Hi!
I am one that is not thrilled with the new layout, though I do understand the necessity for updating and appreciate the work that has been and is being done to keep the information on this site available. Thank you!
My main gripe with the new forum is that it is very expansive and requires a lot of scrolling to see much compared to the old site.
On the old one, you open a forum page and could see 10-20 topic titles all at once - it was very compact and efficient to scan.
For reference, I generally use the site on a laptop, so am expecting optimization for a wide screen. I am not taking into account how this site looks on a phone in portrait mode, since I haven't tried it.
On this version, once I open a forum (or even on the home page), I have a huge header bar, and lots and lots of blank/unused space. I only see the very first topic, and have to start scrolling for a long time to see many more subject lines due to the spacing and first few lines of each topic's first post. from the home page, I don't see any recent/trending topics at all until I start scrolling.
I have noted others with complaints along this line, so hopefully I explained it clearly & the following is constructive.
My suggestion is to see if we can get back to a more compact, "information direct" format. I liked having the list of topic titles with very little fluff in between. As a bonus you could put those first lines of the post in a popup when you hover over the title to see if you want to click into it.
Here are some "For Examples"...
I like this tripadvisor page, shows lots of topics compactly: https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowForum-g60763-i5-New_York_City_New_York.html
This is similar, click into one of the topics, and it looks strikingly similar to the old RV.net: https://slickdeals.net/forums/
This is also similar, but a little less compact: https://arstechnica.com/civis/forums/audio-visual-club.6/
From the forum home page, this one looks like it's a similar architecture to this new forum, I like that it's more info dense in the category pages, though there's still a bit of scrolling to do; they could save some space by moving the search bar inline with the category name: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/credit-cards
Thanks again for all the hard work!
CC
