Sounds all too familiar? The recent redesign of Chowhound, a favorite hangout spot for foodies, left their members quite unhappy.
http://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-chowhound-20151010-story.html
Hmmm… And especially this:
There is a good reason I do not read or post on YSMBs anymore: the new format is terrible.
I was on the Chow site yesterday for the first time in a while, and noticed it was redesigned. I love(d) that site, it is the best way to ferret out great restaurants when traveling. Unlike Yelp, most of the people on it are foodies. Very sad. 
I have not developed any love for our new CC format, either. The school forums are dead… I bet a statistical analysis would show a lot less traffic on all of them except maybe the top 15 schools.
Well, BB… we’re glad you stuck around CC at any rate! Thanks for being a trooper!
I took CH off my bookmarks. The redesigned site is awful - the threads that show up are years old with one or two recent posts, I can’t find favorites anymore.
The most popular section is Site Talk and it’s all complaints.
Some things translate easily to FB. The article is right - CH doesn’t. It’s too bad.
YSMB?
"YSMB = Yahoo Stock Message Boards. Went form “chronological” format (which is the format currently used by CC) to “thread reply” format of message appearance, ugh. Hate to wade through all of that dichotomy…
Did Chowhound tell its users why they made the change? Still waiting for an explanation from CC…
I’m on a tennis board that just changed its format two weeks ago. They have things like like now and also changed the skin to something like CC’s now. They also have a home page with crap like articles which no one is interested in at all.
Once the change took place they put up a dedicated thread for comments/questions/complaints. The complaints were fast and furious but they listened and added the old format as a choice in preferences. It took about 48 hours for them to do it. They also added color between posts/threads to new format after reading all the complaints. There were lots of other things, like adding back in links to virtual betting and other forums which were removed. These were also addressed by administrators and were put back in.
Administrators answered every poster who had a question/ complaint/suggestion.
Posters were very pleased with the sites responsiveness. The sites are owned by a big sports forum company so that they were able to make the changes the members wanted so quickly is a testament to that company’s management versus Hobson which made just a few changes, which took forever, and ignored most everything the members complained about or suggested.
There were also some initial problems with viewing the site on aniPad but using a browser - one couldn’t access their User CP to get old format. I complained about it and it was also fixed within two days.
Sounds like CH has become the New Coke of message boards…
So we could have a nice mobile experience and follow sub-forums easily?
Oh wait, nevermind.
Chowhound Boston is largely dead now and it only took a few weeks of the new design. It was never a very good board but there are/were a handful of very good posters, including restaurant reviewers.
I sort of understand the idea that it can be organized around tags but even basics are frustrating: how is a user to know that clicking on the “x minutes ago” and only on that will take you to that post in the thread.
Truly horrible work.
Do we need boards? Yes. They attract casual posters, not merely a group of friends.
I don’t know if any of you were posters on Parentsoup, Ivillage…but what a shame that was when they started fooling around with everything. They lost so many people because nothing worked, and now it is dead. That was my go to Board with just about everything …the teen board saved my sanity many times. What a pity.
I tried using Chowhound to look at restaurants in my area yesterday, and it was awful. The first posts that came up were 2 years old. It wasn’t obvious how to get to recent, or better discussions. Since Portland is a hot foodie destination, it is ridiculous to be getting 2-yr-old posts.
I used to be on i-village. It was good at one time. There is a fertility treatment site called INCIID that used to be really rocking with participants and they all left due to changes in format. Before the format change, things were really crazy there. One frequent and annoying poster had posted a picture of her daughter in front of her preschool sign and given other hints of where the annoying poster lived, someone else called the preschool pretending to be the mom and withdrew the daughter from school. There was lots of shenanigans like that. Miss those days!