I totally agree that this was a HUGE mistake!  I dont have the time or the interest to page through the posts and figure out whats going on in my neighborhood amongst a thousand posts.  When the neighborhoods are trying to hold folks' attention and gain their involvement in it, they've just done the complete opposite.

 If they insist on having a national type message board then please please please... have separate forums that we can sign into or browse. 

 For instance, Im from Delaware.  If each state on here had their own forum, I'd go to the Delaware forum and look for my neighborhood and then browse the posts there. 

Until this is resolved, you just lost my attention and any thoughts of me leaving another message. 

Rebecca Saxton

Hi Neighborhood Link!

You are doing a great job! It will take a while to get the bugs out, but looks great to me. Not sure how this respectOmeter works. It sure does not look like it is very accurate. Is this done by a human actually looking at the post or is the technology got to the level that computers can judge the post on this website? Some of the post do not look acceptable but who am I.

Thank you!

Well, it's about time a POLL should be held.

From what I have observed so far, there is an overwhelming number of people disliking the new format.  I don't know what someone was talking about "waiting for the bugs to be fixed".  It's either going back to the previous format (with some simple fixes like: no anonymous postings, add ratings, add a button to report inappropriate posts) OR staying with the new format and risk losing customers. 

The fact is, the "join discussion" idea was a flaw to begin with.  It's just impossible to force everyone to read topics & discusssions that's not even their concerns from another neighborhood, another apartment complex, another condominium complex, another City, another State, take all of these and multiply by 100 or whatever you think that could account for the neighborhoods and multiply by the number of States.  Get the idea?  This idea is probably good for a FISHING FORUM where everyone shares the same interests like fishing techniques, but even then, they have no interest reading a post from Alaska for salmon fishing when they just want to talk about flounders wade fishing in Freeport Texas, or sharks surf fishing in Tampa Florida.

Furthermore, anonymous posting could have advantages and should be allowed with some kind of minor changes.  Here is a good example:  A local resident finds out that a sex-offender just moved in next door.  She posts anonymously on her respected neighborhood to warn other residents.  If she'd posted using her username that everybody knew who she is and where she lives, she might as well declares her own death sentence.....

Well, I'm assuming people are frustrated right now, same as my feeling; but if the new format won't change, then Neighborhood Link would loose a lot of people, me included.  I'm sure y'all have already seen the big decreases in the number of topics, discussions and hits.

I'll check back in another one or two weeks.

Just wanted to post another quick update.

Folks with the newer version of Internet Explorer (IE7) were having trouble with the "quote this post" link when replying.  That is now fixed.

Topics are now sorted by last reply time, so you shouldn't have to go digging for an older but still active topic.

We've made some speed improvements and pages are loading about twice as fast as they were before.  That's not saying a whole lot - much more work to be done still.  We have some new hardware on the way which should help a lot.

The editor now does smileys.  Wasn't a high priority but it was easy so went ahead and put 'em up.

If you're browsing discussions in a neighborhood there should now be a link on the left side to go back to your neighborhood's home page.  We'll be adding more stuff to that blue space on the left to help you get navigate from discussions back to other areas of the site.

We're working on an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page to help explain the new features in the discussion area, like the "respect-o-meter" and posting in just your neighborhood versus wider areas.

Thanks again to all for the feedback; keep it coming and don't give up on us yet!  As of this month we now have over 36,000 neighborhoods and of course it's hard to make things "just right" for everyone.  Still, I think we can make this work a lot better for those of you who don't want to talk to anyone outside of your own neighborhood, while still allowing groups of neighborhoods, council districts, small towns, etc to communicate and organize just like individual neighborhoods.

We'll continue to work on the whole "anonymous posting" issue; if anyone has specific suggestions on how to make sure that legitimate criticism, real sex offender notices, etc stay up while people posting false accusations, pretending to be other users, etc aren't allowed to make the site unpleasant for everyone, please post them!

Thanks again -

                       -Robert.-