Seems like a big step backwards
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Hey @longtimebrk
How so? All the same messages and boards are over here and we’ve got tons of new features. So, what’s got you confused and we’ll try to help.
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I participate in the Berkshire Hathaway Board. It doesn’t stay in my tracked boards even though I have added it several times
Is there an unthreaded view?
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I added berkshire-hathaway as a tag. Seems to work.
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No - it’s all threaded now. It takes some getting used to (I never used threaded on the old boards) but I actually like it better now.
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Hi @longtimebrk
I just added berkshire-hathaway to your tags in your preferences and it seemed to stick. You should start seeing Unread and New links pop up on the sidebar on the left when new things are posted here. You can also add it to the Tags section of the sidebar so you’ll have a more direct link over here.
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Tags works! Thanks! Now to tag my favorite boards.
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Thank you very much. Onwards
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Note that you have to click the + to dismiss the drop down menu then click Save Changes or they won’t be saved. Also, if you click elsewhere (accidentally or otherwise), they won’t be saved and there’s no notification that you’re abandoning what could be a bunch of work.
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It is decidedly an UNimprovement. I did a poll here, around 80% used the boards in un-threaded mode. I suspect that, like me, they didn’t want to read every post, they wanted to read those which 1) were from esteemed posters (Mungo, among others), 2) garnered a substantial number of recs, 3) had a title interesting enough to click on, or 4) all the chaff, which is at least 50% of every message board on the internet.
I am not interested in a board which forces me to treat every post as equal, simply because they are not. I do not want “threaded” mode, and there seems to be no alternative here. (I wonder if the people who made this change did any research on how people used their boards?)
[It may be that they did, and don’t care. I get that. When we changed formats at a radio station we weren’t hoping to drag the old audience along, and perhaps the new format will somehow attract a different cohort. I rather doubt it; “investing” doesn’t come on most people’s radar until they’ve settled, have a mortgage, and start to discern the foggy future.]
I don’t know if the change will be fatal, it might be for me as I have not mastered finding a way that satisfies the “don’t waste my time” quotient over the “I learned something” product. It may or may not have been the driver for Mungofitch; I understand his concern about “time”, even when I have done research for myself it occasionally takes me an hour to compose a decent post, and I generally care about that.
Where don’t I? Facebook, because it’s a sea of people I have pre-selected and there is little expectation; at the Fool it is people who have selected themselves, and not all of them would be on my list of invitees; indeed I suspect barely 1/3 would make the cut. “Threaded” obviates that choice for me: every poster blathers in order and I have no way to separate the better from the worser, or the even worserer;, or the worsest.
This is barely my 3rd, maybe 4th post in a week. Maybe I’ll get used to it all and come back, but maybe not. I hope I’m wrong; I have been a fan of the Fool since the AOL boards, but I guess times change. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I wish a format change could somehow be achieved but I doubt it. I am led to understand this is a vendor product, not fully in the control of the Fool, but I will hope changes come, or I adapt. Neither seems likely at the moment.
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I’m pretty much right with you, Goofy. There are a few boards where I read pretty much every post. Tax Strategies was one, as I tried to help out there. A couple of the now defunct social boards had me reading every post, too. The key there was the the volume of posting was manageable. Some days just a couple. A busy day had a dozen or so. The time commitment was manageable.
But any board with significant posting volume, such as this one and METAR, require some screening. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to read every post. And this format does not provide what is needed to screen at the post level. Its the whole thread or nothing. And that just takes too much time, particularly when half of a large volume of posts are not worth reading.
–Peter
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Hi @ptheland -
I’m not sure what type of device you are on, you may have listed it upthread, but I’m looking at ONLY your last post. I do not have to read all of a thread. I am on a desktop PC and can scroll past those posts that I don’t want to read, and once I’ve read some posts in a thread, I only get to the latest ones by clicking on the “n unread” link in the sidebar. This brings me to just the post or posts, that I have not read yet.
Is this how you are using the new boards?
'38Packard
Who knows?
I think the design is accidentally (or on purpose) leading you to get lost by just reading and reading without really knowing how long it might take. On the old boards I could quickly see my favorites and pick a board (or two or three) and read all the posts…then maybe later come back and read a board that had more posts.
It seems that the work flow (if you want to call it work) is broken or at least more disjointed now and it seems, as I already said, designed for you to get lost. But curiously this only pays off if there are ads. So you have to wonder, where are all the ads?
Click the hamburger menu in the upper left and remove the sidebar and you see that the left and right sides are perfect for vertical ads. 
I want to be wrong about this.
I do think that in a week or two, the vast majority who stick around will get used to the new format as their finger muscle memory starts to take over and the content goes back to being the important thing
Mike
[quote=“38Packard, post:13, topic:76143”]
I’m not sure what type of device you are on, you may have listed it upthread [/quote]
I’ve been reading on both my desktop and my phone. Posting is much easier at the desktop.
but I’m looking at ONLY your last post. I do not have to read all of a thread.
Yes. But that’s not true if I’ve been away for a while. After half a day or overnight, there can be 5 to 10 threads with several posts each available to view. On the old boards, I could see all of those in a single screen, decide which 3 or 4 deserved my time and quickly dispense with the rest. Now I have to look into each thread one at a time and scroll around to see what posts are available. It’s possible there’s a poster I want to read buried in a thread I haven’t been paying attention to. Or not. It is much less time efficient this way.
–Peter
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Each time I read a message i have to rechoose berk from tags then rechoose latest from how to display. Otherwise I just get the same two topics from many days ago showing.
Clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk… and we loose Jim in the deal.
Good software serves me, I don’t have to keep getting guidance from someone else on how to use it and I could care less whether there are new features when the old ones that were straightforward and encouraged intelligent contributions are gone.
The only good think is Saul hasn’t bailed (yet).
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Try using/refreshing this link. It seems to be doing the trick for me so far to show the latest activity and quickly see the new posts in threads of interest.
https://discussion.fool.com/tag/berkshire-hathaway/l/latest
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How do I stop other people’s posts from coming to my email?
You can change your email settings in your preferences here. If you don’t want to see anything, change it to never.
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Thank you, CMFMints.
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