I think that is rather 'below the belt'.

If you really believe that the people that have contributed so vociferously to this thread, are really an unrepresentative vocal minority, and the rest are blissfully contented with everything, then I and others are clearly wasting our time.

You must surely know that not all people are stupid enough to get involved, spend their valuable time beating their heads against the wall, raise their heads above the parapet to get them shot off, and give freely of their time and energy testing and reporting.

However, you'd think that if there were many that disagreed with what us mouthy, luddite complainers are banging on about, at least a few of them would have popped up to say so.

Yes, I accept this, and of course you have every right to make changes that benefit you rather than us.

We don't pay for membership of the forum, so we have no inalienable right to any particular feature-set.

However, presumably you also benefit, directly and indirectly, from the community here. It will all be a lot friendlier if the community doesn't feel stomped all over.

I wouldn't go quite as far as to say this.

It wouldn't be the first IT development that was run by well-intentioned people who fail, for a variety of reasons, and in a variety of ways, to establish requirements, design well, test thoroughly and implement in a way that is sensitive to an established user base.

Usually such projects are badly managed, and/or driven by unrealistic cost and time limits. I would be surprised if this is an exception.

There is that. Personally I commend the efforts of the developers that do the fixing, but not the inadequately managed circumstances that led to the fixes being necessary.

I've been in the software business for 20 years now, and I haven't yet worked on, or with, a team where the developers are not doing their very best in the circumstances.

I would cite the following as key determinants of the way this has all gone:

- Haphazard testing. Alarm bells should have rung when only four beta testers signed up.

- A 'Blame the Users' culture. Evidence of this is littered all over this thread, from as early on as when we were being blamed for not falling over ourselves in wanting to be testers.

- One exceptionally bad design decision, namely the requirement for the server to download all the images from their respective hosts, before emitting the page, in order to calculate the aspect ratio to be maintained when resizing - and then making the browser download them all again and resize them.

Apart from this, there's been a lot of firefighting needed, and as you say, it is not yet as full-featured as the old one was.

Apart from a few things, like the competition gallery format, the ability to see recent posts, and the fact that I can now have a funky avatar, I don't yet see many clear benefits.

I've raised a report on this, linking back to these two comments.

Changing the subject, is anyone else finding the search function almost impossible to use?

I tried to find one of the recent threads on "Back focus", so I used those keywords, and got many pages of apparently irrelevant material.

Whereas, typing "back focus siteentaxuser.co.uk/forum" into Google instantly returns a whole page of relevant threads.

There's no longer a 'show as threads/posts' option, and sorting in descending order of relevance (the default) doesn't seem to help.

Also, it breaks if you click on 'Last' to see how many pages of results are returned.

How did you do this, John? I searched on those keywords, and got many pages returned, and finding the relevant ones was exceedingly difficult (I gave up without success).

Wowwwwww!!!! That is a fantastic tip - I never knew that.

I just checked, and not only does it retain the zoom, it retains the position of the frame too.

So you see the same part of the frame as you turn the front dial.

That is such a nice touch.

Possibly, or maybe one or two of mine. It's hard to say unless references are given to specific things said that someone feels insulted by.

I don't think anyone here is actually intending to be insulting. I think there's a difference between comments where people's frustration is clearly evident, and personal insults.

There's lots of the former on this thread, for good reason IMO, but nothing personal that I can see.

I do find one thing faintly insulting, and it is this:

This forum consists of many people that are very technology-aware. It has a rich concentration of lots of people that are not in the least afraid of computers, electronics, the internet, and web applications, and are very experienced in all aspects of their use, including trouble-shooting when they don't work properly.

Hardly anyone like that is change-averse in principle.

Therefore to accuse us of making complaints about the new forum software primarily because it's not like the old one is quite extraordinary, and betrays what I see as an extraordinary lack of understanding.

For an organisation with as much experience of software development and running other forums as claimed, to lack understanding in this way does seem culpable to me, and in that context, insulting, as I say.

Not that forum!!!

I was thinking of the guy that (I presume) invented the term 'measurebation' (although I don't know if the 'measurbation' that Ken Rockwell refers to predates the 'e' version). It's just a marvellous word that sums up the activity perfectly.

The individual I'm thinking of presents an inimitable combination of bias, plagiarism and bad science that produces blood-pressure raising effects quite unlike anything I've seen.

I don't read the DPR forums, so I don't know if he has any peers.

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Edit: actually, on reflection, 'measurbation' would seem to be an etymologically preferred spelling.

I'm sorry, I really don't.

What insults are you referring to?