New Forum..theme and design comments

The latest changes are a further step in VM's project to save costs by making it impossible for customers to bother them. 

There's no email contact. Phoning in now ends up with recorded messages telling you to go away.  And this forum is made increasingly frustrating to use so that fewer people will use it and VM won't have to employ so many staff to follow it.

When their AI is fully developed they will be able to sack customer support altogether. 

Thoughts and Ramblings/Ponderings/Other Nonsense

[TL;DR] I conclude that it's easier not to bother, like my old quote from WarGames; "The only winning move is not to play".

Keep having to log in (now via Google) typing ID and password. My guess is a lot of stuff is gone due to security reasons.  Problem is with that, is it's so secure you can't do anything (like for example, yesterday where I couldn't post anything due the entire forum showing up as locked).  It's too simplistic if you want/need to explain complicated things.

I used to be able to post and edit things as I was doing them on the fly, but now you can't do that (eg the early Windows 10 stuff; download times, crashes on install etc etc).

IMO politico's still don't understand how the internet works (despite it's ubiquity over the last 30 years) and they want to force and parrot (faddy) AI nonsense into everything.  AI (Internet 3.0, if you will) is already dead in the water.  We can always go back to pen and paper.

Businesses have to comply with the new regulations, but users/content creators/occasional posters may conclude that it's easier not to bother, ultimately closing their accounts and cancelling their subscriptions to their respective ISP's (bad for businesses and everyone else).  

One more thing; how much data (particularly knowledge) is being lost to the future (particularly when its our turn be ancients)?🤔

*emoji's have also gone.  

and as with the last update anything here will be ignored - when you sit in your ivory tower looking down at the perfect world you have created - the plebs on the ground are simply ignored as a nuisance - needed in some part but not to be consulted

----------------------

Tony - sacked VIP 

can't do URL any more too

https://bridgemode.bounceme.net/Outgoing%20test.html

<a> <img src="https://bridgemode.bounceme.net/I%20have%20a%20plan!.png" border="0" width="583" height="152" /></a>

seeing if this works

On the specific point of sorting threads switching to "linear" sorting in preferences is working for me. 

The forum was switched over quickly but the current offering still seems to be very much a 'work in progress'.

Rather than it being a user/discussion forum any more it seems to be heading off in more of a simple helpdesk/ticketing system (with a corresponding reduction in controls available to users). The new arrangement seems to be optimised for mobile devices and on the basis of completing the simple task of a customer logging an issue with VM and getting a reply.

That said, IMO the present setup is an improvement on the previous version which tried to replicate features of the original forum but failed to do so very well.

Not-working things I have noticed for me so far are:

* No notifications are working (neither push notifications when logged in or email notifications since the switchover)

* Automatic following of a topic (after making a reply) doesn't work. It looks as if it is doing that after posting but when moving away from the page and returning the 'follow' has not been applied. Manually ticking the follow button is required.

* Not possible to post working hyperlinks (blocked by the new system). Only possible to post the text of a link. May be part of anti-spam measures gone-wrong. Also seems to be trying to so some sort of fancy self-title operating when using the insert hyperlink function.

* Many controls from the 'preferences' page of the user profile have gone.

* No access to past images under user profile, as far as I can see, and previously stored images seem to have gone (although I may have not yet discovered method for access if they do still exist)

* Edit function still no longer available (which is a big limitation IMO). Would have thought this could/should be made available to established users on a permissions-based approach either by request or by forum 'rank' after maintaining an established posting history

Current set of features available may reflect a change in function of what VM wants the forum to do IMHO.

Kei_Many comments for this user?