I agree it is very similar to what Etsy did and when Etsy changed their forum all it did was divide the ability for the community to reach the company and it created a huge separation within the spirit of community of sellers. The ability to be able to chat among each other was over - or at least it was very different. The spirit was killed and it became very "unfriendly."
Why something so big like this without first telling everyone? A email would have been nice but again these types of things is what annoys me most about Z - sharing little and big things like this to me is what keeps everyone together as a team. When changes are just made and you just happen to stumble upon them all it does is make you feel out of the loop - like an outsider!! Not to mention the amount of valuable time taken away to try and figure out how to make things work or where the heck where to find things. At first I thought the forum was just down.....
I agree with Saints_Aplenty. The old forum was pretty straight forward. It's simplicity was the beautiful thing about it. I like things that save me time. I want to spend most of my time at zazzle, designing. This new Forum seems quite convoluted and very time consuming. So much jumping around from here to there and so many choices: heroes, kudos, macros, subscribe or not subscribe, on and on. It gives me a headache! As others have said, we will adapt. But I hope to see in time how all these additional steps and choices we have to make now is more helpful and meaningful to designers than the old way. I actually am not opposed to changes but I want those changes to simplify my life not make it more complicated. And yes, time, patience and experimenting will take care of SOME of that but I doubt enough to make it seem a better way (to me) than the old. Maybe I am wrong, but sometimes simpler IS better.
Yes, we will adapt. These are growing pains that are especially difficult given that we skipped several generations of community technology. Same thing would happen if you jumped from a black-and-white TV up to modern day 4K tv with Roku, Chromecast, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, and all that. You'd turn the TV on and say What's all this? I just want to watch the news! Same sort of thing is happening here, and I believe that in a few weeks everyone will be much more comfortable with this new site and just ignore the features like macros that they have no interest in using.
I have a response on Page 2 of this conversation about why users cannot reply inline to comments, and also why users cannot add kudos to comments. Please review that post when you have the opportunity.
Given that we will not be returning to the old forums I will be closing the comments here.
