Ten minutes ago I went to TT to check the KTM forum. I get a flashing banner that says "You have 1 NEW message". Like an idiot, I click on it because my brain is programmed to look in the REAL PM area... I get a freakin' pop-up for a free Walmart gift card I done over there. Yeah, I was stupid for not realizing I was clicking on a banner ad... but IMO, that place has sunk to historic lows by blitzing users with a buggy, sometimes inoperable interface, as well as a gauntlet of annoying advertising. The return on my investment of time at that place is next to NIL. Many (if not most) posts are cut and pasted from here or KTM talk. What are the owners thinking??? I'm done.
Perfectly good interface before, not great but pretty common and usable. Now, not so much. Did they make it so you could use the old format?
I don't care about the interface as much as I'm pissed about the incessant, annoying, ads that plunge the entire site into some sort of bizarre world I've never seen in any other forum I've visited in 10+ years of visiting forums. They have achieved absolute "maximus annoyus" in Roman terms. They can "kissius me assius".
The new TT format is so slow I can't get a page to load in under two minutes on my iPhone over wireless DSL. And it is because of all the advertisements taking so long to load. It used to take only a few seconds.
I don't mind it at all. To me, it's simple. I go to the PNW section. I see a topic that interests me and I click on it. If I feel compelled, I post. I don't even notice the ads anymore after they took out that underline advertising BS. I will say that it isn't that friendly when posting pictures and my immediate e-mail notifications are kind of screwy now...sometimes I get daily subscriptions to threads I've posted to and sometimes I get immediate e-mails to threads I've posted to. The bottom line is TT PNW section is a great place to meet folks for rides and a good way to get involved with land issues. In fact, most of my riding buddies came from there and it's how I found out about new/different riding areas! So for me, it serves it's purpose. I also took advantage of their new forum member 10% discount from their store as they matched a lower price another online store advertised.
Luckily, I belong to a local forum where I can meet people to ride with. In fact, recently we have had a rather large influx of local TT people who got fed up with that site and joined SDAR.
The site, at least in the Husky and yammy pages seems to have a little less daily updates than under the old format. I find the town square section a hatred page where people bash Obama and the government constantly. The only political aspect that should be put forward in these pages is around land use/closures etc. IMHO
The only forum areas I tended to visit regularly were Husky, suspension, advanced technical (plenty of interesting stuff in there), general dirtbike and exotics (because I'm a sucker for pictures of rare bikes). Traffic does seem to have slowed of late, especially in the Husky forums. It's a shame. A similar thing recently happened to a music-maker's forum I used to hit: 1) There was a revamp which was handled badly. The site was really buggy and badly laid out and a lot of regulars drifted away to other forums. 2) The new site was swamped with ads. Nothing that Firefox with the Adblock and Flashblock plugins couldn't handle, but maddenly irritating for Internet Explorer users and a waste of screen real-estate for the rest of us. 3) The moderators took their eyes off the ball for a while and the site got taken over by a few boorish, right-wing know-it-alls. They have the place to themselves now. A friend started his own forum and a lot of us hang there now. I hope TT gets it's act together.
The tt change is the same as everything else you see changing (including motorcycles), it is a change for the better ... lol ... It is a needed change for the future .. lol ... One thing is for sure: Coffee I bet, is talking all this in
I suppose I am. Yes I would have done a few things differently, and it is interesting to see how things are progressing. Several of my thoughts have been confirmed by all these events.
Not sure I agree. To me, the new site seems slower and harder to use and more annoying. I'm sure it makes them more money somehow, but I just don't have the patience to deal with it so i rarely visit these days. ktmtalk has stayed very much the same for a long time, and seems to be busier.
I used to visit TT several times a day, now it has become hard to use and I only really visit the northwest forum and avoid the rest. Cafe husky is much more user friendly and I come here several times a day now.
Lots of people are creatures of habit and like things the same. Change is scary to a lot of people. Check the 2011 TC450 thread
I hate the new site...cant find a thing....if i gave it a chance i prolly could but not worth the effort
That is just plain CRAZY! I've tasted others, but just changing favorites like that is not natural...
that's part of it, but now TT takes more clicks, and more waiting than it used to. i can adapt to change for the better, but change for the worse annoys me.
