Oh my God, this is just absolutely awful. You shouldn't be "very pleased to share it with you." You should be embarrassed and hanging your heads in shame and frantically trying to get this site back to the way it was.

So basically this redesign was intended to make the site more mobile friendly (although it sounds like people are having plenty of issues viewing it on mobile devices too) and in the process give a big SCREW YOU to everyone (like me) viewing it on a laptop? Awesome.

I will not repeat the same complaints that have been listed by others, but I am one of those folks who liked to hop on multiple times a day, quickly see what was new, contribute information, and go on with life. That seems all but impossible now.

I'm not sure I'm willing to cancel my membership forever, but I am taking a long hiatus until or unless significant improvements are made. Thanks to everyone for their posts over the more than a decade I have been on this site! Good luck, Godspeed, and I'll see you at 35,000 feet!

IADCA wrote:

You might want to do the same, especially with such a unique name.

I would if I could find where in the profile page it is.

This is not Airliners.net. This is a completely different boring, trashy site like a million other boring trashy websites, that uses the old A.net url for some reason. If it had been like that from the very beginning, I wouldn't have even thought of posting my photos here. I am cancelling my First Class membership. I am not paying for this.

LandSweetLand wrote:

IADCA wrote:

You might want to do the same, especially with such a unique name.

I would if I could find where in the profile page it is.

I PMed it to you.

quote: It seems much more modern

more modern ~= unuseable, screen real estate is massively wasted with whitespace.
No idea how this looks on a smartphone. It is gaga on a desktop imho.

[i]
>Also own a number of other sites like ehow
Consider ehow's style, this move is probably expected from the very beginning...[/

No. Do not consider ehow. Consider reverting to the previous site. Lock stock and barrel!

Indy wrote:

This site is a joke now. Sorry guys. I've been a member for a very long time and this is just a new low for the site. This looks like every other trashy site out there. It stinks to navigate and the forums are uncomfortable to read. Just terrible color choices. Bad layout. Bad spacing. Overall you get an F for this performance. If you want to have a version that is strictly mobile then fine but this is horrible for anything else. Bring back your old version or watch your traffic numbers decline rapidly.

I agree. I upload my photos only here, because it was easy to do, the old website was clear, easy to get where you want..(not only beacause I know well the website!)...
I try to upload a photo..too many input..
How can I delete my images from queue? It's not clear..
How can I edit them?
white background is simply bad idea..
The option: last photo added last day or similar? where is? (I mean the image sorted by last accepted...not listed by date or views) how can I find them?

IADCA wrote:

LandSweetLand wrote:

IADCA wrote:

You might want to do the same, especially with such a unique name.

I would if I could find where in the profile page it is.

I PMed it to you.

Thank you.
For those who are having trouble, make sure you do it in the main airliners.net settings page and not the phpbb settings page.

For the love of god, please bring back the old one.
I am sorry but this new site is a big failure.

1. My eyes hurt seeing these all white background and gray-ish words
2. Too many spaces in between topics, subjects
3. I cannot see the whole thing in 1 page now!

please please

The overwhelming white space is so bright and greatly lacking reasonable contrast and proper condensing of content that it is actually visually painful to read the content, after endlessly scrolling to find that content. Sorry, but this is likely what one calls in marketing a “flash in the pan” product introduction or upgrade that likely won’t have much luck in repeat sales. Very sad to see the original great format tossed to the curb.

Another case of fixing what's not broken. If the advent of mobile device usage is the distinctive factor for doing this, then there should be an option for the old layout especially when we're on a PC as I am typing this current post. A big head shake from me unfortunately. While I may get used to it, it'll never have the charm of the old site. On a more personal note, I particularly miss the country/flags that would show where each user is from. I enjoyed that as a facet of the multicultural community we have on this site! a

And by the way, I don't see any indication of my First Class membership anywhere.

Well here it is at last. After many delays and the failure to conduct the promised survey as to what users wanted in a forum, the long awaited new site is launched. Congratulations to the team on working on it and especially to the forum moderators who had to face hostile posts and constantly respond to criticisms.

First impressions. It looks better on my smartphone than the old version. On the laptop there is , as others have pointed out, a lot of surplus white space and the repetition of headings in each reply contributes to extra space being lost.

Some have mentioned the inability to respond to more than one post, pointing out the inefficiency of needing separate replies to each. The old method worked fine on one condition: not a single post that you replied to was deleted. If one of your referenced posts was deleted your entire post would also be deleted along with the replies to other posts. So I guess it's a case of swings and roundabouts.

One thing that I am looking forward to, is seeing whether it is possible to upload a full trip report without having to break it up into two or three "replies" due to an unknown word or image limit per post.

Chukcha wrote:

And by the way, I don't see any indication of my First Class membership anywhere.

First class is no more apparently.

JohnKrist wrote:

jaybird wrote:

The subscription fees we paid to be a First Class member - all gone?

As for the changes - it's the readability that's an issue for me .. small, gray font on a white background .. not the easiest on the eyes.

First Class was disabled long before the site upgrade. Some have had it to the end since we didn't change even if they expired, and those that did expire we changed to Premium. From now on there is just one type of membership, the free one.

"new and improved"?

Really?
So we have a forum colour scheme that is impossible to view for any length of time without eyestrain. Just wait till someone sues for the cost of new spectacles....
Instead of the star to tell us which threads we are following or have contributed to, we get a notification message to tell us when a contributed-to thread has been updated. But if you click on the link in the message it takes you directly to the first post in the thread. From there there is no way to get to the most recent posts in the thread, including the one that triggered the notification, without selecting a page number, hoping for the best, and clicking on it. You can go to recent posts from the forum index listing, but not from the notification. Looks like a lot of thought went into that.
The membership data is faulty - claims I hadn't made a post since 2015 - though this one may trigger it to update.
There are many more issues, which others have already covered.
As someone who has commissioned or taken part in many IT usability surveys, I'd score this as a 2 on a scale of 1 (dreadful) to 10 (magnificent).

Oh and finally - this is an aviation site. Aviation runs on UTC, not on the time in the zone the corporate offices or military headquarters happen to be. As aviation enthusiasts we know how to convert from UTC to our own timezone. This site has members from all over the world. Next time you post an announcement about downtime, put the expected restart time in UTC as well as in PST and save thousands of us the bother of having to look it up.

LandSweetLand wrote:

IADCA wrote:

You might want to do the same, especially with such a unique name.

I would if I could find where in the profile page it is.

You can't. And that's only one of the many horrible "redesigns" of A.net.

LatAmFlyer wrote:

LandSweetLand wrote:

IADCA wrote:

You might want to do the same, especially with such a unique name.

I would if I could find where in the profile page it is.

You can't. And that's only one of the many horrible "redesigns" of A.net.

Try this link
https://www.airliners.net/user/account/settings

Maybe we needed a new website or an upgraded one, but I think this is a downgrade. There are a few new ideas which I think that are good, but there are a lot of things missing, like photo queue and so on. I have 10pics in the queue. I uploaded 1100x733 and they appear a lot smaller now..with 745px width. Why?I don't get it. I don't like the design too. Too many white, and a lot of space wasted. The way we see photos it's a joke... I think most of us prefer the old "livery" of this site...and most of the people came here to see the classic blue, the 747 on the top...the site was unique. I think that this is a downgrade...maybe an upgrade was needed but the new site is a shame I think. Sorry Airliners, but this is my opinion, and most of the users think pretty the same.. .We are the people who use it the most, so it should be convenient for us. Now it's not. I hope the sites is under development.

I'm only using the forum. And the redesign will make this really hard. You had a great way of displaying a lot of information on one page while maintaining readability. Now there is so much white space and pagination. Sad to see the usability decline that way. This will lead to fewer quality posts in the forum and will make this page pretty much useless

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt right now that they're taking in the feedback that is being provided and prioritizing lists of action items. Paul is a good guy, and I'm sure the comments are being noted by him and others. There's a lot of people saying roughly the same thing, with a whole lot of added hysteria and "the sky is falling;" things which I would expect nothing less from the a.net crowd.

Hopefully, once the dust has settled there will be some a.net staff on hand to start addressing the concerns in a meaningful, productive way.

Major Issues

I don't spend a whole lot of time on the photos, so my feedback will be directed toward the forums themselves. I won't be adding a whole lot of new stuff, but hopefully there is some strength in numbers.

1) The page structure is not conducive to easy browsing. My fear is that this has been done to increase clicks, as I've experienced elsewhere. Even with 50 pages per post, it considerably reduces the ease-of-use. For most, the age of slow internet is a thing of the past, and there's really not a good reason anymore to not be able to see all the posts at once.

2) The forum layout simply has too much dead space. The enormous "bezels" that go around the actual forum code makes browsing on a desktop really irritating. At the moment, it doesn't render correctly on a mobile either (though to be honest, I'm hoping we'll have Tapatalk functionality soon, and this will be less of a concern for me). The titles are cut off on the mobile version, and the huge white space at the right side is unnecessary.

3) I agree with others that the font is too small, the colors make it harder to read (and increases eye strain), and the usernames should stand out more. There's also no reason for the thread title to appear in bold at the top of every post. This should be relatively easy to fix. Personally I think returning to the old color palatte while maintaining the new phpBB layout is a good idea, and should again be easy to implement.

4) The post numbers for each forum post appear to be the total post number, not the number of posts within each thread. This absolutely needs to be rectified, as referring to non-sequential 8 digit numbers that provide no context for where you are in a thread is not only not helpful, but an actual hindrance to effective communication.

5) If you're going to move to a phpBB format, I'd really like to see in-line video capability returned to the site. I miss being able to watch YouTube and other videos in a thread. It's cumbersome to have to leave the site.

Minor quibbles

1) For better or worse, the Respected User rating was helpful, as was in-thread access to their nationality, number of posts, and join date.

2) I miss the more comprehensive list of smilies. Nothing says a.net like the tomato-throwing smiley.

3) Having to review new posts before posting on an active forum such as this one isn't really helpful. This site isn't so much about asking and answering (where such a feature might be helpful), but instead is about discussion. God forbid there's another plane crash, the activity in those threads would make this feature work against the free-flow of information.

RobK wrote:

flyingturtle wrote:

casinterest wrote:

I think you can see the posters better once everyone gets a profile pic up and we get accustomed to them, but the the forums still need a lot of work

The $1000'000 question is: Why do we need the discussion topic at the top of every posting? The user name should just be made much, much more prominent.

By the way, should I call the emergency line? I fear for the lives of the a.nut designers. They might feel quite suicidal right now.


David

Why are you typing in florescent green on a white background? WTF.

... To give the new owners a peek at how the redesign is impossible to read.

akiss20 wrote:

The lack of a "view first unread" button makes long threads basically unreadable. I have no idea what page I was on.

There are two ways to do this -

1 - In the thread list, click on the small 'star' next to the topic title.

2 - In an open thread, click on the "First unread post" button.

As a professional web developer, my reaction after a day of actually using the forums on the site:

• Maintaining old web systems is really hard, especially when the code they run on (eg old versions of PHP) is no longer supported and is full of security holes.
• I appreciate the effort that has gone into migrating existing content into the new system. That would have been a lot of work, probably where most of the effort has gone into.
• There are readability and usability issues with the design of the site that many users have raised. Hopefully these can be easily addressed now you are using more standard systems.
• It would be nice to actually theme the banner with something aviation related.
• The lack of raw HTML support has made posting to the trip report forum more work as this is not the easiest tool to author them with.
• I quite like the additional user and notification functionality.
• Searching for personal posts didn't work.

I assume that the site, as it stands, is not the end product, but a platform on which to build now that the old content has been migrated into a newer system.

PanAm_DC10 wrote:

Plainplane wrote:

While I am glad about the efforts to modernize the site, as a photographer I am GREATLY distressed by the disappearance of the copyright bars from all of my shots. I need these restored NOW.

Hi there,

The copyright banner will be returned to images, the developers are working on the issue now, that said, I can't provide you with an exact date when they will reappear but it should not be too long. Thanks for your patience whilst they work on this for you.

Regards

Paul

The designers could just revert to the previous design to revert back to all the features we all loved --. How hard is that?

On migration to the new platform, the respected by and respected members settings got flip-flopped. People I respected now respect me and vice-versa.

The skull on the forums needs to go away. I didn't realize I was on some death enthusiasts' website.

Personally, as a prior SQL/PHP/JS developer, I wish that Paul would put this "new" version into a beta subdomain and restore the old version in-between. Once the beta version is improved, then perhaps roll it out, but it needs so much work that its going to alienate people and make them want to leave.

Watching photos - big improvement.
Forums - a lot of on screen space is wasted. Change for worse.

It is impossible to remove the photo from waiting list for screening

On ore thing - user profile in the past could be used to add custom HTML based info. All the info is now gone and there is no way to customize the profile. This is a change for worse.

8 years of promises about a great new site and this steaming pile of rubbish is served up to users. Sadly I am not surprised though. What will no doubt happen is one of the volunteer mods (not anyone from DM of course - they never take any responsibility) will pipe up with a party line about how further "improvements" are on the way. These "improvements" will no doubt consist of functionality that existed int he previous site. If any feedback had been sought from users in the first instance this colossal balls up would never have occurred. Don't forget this is not the first time DM have made a balls up like this.

I fully understand that the old site was hard to maintain and needed to be replaced but after 8 years this is the best they can come up with? Amateur hour indeed!

Having used this site daily for 15 years or so (though without ever being a member), I appreciate the effort to modernize the design. However, there's room for improvement, and here's what I would like to see:

• The info below the photo should be turned into two columns to save space and make it faster to read (or ideally restore it to the compact way it was before where you could instantly see all the info without scrolling). Also, some of the new info items seem unnecessary and just take up space, like photo dimensions and date of acceptance.
  
• When viewing an individual photo, there's another small photo to the right of it with the headline "TOP PHOTOS LAST 24 HOURS". That entire thing should be removed because it prevents the photo you're looking at from covering the whole width of the page. If I want to see the top photos of the last 24 hours I can simply go to that part of the site myself. It doesn't need to be accessible on every photo page, especially not when it reduces the size of the photo you actually wanted to look at.
  
• Additionally, when looking at an individual photo it would be easier to simply be able to click on the photo itself to maximize it, rather than clicking on the small resize button in the top-right corner. And then clicking on the full-screen photo would "close" it again and restore it to the original size. To make this clear to the user, you could move the resize button to the middle of the photo and only have it appear when the user moves their mouse over it.
  
• Show basic info like airport, airline, aircraft and photo date on the "top 5" photos on the front page, not just the photographer's name and country.
• Add arrow buttons to the "airliners headlines" box on the front page so that we can scroll left and right between the news to quickly check what's new since our last visit.
  
• Ability to "close"/remove the newsletter and "new site design" boxes at the top of the front page so that we can see the photos right away.
  
• Exclude threads from the non-aviation forum in the "RIGHT NOW IN THE FORUMS" box on the front page and the "FORUMS RIGHT NOW" box on individual photos. This is an aviation site which means the focus should be on that, not for example mass shootings in the US. Those that really want to discuss those kinds of news on this particular site can easily navigate their way to the non-aviation forum themselves (or visit an actual news site/forum).
  
• Add tooltips when hovering over the icons at the bottom of a photo like "Cross search" and "Photo correction" etc. Right now it's not clear that those icons do those things.
  
• It should be possible to simply click on the big photo under "PHOTOGRAPHER'S CHOICE" to expand/go to it.
  
• Drafts don't seem to work at all in the forum. When I loaded my draft it was empty. Thankfully I had copied the text to the clipboard so I didn't lose it. And even if the site had kept my text all the buttons below the editor (like "Submit", "Preview" and "Save draft") were gone while in draft mode. It's also not intuitive how to access saved drafts. If you have a draft saved there should be a button in the thread next to "Reply" that says "Load draft" or similar instead of having to click on Reply and then load the draft. Also, when you save a draft it would be nice if it just said "Draft saved" and then kept you in the editor instead of showing you two separate confirmation pages and then sending you back to the original thread. Oftentimes when you save a draft you still want to keep writing -- you're just saving it to make sure you won't lose what you've written so far.
  
• When clicking reply without being logged in, the site takes you to the login prompt, but once you've logged in you are redirected to the front page instead of back to the topic where you were. That means you have to go back to the forum and find the thread you were in and click reply again.
  
• I agree with what many others are saying here about increasing contrast and reducing white space/empty space. A darker background with white text (or just a truly black font instead of a grayish font) and a more compact design would make the new site much more enjoyable and easy to use. This includes removing or reducing margins and padding throughout the site (especially between boxes), removing the topic from each individual post, and re-introducing the ability to see all of a thread's posts in one page and have the option to show/hide them like in the old forum.
  
• And finally, I fail to understand the reasoning behind disabling premium/first class membership -- if a lot of people want to pay a monthly fee to get rid of ads then surely that should be welcomed with open arms by the site owners? Most major ad-backed websites offer that option because they make much more money that way and it improves the user experience for paying users. Win-win!

PS. What is the new favicon supposed to represent? It looks like Klingon scripture DS.

Sadly almost all updates of WWW-sites have the result, that the site runs slowlier than before. Same now here with A-net
Is there really no other way to modernize a homepage ???

As I just discovered, the photos cannot be watched at there original size as they were uploaded. The qualitiy thus is extremly disapointing - all the effort for editing them for nothing?!? Please fix that issue ASAP!!! Photographers will get even more angry now, when their well edited photos get rejected...!

Revelation wrote:

Wow, waaay too much complaining about something we aren't really paying for.

Really? Isn't photographers "pay" for this because they are one and sole reason why this site exist at all? Forums, chats, advertising - all this stuff rides on back of photo horse, because Anet was Aircraft Photo Database, known for large amount of quality photos. Now photo part is FUBAR and if team will not takes care REALLY FAST a) Views will drop dramatically b) Lot of people who add to site leave, some of them deleting their accounts.

I guess we have to get used to it. What I hate is that URL links to relevant pictures on Airliners.net I gathered on excel sheets don't work anymore, for example clicking https://www.airliners.net/open.file/2340661/M/ used to show a certain CX 777 for instance but now gives an error message. You should give a thought that there are direct links to old pictures and discussions in many online and offline texts and pages which became worthless overnight.

Sorry this webpage is not more Airliners.net. This is a desaster.

Apart the criticism written by others, i don't understand how you could transform the RU to Follower.

Also this white color everywhere i get headache from this.

This is a huge mistake, i think you will loose a lot of users specially those which contritubed (and raised Airliners popularity) to this site since more then 15 years.

I joined this site 10 years ago and i was very happy with it. (Besides one annoyance)

The homepage now is way to overcrowded filled with non relevant informations. Please diminish the social crap!

I really hope you will change this mess, otherwise i won't visit this site as often i liked to do.

The new forum structure will come back to bite this site with the next AF447 type of event. With tons of new posts, it will be much more difficult to scan through the threads and look for well known and knowledgeable contributors. They, on the other hand, will find it difficult to put together those thoughtful posts that stick out in the text mass on such an event, and which are - as far as the forums are concerned - a.net's most valuable resource. Quoting different users is much more difficult, you can't see all the posts on one page any more, and then you'll have difficulties to actually post, because while you composed one post full of content, a few dozen other chat-like posts have been made. I fear this will become very much like facebook discussions or the youtube comment section. Not a.net any more.

I'm going to take a different stance. I actually don't mind the upgrade too much. Though there are a few things.

The Good

• I like the activity section in the top right. Hopefully it shows your newly accepted photos etc. You could make some good use of this.

• The design is modern which is good. The old site did need a refresh, so good on you for making the effort to get it up to date - but I am still not quite sold on this look.

• Watermarking for images is much better.

Criticism & Suggestions

• The forum font should be the size and colour that when you are typing a reply in the 'Post A Reply' section is.

• The whole website suffers from blank space syndrome. I can understand the sides being blank for adverts, but I am talking the fact that there is way too much space around text (ie. on the photo upload page, there is no need for a two centre gap around the headings like Auto-Complete)

• Following on from the last point, the headings are way too big. Simply no need to be that big.

• The photo pages themselves have the data way too spread out. I don't want to scroll two lengths of my computer screen to see the rego or comment etc.... Font can be smaller and it can fit it better into a smaller space - with nicer appearance.

• There needs to be a way to bring up an advanced search on the home page. Maybe even a down arrow near the search bar.

My last point however is the biggest one.....

• Photo viewing quality is poor, to say the least. For a photography website - it unfortunately is one of the things that can't be compromised, unfortunately.

All in all, not too bad as some are making it out to be. I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes as I, and others get used to the new feel.

Hi Anet Team

I usually am a lurker in forums, and mostly have been on Anet for the wonderful photos. Very disappointed with the change.

I've been a First Class paying member for some years now, and am very annoyed now at seeing ads. Wife stopping by my computer to say hi, and seeing ladies on the screen - she wonders what kind of site I'm visiting. How embarrassing and degrading is that!

Unless something is done about the ads and option restored to pay and avoid, then I'm pretty much finished with Airliners.net.

I agree with others,the site is extremely busy, an unprofessional look and feel. I'm being bombarded with fluff/fillers and I definitely don't like the white space everywhere. I really just want to look at planes.

Hoping very much to see changes/improvements or a "Classic" option for old-timer users like me. I'll give it a few weeks, but If it stays the way it is, especially the seeing ads everywhere bit, I'm finished with this site.

Very sad.

Jeremy

Simple and to the point I HATE IT

I do like the redesign and I can understand why it has been done. However, it isn't very readable - please, please, please can we have a darker typeface as grey on top of grey on top of grey just isn't working.

In my opinion the new site is a smartphone site.
For Desktop PC's and notebooks all thumbnails are too big.
You cannot get a quick overview any more.
So imho the site update wasn't an upgrade, but a downgrade.
The old site was loads better. Who needs a smartphone style on a desktop PC or notebook?
I noticed too, that there is no possibility to get rid of ads and watermarks in pictures by paying a small monthly fee. Is the site now driven by ads only with no possibility to get rid of them?
Furthermore I miss the old background color, thumbnail sizes and captions directly below or beside the images. The completely white background is annoying. There are other sites that offer a "classic look", so you can revert to the old style. The new site is a disaster.
Regards, Jens

I can't stress more - it WAS photo site, not forum site nor social network. Without photo part which is now TOTALY BROKEN - why we need go through painfull screeneing process to post to site which resize your photo and compress it worse then flickr - this will became just another forum with couple dozens users who pay for access and some couple hundreds who use AdBlock to read it for free.

Even though there are some things that I would like to be improved, I'm overall OK with the changes.

Wish List
1. Optional blue background. (can be changed in user settings)
2. Bring back the 747 banner
3. Bring back the flags next to usernames
4. Fix the photo resolution/watermark issues

I personally think that the people calling for a complete regression to the old site are overreacting slightly, but that's just my 2 cents.
Regarding the advertisements, I have no problem with them as long as they are placed off to the sides.

On the old site there was a option to see all the new photos uploaded to the site in the last 24 hours. Where is that option on the new site?? Is that option gone now? How will I be able to see the newest photos uploaded to airliners?

Before the upgrade I didn't have any ad's on the site now I have! Why?

airkas1 wrote:

Airplanes4life wrote:

1. Search box on home page

Look in the upper left corner

c933103 wrote:

Would recommend take off the site until you guys are done with that to reduce the amount of pain brought to people

Noted and will recommend to fix soon.

kulverstukas wrote:

but this awful page of photo, with broken aspect ratio and with arrows which scale photo to fit screen breaking

The developers are aware of this and a fix is in the pipelines.

The key of what I said weren't "fix it soon", instead it was"contain the damage".