I appreciate all your hard work putting together the new Fool Discussion Boards. I like the new editing abilities most! I’m reading from many posters that the new format is overwhelming, with too much to wade through to get what they want. Consequently, they may leave or never appear, and we will see a loss of high quality members that draw people to these boards. Is it possible to simplify the format? People want unthreaded posts, with author’s names visible, maybe recs, too, so they can see which they want to follow. They also want to be able to email someone in private, for a more personal conversation. Again, I appreciate all you’ve done. I’m just wondering if things could be made simpler, along the lines of what people are requesting, to preserve the high quality content from so many great veteran posters.
“Is it possible to simplify the format? People want unthreaded posts, with author’s names visible, maybe recs, too, so they can see which they want to follow. They also want to be able to email someone in private, for a more personal conversation.”
Overall, I like the new format, but GDs ideas above are the greatest negatives.
Pete
One more thing would be nice to have. Instead of having to edit your categories for every board. Could you bring back the heart or something like it so you can click on it and it automatically goes under your categories? I am really liking the boards though and really easy to navigate now.
Andy
The sidebar Categories and Tags are a brand new experimental feature to Discourse, released just 8 days ago. I believe TMF said this feature was added at their request. It’s very possible new changes will be coming to this feature.
As @5761796E65 said, the sidebar was released in Beta last week and we put it in immediately because of how well we thought it mimicked the Favorites and my.fool.com page. (It was a prior feature on the Discourse for Teams site, not the regular Discourse - when we saw it there we asked them to move it to regular Discourse asap and they did) There are conversations with them (from many customers) about improvements…a couple being adding a User link that would highlight anytime a followed user posted and nesting Categories to make it a bit cleaner.
@buynholdisdead I’ll add that to the list - I like it - instead of 4 options when you click the bell in a category or tag, you get a 5th to add it to your sidebar.
@thegreatdane Thanks - I appreciate the way you started with that 
And editing rocks! I’ve been reading all the posts. Unthreaded just isn’t possible, it’s not a function of the platform. I was an unthreaded person back in the old system too but I’ve come to appreciate and like threaded since moving over here. The platform is about conversations and those are best in a thread-mode, unbroken by not having to click next all the time and having other conversations mingled in. As for emailing member, sorry, no but for legal reasons, it’s just not possible. There were many long discussions about it but, well, the lawyers won. But keep the suggestions coming - we are reviewing them.
I’ll disagree with that on several counts.
The big one being: in an online posted-message context, conversations are best when it’s easy to go to previous messages in the same conversation. Something that seems to be lacking about 2/3 of the time here, with no pattern I’ve yet discerned.
Another being that conversations are best when the people I’ve told the system to ignore are ignored. I don’t need to be told about messages from people I’m ignoring. I don’t need to be told about new topics they’ve started. When I said to ignore them, I meant it.
Conversations are also at their best when there isn’t an attempt to shove unrelated conversations in areas I’ve expressed zero interest in at me. Get rid of that stupid “Suggested Topics” list.
And after all that… sorry, I prefer unthreaded message boards.
I Upvote this …
Can you clarify? The previous messages in the same conversation are there when you scroll up. Can’t be easier than that. You must mean something else?
Yes. By “scroll up” you mean scroll through 54 messages to find the one I want? It’s possible with the new software by clicking on the “quote”, but it seems it floats somehow, less intuitively that the old method. But …
It’s the “threaded mode only” which is the disaster here. It forces me to scroll through endless chaff to find a few kernels of wheat. The sidebar organization of boards is a hurdle I could get past, although it’s pretty idiotic, but the endless scrolling? Not so much.
Waste of time. At least when the grocery store put in self checkout I got a reward: faster service, even though it required more effort. With this new software I have to put in more effort and I also get to waste more time with less reward. This is not a winning formula.