Chowhound

@small_h I’m not ignoring you, I just don’t feel it’s worth discussing anymore, it was a mean-hearted post, especially since I belong to another group that has members that still post to CH.

It is what it is. I’m happy here. I don’t care what they do.

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Kathy, at this point I dont remember exactly how. Its very likely I fell into a rabbit hole and woke up here. I recently retired, my wife is still working p/t. Now that Im off the road months at a time, I have taken on meal planning and kitchen detail. Giving myself a real challenge to cook more at home and learn stuff from scratch. So I was actively looking for help…and low and behold…I found it.

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Ok. I was just confused by what you wrote.

I, like many others, had passwords changed
somewhere along the way.
So now I can’t even interact with my own threads.
Really lost interest after they eliminated regional boards.
Must say, I haven’t had any inclination to even type in the address.

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Site design changed! Title kinda difficult to read with the new font (usually reserved in fashion magazines, actually several years already). Mhh

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Your post prompted me to visit CH. Those fonts hurt my eyes, oh my. :laughing:

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I find the font difficult. But there are some aspects of the new design that are cleaner and more informative.

Interestingly, since there was such enormous outrage over the “heart” icon I find it ironic that you can no longer easily see if your post has been “hearted” by clicking on your “post” column. A person would actually have to go back to the thread and look at the full post there.

Their response to that whole fiasco was what started the mass migration away from CH. And now they no longer are invested in the darn thing enough to make it’s usage easy for the members to monitor (if they actually care)!

The problem with that font, besides the fact that its hard to read, is that it doesn’t match any other fonts on their page. Its like decorating one of the room in a house in post-modern style while the rest are in Victorian.

The problem of these type of serif fonts (Didot, Bodoni), with large contrast is usually set in used as display font in large size, and usually in print. With the small size used in CH and web, one can’t see the fine lines very well, the worst is italic. Also, these fonts are used a lot in fashion field (e.g. Vogue), maybe CH is trying to appeal to those people?!

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It’s funny because they say they were trying to make it easier to read, but it’s so much harder on the eyes.

At least they are soliciting feedback, let’s see if they do anything with it. One would wonder why they wouldn’t solicit the feedback beforehand…

It’s amazing how there are little (or not so little) design features here on HO that are so intuitive and user-friendly (bookmarking threads, for example) and by contrast CH becomes less so.

I still enjoy some of the threads with strong communities, though, but it’s disappointing when the site design mostly get worse.

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I think because that came back to bite them in the past.

They had enlisted a number of frequent/long term posters to test a beta model of what eventually became the “big” change. People took their participation seriously, invested much thought and time into providing feedback. When the new design came out it seemed to have ignored a great many of the issues the testing group had warned of. These issues in turn became some of the main issues the rest of the community disliked.

After putting in all that energy to help a community they cared about many of the testers seemed to feel used, disrespected, etc. They were very much invested and it felt like a slap in the face being treated with so much disdain. Which added greatly to the bad blood during the reign of “CEO George” who left CH after leaving disaster in his wake.

I was not one of the testers so this summary represents my impressions formed from many comments, posts and private emails during that period.

I’d be quite interest in the perspectives from any HO’s who were involved in testing during that period.

edit: should be VP George

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Who ever designed this system did a great job! It is very intuitive and seems to have taken human nature into consideration during the development.

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Yeah, I just checked it out for the first time in a while and a quick count shows at least 6 different font styles. Not so Bueno to the eyes.

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Yet I never made it past those fonts to find out. They were so hard on my eyes that I wondered if they could have been a coding mistake.

At least on my iPhone the topic headings are twice the size typeface as the post text as well as very bold. The rest of the change seems pretty benign.

I think it finally dawned on someone that if they’re not going to actually pay any attention to any of the feedback they get that conflicts with their “Vision” du jour, it really doesn’t matter whether they get it before the change is rolled out, or afterward…:wink:/:roll_eyes:

I mean, I get that in general, the way these things go is that site owners/managers get Fabulous! New! Ideas! for their sites into their heads and then do what they’re gonna do for whatever their (usually unstated) reasons, and site users can deal with it, or leave… But Chowhound seems to have developed that to a really fine art…

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Yeah, CBS, knowing its goal was to increase search result hits, made the big mistake of soliciting feedback from the Chowhound community, which had its own agenda.

Had CBS just made their changes, and not given the community the false impression their opinions mattered, I wonder whether people would have left. CBS needed Chowhounds to test bugs, and valued their feedback for doing so (heh, and rewarded them by unloading a stockpile of shirts from the discontinued Chow.com branding). Good user research observes how people use/misuse a site, but doesn’t have users themselves do the design (e.g…, see Homer Simpson’s car), but the nature of the forum invited repeated higher level criticisms and design suggestions and and the constant ignoring of their concerns disillusioned the community.

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I was one of those invited to give feedback during the beta testing. Spent far too much time poking around, struggling with, and snarling over problems (mainly dealing with usability/accessibility for those with sight-related impairment).

Wrote up a detailed report, with screenshots, and suggestions for changes; emailed it to Marssy (was that her name?) and received a response of, “Those are features, we only want to know about bugs.”

That was when I knew it was going to be bad. Tried to stick it out, but literally couldn’t visually navigate the site after the redesign went live.

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This latest debacle debacle, though minor by comparison to “VP George’s Folly”, seems to be playing out along exactly the same lines… It’s enough to make you wonder if whoever’s in charge of their “Chowhound Franchise” is shorting CBSI stock on the sly… or something.:roll_eyes:/:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I was/am a CH poster. However, I had not posted there for over 10 years my profile said…lol. Anyway, I updated it today and found very little discussion going on. Someone mentioned that Linda Whit “defected to that other site” so I googled her name and this site came up. I joined today. Still a member of CH but I joined HO today.

I found CH in 2008 when I was out of work, had a lot of time and I loved it at first. Full circle. I find myself out of work again so I been bumping around the internet more lately while I look for a new position.

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