Peter,
Yes, some of the other boards definitely have similar problems, especially METaR. I would guess that Saul got the changes mostly because he asked for them. Maybe Wendy’s too nice and also, Mungo’s gone. Also, the large influx occurred just as the new boards were being rolled out. But these are all only guesses. Do you have another theory?
I can no longer stand to read METaR, wading through every single post. It’s ridiculous.
@RaptorD2, I’m curious, how were you reading it before? Were you glancing through in unthreaded mode and just clicking on authors you liked?
Generally speaking, yes, that’s one of the ways. Or I would scan the (unthreaded) list of posts on a board and click on those with significant recommendations. Or I would go to the Best Of board and find posts from boards I don’t usually or often visit.
I note that none of those options are now available so far as I am aware. I can find that a “thread” has 250 recs (sorry, likes) but that may be in just two of the 40 posts in the thread. Now I have to wade through the other 38 for no reason?
If I want to see what’s being talking about on a board is there a place to get an overview? Or do I pick a few “unread” posts from the mish-mash of jumble posts/boards/categories listed? There may be 10 “new” posts on MeTAR. Do I care? I want to see the thread titles, all together, and decide which to bother to open. Maybe one thread has taken off and has lots of my favorite posters. Maybe another hasn’t and its just some mindless crypto enthusiast that I don’t care about. And if I want anything but “full thread”, oops, can’t do that either.
I’m doing my best to hang around (I even changed my almost unreadable initials logo to an even more unreadable one 
but it’s an effort. A good message board shouldn’t be an effort. I should know what I’m looking at and be able to find what I want quickly and effortlessly. This ain’t it.
As we slip further off topic, I’ll chime in, mostly echoing Goofy.
For METAR and BRK, I’d generally read only highly recommended posts or authors I have learned to value over the years. I’d often read a new thread that had a title that might be interesting to me. Basically, I’d pick and choose what to read. Sometimes I’d skip highly recommended posts as I learned the thread was wandering far off topic and the recs were garnered by replies to nitwits who didn’t deserve the time of day.
There are a couple of boards I generally read in their entirety, as they are my professional area of expertise. I consider answering questions there to be a way I can give a little bit back to the TMF community for the help they provide me in other areas.
And as Goofy more eloquently said, those options are no longer available. Worse, I find that a new reply to a thread is by someone I have ignored. With the simple list of posts we had at the old boards, those were trivially simple to skip. Now I click on the thread only to discover that the new post I was dutifully alerted to is by a nitwit. So I go back to the list of new posts (now down by one) click again, and find another nitwit. It’s a real time sink with no benefit.
Importantly, I am not saying that reading in this threaded mode is wrong or bad. But in the old boards we had both available. You could read the boards in a threaded mode OR in a sequential post mode. These boards have cut off the sequential mode readers.
–Peter
Softie, I could write a long answer, but it would just be a copy of Goofy’s. An exact copy, word for word.
Thanks. And to be clear, I’m not trying to convince anyone they shouldn’t prefer unthreaded. I just want to figure out why you like things a certain way in case I can suggest ways to achieve a similar outcome on this new platform.
If I might summarize, you folks see the “signal” and “noise” as happening post-by-post, not thread-by-thread. And also, you’re on average more person-oriented than topic-oriented. The unthreaded view allows you to 1) quickly jump around to the highest-quality individual posts, and 2) focus on the small group of Fools you have some community with, whatever other conversation is happening around you.
I hope TMF can find ways to enable this kind of interaction for you. I made requests over on the Premium side for more convenient ways to watch for posts from Fools I’m following, as well as being able to save searches. That would allow you to define search criteria of, e.g., posts by posters A, B, and C on the METAR board that have at least 10 likes. And then you could just re-run that search to see if there’s content you might want to engage with. Not a perfect replacement, but it might be passable.
This will be continue to be a big problem. Especially with how many posts the nitwit makes.
Paul
Yup, what Goofy said. Most of my visits to the boards other than the ones I specifically followed came by way of BestOf, which I used shamelessly to find popular posts on boards I didn’t follow. Now there is no such thing.
I have no time or inclination to dive into everything. If I can’t quickly and easily find the things that are most likely to interest me, I won’t bother.
Yes - it seems as if Discourse is set up to make it relatively easy to find topics that have received a lot of attention/activity, but almost impossible to find posts that have received a lot of “likes.”
If you try to sort by “Top” content, you first get a sorted list that appears to combine activity and ‘likes.’ If you sort by ‘likes,’ you can get topics listed by like count - but only topics, where the “likes” are aggregated across all the posts. There’s no way to quickly find a particularly well-regarded single post for a given time frame.
Is that something that TMF can toggle?
That would be nitwits, plural.
While I have no desire to publicly display the number of people who have blocked a poster, it would be nice if TMF used that information to invite some posters to post elsewhere.
–Peter <== carefully noting the number of posts he makes here, thinking that laying low for a bit might help differentiate him from the nitwits.
It’s a safe assumption that we are all somebody’s Nitwit, not to be confused with a Roomwit, which is a much higher level of Nitwit
Every time I post I’m sure someone out there reads it and wishes they didn’t waste their time
I have no time or inclination to dive into everything. If I can’t quickly and easily find the things that are most likely to interest me, I won’t bother.
Prediction: That issue will be resolved before much longer. Sadly. Because the most valuable posters will have bailed.
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I’ve been reading & posting on TMF boards since 1997. Made 15,000 posts and read probably 200,000 posts.
Ah, no. Looking the total post counts of my old favorite boards, 277k + 130K + 284k + 109k posts = almost ONE MILLION posts that I have read.
Over that time I have noticed that when the market was doing poorly
the number of posts dried up and when the market was booming the number of posts shot through the roof.
We are in a bad market now, and I’ve noticed the number of posts decline a lot starting in March/April. Because of the bear market.
This cutover to these new discussion boards occurred when the posts dried up, so: 1) many of the valuable & prominent posters have had little reason to post and 2) few readers are around read because there’s nothing to read.
Terrible timing on TMF’s part. Many of the first group won’t return, and many of the second group won’t have much reason to return.