Firefox has a built in spellchecker. But it won't work with the whizzywig editor. And somehow my account keeps getting changed back to whizzywig without my permisssion.

And I detest the bumbling tooltips.

by tooltips do you mean the thread preview that follows the cursor around on the menu page ? Yes I don't like that either and find it not at all useful when there is more than 1 post in the thread. Its just annoying.

I think Dani is the only one who likes it.

To turn that stupid annoying thing off, I had to disable the dropdowns, which I liked. It made the site much harder to navigate.

Hmmmm it must have been a ghost that made this post with your account then

I turned everything off a long time ago. It seemed like the safest ploy.

Somehow, each "nice" new feature also comes with some "nasty" elsewhere. The "ooh ahh" crowd might be able to take the pain, but I can't.

No other forum I visit has this constant churn in the user interface experience. This is a site to enable people to communicate, not some continual beta site to test the admin's web programming skills. If this were a downloaded program, and the UI was changing with each patch, you'd be losing customers faster than you could patch it.

I get into a mode where I know where everything is (eg. how to mark a forum read). Along comes a change, and I have to re-learn the UI sequence.

Every time I detect a change, I seem to spend (aka waste) a few hours wondering what else has changed.

Yet another example of what I would regard as useless tinkering.
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/forum6.html
Now some threads are labelled "Multi Page Thread", as if "1 2 3 4 5" wasn't bleedingly obvious enough.

Personally, I think it's about time there was a lot more transparency from the admins. For example, each change which might affect the UI experience of ANY member (no matter what options they've ticked), the change should be announced in a forum message with due notice.

All this "well the majority won't notice anything" argument doesn't wash, because the majority still have the options given to them. It's only the people who've been here a while (coincidentally, all the people who provide all the help) who've figured out that such options exist and have chosen to make some changes.

Oh, and FYI, I have all these things turned off, yet I still get a regular crop of "The server at www.daniweb.com is taking too long to respond." I even got one composing this missive.

>>Now some threads are labelled "Multi Page Thread",
I don't see that. Maybe its the way you have it set up in Control Panel ? I have Thread Display Mode set up as "Linear - Oldest First"

Actually, neither do I any more.

It seems that because DW was being so damn sluggish that by browser was displaying the "alt" text for the little graphic symbol immediately to the left of the numbers.

I withdraw that particular observation as being down to server lag.

I installed firefox 2.0 and the spell checker works with the editor for me.

It works now, because the whizzywig editor is now gone.

But to get rid of the bumbles, I had to get rid of the dropdown menus, so I have to scroll to the links, so the no-scroll bug stops me until the ad stops moving. And there are some ads that don't stop moving.

And now I can't tell which smiley I am getting, because the menu shows the text, instead of the smiley. Then the wrong one shows up.

Salem,

Thank you for your comments. I'm going to quickly respond to some of the points which you brought up.

(1)

If I didn't work to continually improve upon DaniWeb, we would still be the small technical support forum for just Windows and Mac that we started as. If it wasn't for all of the evolutions and new innovations of the site, the C and C++ forums, where you spend most of your time, and the entire software development category, for that matter, wouldn't even exist. To highlight some of the most recent changes, the reputation system would still be in its default buggy behaviour and there would be no way to browse through threads in a forum without having to hit the back button continuously.

In fact, all of the changes that have been made within the past months have certainly not been done just to "test my web programming skills" but instead come as either a direct request or need from the community, based in large part from feedback here in this forum. The changes made this month, for example, which include the similar threads feature, the behaviour of tooltips, the reputation system, the redesign of the blogs pages to more prominently feature member usernames and the blogs the entries belong to, the addition of syndication buttons, have ALL come as a result of feedback passed to me by members.

It's important to note that there are 200,000 members. Even if you only look at members who post on a regular basis, that's still over 2,000. Of course not everyone is going to like all of the changes or hate all of the changes. There might be a new feature that you like and someone else might hate. And then there might be a different new feature that you hate but someone else likes. My goal is to make the majority feel that, when looking at the overall picture, there are more things you like about the site than you dislike.

(2)

You mentioned receiving a "This server is taking too long to respond" message on a regular basis, in addition to sluggish behaviour in general (such as with the 'Multi-post' icon not being displayed).

One of the recent problems that we've been faced with is that of MySQL table locking. What this means is that, while lots of people can all read from a single table at one time, the table has to be temporarily locked each time a change is made to it. As DaniWeb grows, this causes problems because while, on average, we will have 2,000 people at once trying to read from the post table, everytime someone wants to make a new post, the INSERT sql query has to wait in line for all of the existing reads to finish up so it can gain temporary sole access to the post table to insert a new post. This is why it's been taking a long time when posting lately.

Another problem we've been faced with lately is a Denial Of Service attack over the last couple of days / week.

To combat these problems, just yesterday we upgraded to four brand new servers after nearly a month of planning and a week of setup. The problems you experienced yesterday were most likely due to you trying to access DaniWeb in the middle of the migration. Because this was meant to be an uneventful migration with very limited downtime (there was about a half hour in total when the website was replaced with a 'site currently unavailable' message while the database was being moved to its new home), the messages about the move were confined to Area 51 instead of publically.


That being said, do many of you agree with Salem regarding changes to DaniWeb being far too constant and making the UI have a steeper learning curve than it should?