Hi,
I'm the guy you have called an old man :) on the forums when you said "Maybe it's just a major generation gap"
Well I'm not old, at least I don’t think I am
I believe that most people are frustrated that they can’t find anything. And these are valid issues. What use is a forum if you can’t find data on it?
I will also agree that for some they don’t like change.
I don’t believe I fit into that category. I'm all for a nice new sleek interface, I believe it has great potential BUT they have committed the cardinal sin of forums, they made it unusable. If you are going to make changes so drastic then fine but they should be implemented in phases. Just imagine what would happen if tomorrow your country decided everyone was to drive on the other side of the road. It would cause uproar amongst the people, 70% of them would not know which side to drive on every time the turn a corner...do I get in the left or the right.
Now add to that if at the same day they change the side of the road to drive on they change the color of the traffic lights so red was go and green was slow then yellow would be stop. Combine all this together and you get mayhem
This is what has happened to the forums.
This is why people are angry just like the population of your country would be angry.
Yes I agree over time people will get used to it, and yes Symantec will slowly make changes to make it more users friendly.
I also believe that if I implemented change like this to the 100,000 users within my company I would be fired because no one would find their data.
What they should have done is if they want to make a complete switch over either do it in phases OR go BETA on the site and get the feedback from the community to fix the issues before a go live.
I still think that this should be put back into BETA phase and the old environment returned until they can get the bugs out of it.
There is little consistancy in the filter menues some time you can see your product other times you cant.
When you search you get items belonging to completly different product
Tracking items is a pain in the butt.. you have to leave the forum to track a forum item instead of just placing it in a feed on the right side of the window or even if you could meke them all RSS so you can add it to your own RSS app to track
The large font is way too big it is wasting space that should be used to display the full subject line
The inability to see the number of views and the number of new responces is really bad.
It needs major work and all this work should have been done offline not in a live environment.
It is a bit like selling a backup software to backup your data and then telling the customer we are still working on the restore part so for now you cant restore..