jhabrix wrote: Now, there's also a time limit on when you can edit your posts.

How do you figure that?  I see older posts of mine that are still editable right now.    

Q Photo wrote: …as far as I'm concerned the forums seem fine to me, at least recently.  Pages are loading much faster.  I am on dial-up and things seem good even though I'm going back and forth from forum to forum.

Everything is relative, Q.  If you're on dial-up, you may not notice the difference between these sluggish, hesitant new forums and the old WebCrossing forums when they were working properly, which was substantially more than half of the time.

Over there, for me going from one page to another one, or from one forum to another one or posting, was as instantaneous as changing channels on the TV with the remote.  It took well under one second over there; the progress bar on Firefox did not even get a chance to draw on the screen.  Here I get to the see the bar progressing, hesitating at the end and finally drawing the page in three to five seconds at best, in over one minute at worst.  That interval was practically unmeasurable in the old forums.

For me, the practical difference comes out to a ratio of 30:1.  I'm spending three times as much on these new forums as I used to on the old ones, yet I'm able to read and reply to only one tenth as many threads as before.  That is 30:1.

The worst part here is posting.  The more active you are, the more you get punished; lurkers don't have it quite as bad.  I see you're mostly a lurker.

When you post, you have to wait for the Reply Editor to appear and draw onscreen while you watch the forum's spinning gear, then the formatting bar draws on screen a bit later. Even as a miserable, lousy typist that I am, there are times when I have to wait for my typing to draw on screen; the delete key sometimes manages to delete only one character per second.  When you're done and hit Post, the wait can be anywhere from a few seconds to almost one minute.

A few seconds are a lot longer than the unmeasurable fraction of a second it took in the old forums.

The rest of the web is functioning very, very fast.  Visiting other forums and even some serious Uncle Sam pages where I have paid accounts, such as the Federal Judiciary's PACER a huge resource hog, is still like changing channels on a TV.

Sure, there are some nice features here, like the ability to embed images and send attachments, and the quoting format.  Scripts and AdblockPlus have made it even more pleasant, improving the interface and even the performance.  I had feared the scripts and hacks would slow me down, but after performing many tests both ways, I have determined that I'm saving a tiny bit of time as the hidden elements have to be downloaded anyway but not drawn.  A pleasant surprise.

At this point, only two items need fixing in my view:

1.— The ability to go directly to the last post read (a biggie), and

2.— The performance issues I just described in the preceding paragraphs of this post, also a BIG biggie.

The spelling checker is a joke and very slow, but that can be worked around by using an external spelling checker.  I don't think it's worth for John Cornicello and his team to spend any time and effort to try to get Jive to fix the spelling checker.

Zeno Bokor wrote: i see them, and hate them because i can't remove them

Why not?