the click of a mouse, so I can read it again later. So why don’t you get your ass over there? Because a search on ’20-35’ only gets me ten results. You guys are HERE and not THERE, and there’s a reason for that.
WHAT’S POSITIVE
The threaded model has its advantages. Getting rid of it would be a great loss. It’s really nice how two or more people can start a side topic in a thread. It’s also relatively easy to spot if someone has been responding to YOUR message and has a remark or question about something. Unfortunately the mentioned ‘other’ forums don’t have this option. Unfortunately Phil thinks his forums are so popular because of the threaded layout and that people who don’t like reading messages one by one are a minority. I really would like an official poll on this, because I really can’t image that I’m alone here.
WOULD BE A GODSEND
It would be a godsend if (a) every user could select the forum model in his user profile (‘one by one’ or ‘thread by thread’) OR (b) every single message would have a link ‘read all messages in this thread’. To prevent the server from having to send very big HTML files, very long threads could be split into for example 25 messages per page. This would be very easy to program in my opinion. I program ASP myself and I believe it takes only one or two hours maximum to program this functionality in its basic form. The threaded model on every message page should NOT be abolished. It should be there at least at the top. You could even show it after each message. I’m sure this can be done using Javascript, so there would be no extra load on the server.
SCREEN WIDTH
What’s also very frustrating is the fact that you can only see a very small part of the subject title. Things like ‘I really don’t now if I should buy …’ or ‘D60 vs D30 and a question about the …’. I keep on hovering with my mouse over these titles all the time, to see if there’s a yellow tooltip, but this doesn’t work everytime. I’ve opened many topics, just to find out, that they’re not interesting for me. Although it’s very hard to change the table layout of a site, it’s relatively simple to have a variable cell height. Just don’t clip the long title (or clip it so it would not exceed TWO lines) and you’re probably done. This could be a user profile setting. Very simple to implement and a major improvement.
I’m done. I now it’s Phil’s site and only he decides what it should be. I just wanted to share my everyday frustration with you to get it of my back, because I spend so much valuable time of my life here. Valuable time, which can be reduced easily (it can be halved, at least) by other technical solutions. Thank you for reading until this point and have a nice (D60) day.
Marcel D.
The Netherlands
GC-S5 - 990 - G2 - D60 ( BG-ED3 - 28-135 - 550EX )
http://fotohoek.go.to
How about that? Although I visit this site for a long time now (since 2000, the year I bought the Coolpix 990), I’m now reading forum posts on a daily basis. I just bought the Canon D60 in a shop (!) a couple of weeks ago (I’m working on my ‘from 990 to G2 to D60 from a user point of view’ essay) and there are MANY posts that are extremely helpful. I’ve got the 28-135 and I’m thinking about the justification of buying a 28-70 (like many of you who are a little insane), I’ve got exposure problems (like many of you) and I’m working on my digital workflow (like many of you). The information posted here has been a remarkable input for my life with the Canon D60. Thank you all very much for this.
So what’s the problem? The forum layout is very frustrating in a situation where there’s too MANY information to gather. Oh no, not another ‘get rid of the threaded forum layout’ message. Well yes, I haven’t seen one here for a couple of weeks, so its time again.
What is my experience?
TIME
I takes me several hours to read a couple of long threads here. I sometimes read this forum at my workplace at the end of the working day, and many times I can go home one to two hours later, after having just read 10 to 15 threads. Every time I get frustrated to see how many time it takes to read so ‘little’ information. It’s even worse when I just want to read five threads before I go to bed. At least one hour goes down the drain every time.
MONEY
My internet costs have been rising dramatically. I’ve heard that local calls often don’t cost anything in the United States, but I have to pay approximately 1 eurocent per online minute. That’s 60 eurocents for an hour of visiting the forum. Because you just READ messages most of the online time, these messages are relatively VERY expensive.
QUIT THREAD
There are many threads I would like to read, but the time and costs keep me from doing so. When I find an interesting thread which has 100 messages, I don’t bother start reading it even if I really want to, or just stop reading it after a small percentage of the messages.
ONE BY ONE
I would like to read my threads on by one. With the current forum layout I’m reading five to ten threads at the same time. I read a message, click ‘next’ and immediately switch over to the following instance of the Internet Explorer to read the next message on another thread. Not doing it this way, would cost me even more time and money.
MORE FORUMS
I only read the Canon SLR forum now. I would be interested in other forums too, but I don’t even THINK about doing this. Then my social life would be gone forever.
ALTERNATIVES
When I visit the forums at Rob Galbraith’s or Fred Mirandas’ site for example, I can search the forum, select twenty threads from the search results, disconnect my internet connection an start reading them offline. Every time I’m amazed how little time it takes to read complete long threads over there. I also have the possibility to SAVE a complete thread with the click of a mouse, so I can read it again later. So why don’t you get your ass over there? Because a search on ’20-35’ only gets me ten results. You guys are HERE and not THERE, and there’s a reason for that.
WHAT’S POSITIVE
The threaded model has its advantages. Getting rid of it would be a great loss. It’s really nice how two or more people can start a side topic in a thread. It’s also relatively easy to spot if someone has been responding to YOUR message and has a remark or question about something. Unfortunately the mentioned ‘other’ forums don’t have this option. Unfortunately Phil thinks his forums are so popular because of the threaded layout and that people who don’t like reading messages one by one are a minority. I really would like an official poll on this, because I really can’t image that I’m alone here.
WOULD BE A GODSEND
It would be a godsend if (a) every user could select the forum model in his user profile (‘one by one’ or ‘thread by thread’) OR (b) every single message would have a link ‘read all messages in this thread’. To prevent the server from having to send very big HTML files, very long threads could be split into for example 25 messages per page. This would be very easy to program in my opinion. I program ASP myself and I believe it takes only one or two hours maximum to program this functionality in its basic form. The threaded model on every message page should NOT be abolished. It should be there at least at the top. You could even show it after each message. I’m sure this can be done using Javascript, so there would be no extra load on the server.
SCREEN WIDTH
What’s also very frustrating is the fact that you can only see a very small part of the subject title. Things like ‘I really don’t now if I should buy …’ or ‘D60 vs D30 and a question about the …’. I keep on hovering with my mouse over these titles all the time, to see if there’s a yellow tooltip, but this doesn’t work everytime. I’ve opened many topics, just to find out, that they’re not interesting for me. Although it’s very hard to change the table layout of a site, it’s relatively simple to have a variable cell height. Just don’t clip the long title (or clip it so it would not exceed TWO lines) and you’re probably done. This could be a user profile setting. Very simple to implement and a major improvement.
I’m done. I now it’s Phil’s site and only he decides what it should be. I just wanted to share my everyday frustration with you to get it of my back, because I spend so much valuable time of my life here. Valuable time, which can be reduced easily (it can be halved, at least) by other technical solutions. Thank you for reading until this point and have a nice (D60) day.
Marcel D.
The Netherlands
GC-S5 - 990 - G2 - D60 ( BG-ED3 - 28-135 - 550EX )
http://fotohoek.go.to
