I don't like it.

[excited_Genie16B8]

Well, not surprisingly the Adobe team went and mucked up what I feel is the best forum on the Internet. They made it look like every other forum on the Internet, with just too much going on.

The clean, plain simple look of the current forums is superior to any other I've ever seen, and changing that is just not worth whatever new 'forum features' might come along. If you can't add new features with the current look, then just don't do anything.

Specifically, the original author of the post is a "who cares" type of thing. It's not needed in a message view. This is worse than what we now have.

Likewise the "views" and "replies" are not required information, and only serve to mess up the view. This is worse.

The message Subject has too little room to display, so it gets wrapped to a second line. This is worse.

Maybe it's not obvious, or not implemented yet, but I see no flags telling me there are replies that I haven't read yet. This is worse.

When you open a message thread, we have the familiar "forum look" which is very much worse than the very clean look we now enjoy.

Like the Home/End shortcuts, and the handling of subclips, Adobe went and 'fixed' something that wasn't broke, thus effectively breaking it.

[Guest]

Do we need a Forum at all?

[PJonesCET]

Yes we do need Forums. I'd prefer we stayed with this system But adobe corporate has decide this system is outdated. The problem is not the system the problem is with Horsepower. The Servers are not nearly large enough; and they are not duplicated so if one Server coughs it doesn't bring the the whole system down. The should be set up as exact mirrors. so that if something blows up the users would never notice it.

There is the occasional bug where the Style sheet either dies or is corrupted where there are no left margins at all. But that only appear maybe once every couple of month.

The biggest problem I see with the new system is it dark and foreboding just like the adobe main site. To much use of charcoal Gray. On phpBB system they have user chosen style sheets changing background color to please the eye of the user. It configurable in the USER set up.

Adobe would sell even more products if they would get away from the dark gray. The cemetery feel turns off users.

[D__McCahill]

> Do we need a Forum at all

If you ask this question, then you don't. But Adobe has surely noticed that many minor problems get solved here, without having to go to the more expensive tech support.

[Jacob Bugge]

>Do we need a Forum at all?

Adobe does.

Unfortunately, someone there seems to believe that they need a forum format that is different from what the members need.

[Guest]

my question was ironic Don.
you already answered the question in your second sentence.

true, true man.

[Bill12]

From a user perspective, the forums are needed to get the support that Adobe does not provide (except at a cost, and then sometimes without satisfaction). Many folks here actually give better answers than tech support. I have also read several posts lately where tech support has sent folks to the forums!

[~graffiti]

"except at a cost, and then sometimes mostly without satisfaction"

There! Fixed that for you.

[Bill12]

OK, I was being nice. I know that the support was the reason a lot of us ended up here.