(06 May 2020, 7:13 pm)Malarkey wrote I really like the new look of the forum having seen it evolve from it's early days when I first joined back in 2012, this forum has come a long way since then through a continuous background work done by Dan, Adrian and Liam to name a few and those who have shared content over the years, the forum wouldn't be what it is today without this joint effort.
Hopefully with this refresh this will bring back old forum members who have came and gone over the years along with welcoming new members from all across the country over the months ahead so that the sub forums for other local areas become more active with updates for us up here in the North East to keep up to date. Maybe this could be a focal point for a future expansion of the forum in the future.
The only thing missing for me from the new layout is the Latest Threads for GNE/SNE/ANE, I think these should be kept given we still have Latest Threads for our local independent operators along with operations for elsewhere in the country in personal opinion, I've always liked viewing those myself personally in order to keep up to date with things even if the vast majority of posts made on those threads weren't specifically related to that specific area of the forum as often posts have had to be removed or moved elsewhere for going off topic.
I've been working my way through my old GNE photos over the past few days dating back to 2015, hopefully will start getting some of these uploaded in the coming days and weeks ahead so these can be used within Fleet News/Bygone Era if needed as I have uploaded a shed load of Arriva/Stagecoach ones prior to these, I also have a shed load of Independent Operators photos to go through for the NE aswell.
Dan feel free to use any of photos as part of these updates
(06 May 2020, 9:11 pm)Malarkey wrote I agree, I think removing the "Latest News" threads for GNE/SNE/ANE limits conversation as what has been kept under these are the sub forums which only get sporadic use.
(06 May 2020, 9:25 pm)streetdeckfan wrote I suppose there's nowt stopping anyone from just making the Latest News thread if there is actually any news!
Glad you like the new look forum, Malarkey! For the photos to work properly for the Bygone Era, you'll need to datestamp the photo on Flickr to be relevant to the time period it was originally taken. Appreciate this can be difficult for purchased/scanned photos though.
With reference to the discussion on latest news: are either of you able to define what latest news actually is, though? What you think is latest news, others might not. That's the beauty of the split discussion topics: it steers conversation so that it's related to the topic. If anything I dare say this new format allows the forum to be more conversational, whereas previously there was a bit of conflict when it steered off-topic, or people deviated away from 'latest news'. There have been 365 replies to the [url=https://northeastbuses.co.uk/forum/showt...p?tid=2428]Go North East Coronavirus service levels[/url] discussion thread; at times the conversation has steered off-topic which could have been an issue in the latest threads, but isn't as much of an issue in this discussion thread, but this contains all information about timetables, buses transferring to other depots, buses being parked up, etc.
The reason why the operator-specific threads have been retained for other smaller operators is because there is far less discussion about these operators. Having hundreds of sub-forums for each operator for then very little discussion to take place in individual threads wouldn't make any sense.
If we think fleet re-allocations is what we would define as latest news, why have those movements taken place? Is it as a result of service changes? In which case there will already be a thread for that and these fleet re-allocations would be posted in that thread.
It's a new way of using the forum and it will take some getting used to. Not too keen on introducing another 'latest' thread just yet as I think by default most people will end up going back to using that as it's what they're used to.
(06 May 2020, 10:16 pm)Michael wrote I'm having a problem with the page not loading properly, meaning i'm having to refresh the page sometimes.
This only happened about 5 times since the update, could be a problem on my end though.
Like streetdeckfan, I've had a tab open with the site active pretty much constantly since Saturday gone and I've not had any issues. I was having some issues with my internet connection last week though, and when I rang up my ISP, they (predictably) blamed the increase in traffic with more people working from home etc.