Can the images pinch to zoom again? Tapping on them to open a new page is annoying when done repeatedly. The old site allowed pinch to zoom -- very handy. But you guys have locked the zoom level to 1 or device width or whatever. Can you make that device width zoom level the default rather than the limit? Thanks.

Among all the compliant and to a certain extent justifiable criticism, I would like to extend some words of thanks to airkas1 and Revelation for the efforts they have made to assist those with questions.

It is also interesting to see the contrast in the reactions to the changes. On the one hand you have those who spit the dummy and on the other those who are willing to make an effort to learn how to use the new site.

I can think of one member in particular, an older on compared to many of us, who you might think would give up. Yet he has shown a spirit of enquiry, tried things out, clicking here and clicking there, asking for help and learned things along the way. In contrast younger members are the ones most loudly complaining.

In an aviation forum I would have expected that spirit of enquiry and adventure to be more commonplace but for the most part people appear not to like change - any change despite it being so necessary. The old site may have "looked nice" but in many ways it simply didn't work, with constant error messages and outages.

Yes there are problems with the present site (and clearly it was launched before it was ready) but those issues are being addressed. They might even be solved quicker if the same points weren't raised again and again without posters having not read previous replies.

Hi there, yes we are aware of this issue and a fix is being worked on. It doesn't happen to every image just certain ones but expect a fix soon as it is a priority.

Thanks and regards

Paul

PanAm_DC10 wrote:

Hi there, yes we are aware of this issue and a fix is being worked on. It doesn't happen to every image just certain ones but expect a fix soon as it is a priority.

Thanks and regards

Paul

thank you Paul for your answer. No doubt there is much work ahead.
Cheers

Can you please sort the damn log-in issue. This is becoming infuriating to have to re log-in every time you leave the site for more than a few minutes. The 'remember me' button is only there for decorative purposes as it doesn't actually do what it says on the tin.

RobK wrote:

Can you please sort the damn log-in issue. This is becoming infuriating to have to re log-in every time you leave the site for more than a few minutes. The 'remember me' button is only there for decorative purposes as it doesn't actually do what it says on the tin.

Word...

To add insult to injury, once I've logged back in I'm back at the main page instead of where I left off.

Hello again

The log in issue is being worked on as I write this and we hop for a fx to be rolled out shortly, sorry for the inconenience.

Thanks and regards

Paul

Laddie wrote:

2. I cannot change the default avatar. Clicking the "Change avatar" does not do anything.[/quote'

DIRECTFLT wrote:

I can't change my "Death's Head' Avatar. .

The "change avatar" isn't enabled, but assuming you haven't been able to do it yet, there's another way (you have to be logged in).

Go to the avatar (the wretched skull) at the top right hand corner of the page and click on it to get the drop down menu. Click on "Settings."

Immediately you should see "Profile Photo" (the avatar) and you can choose a file (picture) to have there. Now comes the tricky bit - it has to be the right size. Originally, I tried to use a bigger version of my anchor but it was rejected"as "too big." So I tried to use a smaller version of the exact same image and it was rejected as "too small." Hmmm?

Third time lucky, I got the right size. Now you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "save."

At least, that's what I did - with the help of a couple of other member and a moderator.

mariner

echoing a ton of others, readability of the new site is pretty awful. i honestly get annoyed at the site now, and don't visit as much as i did in order to avoid the frustration of simply viewing the new UI (there isn't necessarily any further interaction).

the orange type on white background leads to eyestrain. light type on darker backgrounds is the way to go; this even saves energy (especially relevant on mobile devices).

below all the headers, only five thread topics are visible at 1680x1050. previously, i could see upwards of 10-15, increasing the likelihood that one of the topics was of interest to me. i'd obviously spend more time on the site because of that, and ad companies like that. i've noticed lately that i'll load the civil aviation forum, see five uninteresting topics, and then move on to a different site. that's just my experience.

i thought a benefit of the new site is that it would do a better job of keeping users logged in, but that's certainly not the case.

love the content here and have nothing but respect for the vast majority of users and mods, but i feel like the 'upgrade' was anything but. i'd switch back to the old site in a heartbeat.

ETA: now i'm consistently getting NRA "concealed carry is a right" banner ads. i have do not track enabled, and have even loaded the site in private mode with a UK VPN - same ads. as someone affected by gun violence, i'd rather not be bombarded by fear mongering like that. i know it's the adserver's decision, but man that's annoying.

Revelation wrote:

Re: going back to old look and feel:Try the steps in viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1335851 ...

This should also help with:

scbriml wrote:

On my laptop, when I go to one of the forum, I can't even see a single thread without having to scroll down the page.

Theseus wrote:

Similar experience here. On most screen, no information appears before I start to scroll down.

rnav2dlrey wrote:

echoing a ton of others, readability of the new site is pretty awful. i

Try this: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1335851

speedbored wrote:

Revelation wrote:

Re: going back to old look and feel:Try the steps in viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1335851 ...

This should also help with:

scbriml wrote:

On my laptop, when I go to one of the forum, I can't even see a single thread without having to scroll down the page.

Theseus wrote:

Similar experience here. On most screen, no information appears before I start to scroll down.

rnav2dlrey wrote:

echoing a ton of others, readability of the new site is pretty awful. i

Try this: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1335851

Seriously, everyone - if you're interested in getting the forums back to the usability they once had, try speedbored's Chrome plug-in for this site. It makes it much more user-friendly.

Can someone tell me how the new viewcounts work? Does a view count when someone opens the medium sized photo or large sized? When it`s only the large size viewcounts will probably be much less than before the upgrade of the site because when you are not logged in (and I think most viewers are not members) the photos are shown in mediumsize and views will not count. Top 5 also shows only medium size for non-members (it was large size before). And for the Facebook views it`s the same issue.

Greets

EA CO AS wrote:

Seriously, everyone - if you're interested in getting the forums back to the usability they once had, try speedbored's Chrome plug-in for this site. It makes it much more user-friendly.

Unfortunately, not everyone uses Chrome (Firefox, Opera) and it's not available for IE

Can we just go back to the old design please? This new site is terrible in every aspect!

kulverstukas wrote:

EA CO AS wrote:

Seriously, everyone - if you're interested in getting the forums back to the usability they once had, try speedbored's Chrome plug-in for this site. It makes it much more user-friendly.

Unfortunately, not everyone uses Chrome (Firefox, Opera) and it's not available for IE

Let's be clear: The plugin does work on Firefox and Opera as well as Chrome and Safari:

https://userstyles.org/ says:

The easiest way to use user styles is to use Stylish for Firefox, Stylish for Chrome, Stylish for Safari, or Stylish for Opera. It's all free, by the way.

The 'odd man out' is Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but as my tech support team at work keeps telling me, even Microsoft isn't using IE any more.

Revelation wrote:

The 'odd man out' is Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but as my tech support team at work keeps telling me, even Microsoft isn't using IE any more.

I don't give a f**k about MS, but majority ( > 50% ) of people still use IE (or Edge which doesn't support plugins in non-techpreview version yet).

Also to report another bug, I get logged out of main site every time I finish session, but stay logged in at forums. Weird.

UPD: Site hangs up at me when I try to choose airline at upload page - both from drop down or by entering first letter(s).
UPD2: Seems it keeps trying to resolve DB search (I put "a" in the field and get dropdown with airline names with quantity of photos in DB as comment and some "true" remark) but get killed by timeout and reverts back to unfilled field. It's also unable to scroll dropdown even if it's appears.
UPD3: Both problems are at IE11. At Firefox it works (albeit bit slow).

kulverstukas wrote:

Revelation wrote:

The 'odd man out' is Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but as my tech support team at work keeps telling me, even Microsoft isn't using IE any more.

I don't give a f**k about MS, but majority ( > 50% ) of people still use IE (or Edge which doesn't support plugins in non-techpreview version yet).

Not really:
http://gs.statcounter.com/
http://www.netmarketshare.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

kulverstukas wrote:

I don't give a f**k about MS, but majority ( > 50% ) of people still use IE (or Edge which doesn't support plugins in non-techpreview version yet).

It's debatable. Plenty of data at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_sha ... ary_tables ... If you focus on the desktop IE is still strong (but arguably not >50%, more or less right at 50% by one metric) but not as strong as it used to be and is of course not a factor in mobile.

Anyone still using IE by choice in this day and age is simply behind the times and probably not comfortable with installing a plug-in anyway.

Boys I am afraid you just Digg.com-ed your selfs. There is a whole history of UX/UI changes destroying web communities.

Have you compared your stats (posts/views) for before and after the change? Feels like both of those things are down across the board.

mariner wrote:

Laddie wrote:

2. I cannot change the default avatar. Clicking the "Change avatar" does not do anything.[/quote'

DIRECTFLT wrote:

I can't change my "Death's Head' Avatar. .

The "change avatar" isn't enabled, but assuming you haven't been able to do it yet, there's another way (you have to be logged in).

Go to the avatar (the wretched skull) at the top right hand corner of the page and click on it to get the drop down menu. Click on "Settings."

Immediately you should see "Profile Photo" (the avatar) and you can choose a file (picture) to have there. Now comes the tricky bit - it has to be the right size. Originally, I tried to use a bigger version of my anchor but it was rejected"as "too big." So I tried to use a smaller version of the exact same image and it was rejected as "too small." Hmmm?

Third time lucky, I got the right size. Now you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "save."

At least, that's what I did - with the help of a couple of other member and a moderator.

mariner

Hopefully we will be able to soon only be able to quote a specific line or lines from another poster instead of repeating the entire post including what they quoted. That is certainly contributing to the never ending length of threads. But yes, I am also on the north side of 60, and a a.net member since 1999, after a couple years of being a lurker. After using a very capable completely free image editor program called irfanview (google it-it is great and has been around for over 15 years), I was able to adjust the sizing of my chosen avatar to one that the new a.net was finally happy to accept and 'Save'.

LSZH34 wrote:

Can we just go back to the old design please? This new site is terrible in every aspect!

No it isn't, and the site won't improve if these are the kinds of replies admin gets.

There are a lot of cosmetic changes that need to be made, and there are plenty of bugs that need fixing, many of which are being worked on. But the old site had plenty of bugs too, folks just found workarounds, or learned to live with them (or gave up hope that they would ever be fixed).

The new site is not terrible in every respect. For one, I can actually read the forums on my iPhone, which I had basically given up on with the old site. You don't have to lock a thread when it gets to 200 posts because it's "too long" any more. Threads can be moved to different forums without them disappearing without a trace half the time. The site actually remembers my last read message in a thread when I switch between computers and my iPad or iPhone. The old site couldn't do that, so I'd never know if a thread actually had new replies or if they were just new since the last time I used that computer.

The new forums also correctly track which threads you've read and which ones you haven't. With the old site, if I clicked an unread thread, EVERY thread older than that would be marked read, whether I'd ever opened it or not. Now, it only does so if I actually read a thread, or if I mark the whole board as read.

I could go on, but I'm sure people will ignore it and just go back to whining about the font colors.

Revelation wrote:

Anyone still using IE by choice in this day and age is simply behind the times and probably not comfortable with installing a plug-in anyway.

Okay, I'm old and rusty. I just have much more things to do in my life than learn any new fancy whistle IT people think will be good for me. If some tool makes job done - I don't need "upgrade" on it. If I can hammering a nail with my old hammer, I don't need this new electronic device with GPS positioning, updates upload through Wi-Fi and ability to check in every hammering place and put every nail in instagram for everybody likes them...

Unfortunately, nail manufacturers now thinks only about their new nail compatibility with this GPS-Wi-Fi-Instagram-capable devices. This new shiny nail's inability to bind boards together is not at their priority bug-fix list and sometimes not even at bug-fix list at all...

PanAm_DC10 wrote:

Hello again

The log in issue is being worked on as I write this and we hop for a fx to be rolled out shortly, sorry for the inconenience.

Thanks and regards

Paul

OK.

One other thing that I don't know if it's been mentioned already or not : when clicking links they should open in a new tab but they don't, they open in the same tab. This is a 2 second fix in the phpbb admin panel.

kulverstukas wrote:

If some tool makes job done - I don't need "upgrade" on it. If I can hammering a nail with my old hammer, I don't need this new electronic device with GPS positioning, updates upload through Wi-Fi and ability to check in every hammering place and put every nail in instagram for everybody likes them...

Yet your ol' hammer can't get termites into it from all over the flippin' world in fractions of a second.

I really like my hammer with its fiberglass handle. Stronger, lighter, won't crack, waterproof, termite proof and so on.

Revelation wrote:

I really like my hammer with its fiberglass handle. Stronger, lighter, won't crack, waterproof, termite proof and so on.

I have hammers with stainless steel head and fiberglass handle since early 2000th... Unfortunately for marketing people it still looks like new and works well. So they stop selling old plain nails to me

Just a quick question to the moderators what is the ETA on the Forum illegibility / contrast / color scheme issues ?

It was promised to be implemented this week and nothing so far.

BTW I do appreciate the other minor issues that have been resolved....

The "featured photographer" is not updated on the main page. Would be nice to switch from time to time

mariner wrote:

Laddie wrote:

2. I cannot change the default avatar. Clicking the "Change avatar" does not do anything.[/quote'

DIRECTFLT wrote:

I can't change my "Death's Head' Avatar. .

The "change avatar" isn't enabled, but assuming you haven't been able to do it yet, there's another way (you have to be logged in).

Go to the avatar (the wretched skull) at the top right hand corner of the page and click on it to get the drop down menu. Click on "Settings."

Immediately you should see "Profile Photo" (the avatar) and you can choose a file (picture) to have there. Now comes the tricky bit - it has to be the right size. Originally, I tried to use a bigger version of my anchor but it was rejected"as "too big." So I tried to use a smaller version of the exact same image and it was rejected as "too small." Hmmm?

Third time lucky, I got the right size. Now you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "save."

At least, that's what I did - with the help of a couple of other member and a moderator.

mariner

So, I did log in. I did click on the death's head skull at the top right hand corner of the page, but, there was no drop down menu. And there was no "Settings" to click....

What dropped down were only these options to click on:
Change Avatar
Change Password
Control Panel
Logout

airkas1 wrote:

DIRECTFLT wrote:

[...]

Please see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1336319

Thanks, I did go to that link, but alas, when I click on the Death's Head Icon, I simply do not the the drop down with:

My Profile
Photo Corner
Crew Corner
Settings
Logout

Ill keep it plain and simple.
Bring back the old site thank you .

DIRECTFLT wrote:

So, I did log in. I did click on the death's head skull at the top right hand corner of the page, but, there was no drop down menu. And there was no "Settings" to click....

What dropped down were only these options to click on:
Change Avatar
Change Password
Control Panel
Logout

The confusion may be that there are two avatars and two bells at the top right hand corner, one on the page you;re on and one in the blue tool bar. The lower one says "Welcome xxxx" beside it and it goes away if you scroll down the page. Clicking on that will show"control panel" etc., which doesn't help for this exercise.

There is an avatar above that - always there, at very top right hand corner in the blue tool bar which says "Photos - Forums - Airliners - Top 100 - About - and, to the right of that, a bell and an avatar. Clicking on that should give you the drop down list shown in the post above.

mariner

Okay, my problem was in the sizing of the page. I don't like to use glasses with my "older" eyes, and so, having the page magnified a bit, well that made the top part of the page disappear and not be visible. In my current setup, reducing the image to 67% now gives me the icons that were mentioned.... Usually, I reduce the page to 80% and have no issues seeing the entire page....

kanban wrote:

I'm struggling to find my way around the site and am continually frustrated by a few things
1) the small gray type
2) the even lighter font for links..
3) I used to be able to save a draft while I gathered citations or lines, however in the new process stuff gets lost.

Maybe the font size and grays are OK for younger viewers but some of us old farts really have trouble reading them. I did find where I could influence the size when posting.. but not in reading

I am using a 15.6" laptop and Firefox and find that increasing the zoom level in the Firefox settings to 120% or 133% makes the text much more readable and darker. Still not as good as the old site but much easier to read than at the 100% setting. Another advantage is that it eliminates the blank spaces along the sides of the text area which are normally filled with ads. Now with those areas beyond the visible window, the only ad I see is the single banner ad at the top of the page. Firefox also seems to remember that setting for each site so I don't have to change it each time I log in.

One other comment is that it's unfortunate the site permits "signatures". I've noted that many members now have signatures (the lines of text below the horizontal line below their forum posts) with often several lines of text. I don't know what purpose that serves except to require even more scrolling which is a problem with the new site even without the signatures.

hOMSaR wrote:

LSZH34 wrote:

Can we just go back to the old design please? This new site is terrible in every aspect!

No it isn't, and the site won't improve if these are the kinds of replies admin gets.

There are a lot of cosmetic changes that need to be made, and there are plenty of bugs that need fixing, many of which are being worked on. But the old site had plenty of bugs too, folks just found workarounds, or learned to live with them (or gave up hope that they would ever be fixed).

The new site is not terrible in every respect. For one, I can actually read the forums on my iPhone, which I had basically given up on with the old site. You don't have to lock a thread when it gets to 200 posts because it's "too long" any more. Threads can be moved to different forums without them disappearing without a trace half the time. The site actually remembers my last read message in a thread when I switch between computers and my iPad or iPhone. The old site couldn't do that, so I'd never know if a thread actually had new replies or if they were just new since the last time I used that computer.

The new forums also correctly track which threads you've read and which ones you haven't. With the old site, if I clicked an unread thread, EVERY thread older than that would be marked read, whether I'd ever opened it or not. Now, it only does so if I actually read a thread, or if I mark the whole board as read.

I could go on, but I'm sure people will ignore it and just go back to whining about the font colors.

Fully agree. The old site was horrible in many aspects, we just were used to it. There are a lot of cosmetic issues to be fixed (and especially the automatic logout) with the new site, but in the end it is necessary to have a long term future that it is migrated to a newer platform. The old site was like a 70's VW Beetle held together with gaffer tape. We loved it, but it was about to fail its MOT and being pulled off the road.

airzona11 wrote:

Used to love coming to this site multiple times a day for 15+ years, however the new interface it horrible. Maybe a few times a week ill come here but the experience sucks.

Pop up overlays and banners make the flow horrible. The color scheme feels like you used some free website creator and spent 5 minutes.

GO BACK TO THE OLD INTERFACE

You have rose tinted glasses. The old forum was an absolute nightmare with ads. Popup adverts where you more your mouse over an ad and suddenly the whole screen was filled with it. Redirects to other pages. Redirects on iOS to the app store to purchase games (at one point in time 80% of the access to airliners.net resulted in a redirect forcing me to stop using it on my iPad). The old airliners.net forced me to install ad-blockers. I still have an ad-blocker installed and the flow is super smooth.

Viscount724 wrote:

I am using a 15.6" laptop and Firefox and find that increasing the zoom level in the Firefox settings to 120% or 133% makes the text much more readable and darker. Still not as good as the old site but much easier to read than at the 100% setting. Another advantage is that it eliminates the blank spaces along the sides of the text area which are normally filled with ads. Now with those areas beyond the visible window, the only ad I see is the single banner ad at the top of the page. Firefox also seems to remember that setting for each site so I don't have to change it each time I log in.

One other comment is that it's unfortunate the site permits "signatures". I've noted that many members now have signatures (the lines of text below the horizontal line below their forum posts) with often several lines of text. I don't know what purpose that serves except to require even more scrolling which is a problem with the new site even without the signatures.

Signatures are absolutely no problem at all... You simply turn them "Off" from displaying.

Log In, Go To FORUMS, Select the "Welcome, Your User Name Area" in the upper right hand area of the page, then:
Choose User Control Panel/Board Preferences/Edit Display Options/Display Signature - Select "No" - Then Scroll to the bottom of the Page and Press "Submit", and you're done !

As for the lighter background.... I wish.... that the "Quotes" had the lighter background, and that the text of my post had the darker background.

AngMoh wrote:

You have rose tinted glasses. The old forum was an absolute nightmare with ads. Popup adverts where you more your mouse over an ad and suddenly the whole screen was filled with it. Redirects to other pages. Redirects on iOS to the app store to purchase games (at one point in time 80% of the access to airliners.net resulted in a redirect forcing me to stop using it on my iPad). The old airliners.net forced me to install ad-blockers. I still have an ad-blocker installed and the flow is super smooth.

I never experienced this with the old site, but maybe because I considered ad-blockers one of the most important tools in the web survival kit since the first day they were available. It does not seem that the new website is more survivable without them unfortunately.

jumbojim747 wrote:

Ill keep it plain and simple.
Bring back the old site thank you .

I'll keep it plain and simple.

The old site ain't coming back. We have a new site, it's far from perfect just now, but it will get better. Embrace it and move on.

Forgive me if this has been done to death by other contrbutors, but can we get the photo description alongside the photo so we can still see the photo while reading it? I can see that the scroll down helps with advertising and to play back what I found myself saying to my parents many years ago "Yes, I do realise that someone has to pay for all this", but this aspect has severely hampered the user-friendliness of the old site.

Also, "view my posts" is not updating properly and I miss the stars on the old (and much densers) forum message lists which guided me more easily to the topics I was interested in.

Hi there,

did you accidentally roll back an upgrade that has been implemented before?
It is not possible to sort an album by "date added", only by "views" and "likes". If I remember correctly, you have fixed this before (I checked last weekend, because it was one of the things that I reported here in an earlier post and I really think it was possible to sort by the date the picture was added to the album).

hOMSaR wrote:

The new site is not terrible in every respect. For one, I can actually read the forums on my iPhone, which I had basically given up on with the old site. You don't have to lock a thread when it gets to 200 posts because it's "too long" any more. Threads can be moved to different forums without them disappearing without a trace half the time. The site actually remembers my last read message in a thread when I switch between computers and my iPad or iPhone. The old site couldn't do that, so I'd never know if a thread actually had new replies or if they were just new since the last time I used that computer.

The new forums also correctly track which threads you've read and which ones you haven't. With the old site, if I clicked an unread thread, EVERY thread older than that would be marked read, whether I'd ever opened it or not. Now, it only does so if I actually read a thread, or if I mark the whole board as read.

Not to mention the annoying bug in the old forum that "show next 25 replies" skipped two entries. I assume this was a classical off-by-one error someone broke even more by fixing it in the wrong direction.

BTW, I love your signature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motor_Bus

I can't stay signed in for the life of me, even when checking "Remember Me".

This was an issue on the old site, but there was at least some time before an auto-logout.

Oh happy happy joy joy! Just lost an entire post because when I pressed send I got redirected to the login screen. And instead of letting me post the reply after logging in for the umpteenth time, I was redirected to the homepage and my entire post was gone.

Fantastic! I refuse to believe it takes nearly two weeks to resolve an issue as simple as members not staying logged in.

Fix it already!

OK, I am trying to be fair, and not dislike something simply because it is new and unfamiliar. Although the previous version of a.net wasn't a tend setter, I find this "upgrade" to be much harder to navigate and find topics that I am interested in. There is no "star" feature marking threads that I have already commented within. There are far fewer thread titles per page.

Just guessing, but I am willing to bet with good odds that traffic on the site is down appreciably. Just not a friendly place...

Dare I say the name, but what is wrong with the board model used by FlyerTalk. That platform is also used by pprune.org as well.