Thanks Joe and all who have posted feedback here.
Joe's initial questions is about why there is a drop in the number of posts in the Johnson/Evinrude category. The short answer is that I don't really know for certain. The longer answer is that there do seem to be some issues for some users regarding the new board and they might be having an effect. I will list and address some of the issues below, but let me first reiterate that I am confident this board format is better than the old one. I know that's hard to believe if you are one of the users who is finding it to be slow, but from where I sit I am firmly behind this format. It is more stable and secure, more feature rich, better for photo and attachment posting, better indexed with search engines, better able to integrate into other areas of the site, etc. It might take some time, but I think many of you will agree eventually.
Some of the issues that might be resulting in a short term drop in posts:
1) When we switched to the new board registered users had to choose a new password and follow the instructions to do it. That process may have frustrated some users and caused them to leave.
2) The speed issue that is mentioned above and has been discussed in a post on the Mercruiser category as well. We have made a number of changes that should improve the loading speed and we are making some more changes this week. It has been a difficult problem to pin down because it is not effecting all users and there don't seem to be many common factors among the users that are effected. Loading the main page of the forum and the loading the individual forum categories (such as the Johnson/Evinrude category) seems to be much of the problem. We are trimming down those pages and and will be trying a new utility that improves the caching to reduce the number of times that the site is required to retreive redundant information from the database. I hope users will be patient with this we do feel your pain and we are working on it.
3) The added sub categories to the Johnson/Evinrude forum for "oil/fuel mixture" , "propeller selection", and "model year id". We felt that so many of the visitors had questions related to those issues that they warranted their own categories. For a user with those questions they will have an easier time browsing within one of those specific categories and searching within those categories than in the overall Johnson/Evinrude category. The problem is that those sub-categories occur and the bottom of the Johnson/Evinrude list of messages and may not get noticed. We are looking at how to arrange them and might display them nearer the top of the Johnson/Evinrude list.
4) It's a slower time of year for boating in the Northern Hemisphere, and was therefore the only viable time for us to make the format change, but a drop in users this time of year might be more noticeable than a drop in the summer.
5) The layout of our site homepage changed also and the link to the forum might not be as prominent as it should be. We are looking at how to improve that.
Our overall website traffic is significantly higher now than it was this time last year, but I agree with Joe that the postings seem to be down at the moment.
This board has always been a reliable resource for marine engine tech issues and has had the reputation of being friendly, respectful, and on topic. I think if we follow that theme and work out the bugs of the new format we will see a rebound in use.
Thanks everybody!
Best regards,
Andrew
I guess there is a limit and I dont suppose you can use them anywhere else.
