The irony is that the discourse software this forum is based on is superior to the old format. The problem is that it was foisted on everyone without warning. Not a great idea.
A soft rollout with a ‘try our new forum beta that will replace the old one in 6 months!’ would have gone over better.
Although it’s designed to be responsive to the user’s device, the new format is an abomination and has been formatted to fit a phone well but doesn’t change the look and feel for those reading on a large screen. Having 80% white space on a 23" monitor and incessant scrolling stopped me reading regularly anyway.
I know what you mean (and am often thinking exactly the same, here, to be honest), but it isn’t really that, Bob.
Trading’s like everything else.
There are bright people and stupid people, and there are lazy people and people willing to work.
It’s just that out of all the well-known forums, this is the one that attracts most of the stupid and lazy people.
There are reasons for that, but the Admin doesn’t want to hear them. And that’s actually why the concentration of stupid and lazy people here is higher than anywhere else. He isn’t willing to change that. For whatever reason, he thinks it suits him.
You’re right Charlie, this is a site for newcomers to trading. Its is not called BABYpips for nothing. Useless to complain about the clueless posts from some of them, these would only seem to underline they’ve come to the right place to ask questions of the right people. Yes, many are lazy and stupid - that’s because they want to make money without having to have a job - but that’s what we all want too isn’t it?
The forum is absolutely atrocious to use & I agree, this format change has killed the forum. This is my first time on it in months & the only thing that brought me here was a link to this exact thread in a BabyPips email. A link slating the forum, I’m all over that - click!
I used to love this site & used the app all the time. I recommended this site to folk when ever people asked about my trading. I’ve not looked at since the change but I dare say the school section is still great quality & I’ll probably mention that to anyone that asks, however where I would usually bang on about the great forum will now be replace with, “I wouldn’t bother with the rest of the site though”.
There is a VERY strong chance that this is my farewell post so BabyPips: it’s been a grand +5yrs but I don’t see this relationship going any further. You’ve changed, you’re not the site that I fell in love with. You sold-out, you’ve let yourself go & you’re just a mess: we’ve all tried to have an intervention but you just won’t listen. So I wish you all the happiness in the world, I’m moving on with my life. It’ll be painful at first but you’ll get over me, just go forward, get married, have some kids & maybe try listening to your users once in a while.
[quote=“baz1982, post:47, topic:122595”]
You’ve changed, you’re not the site that I fell in love with. [/quote]
It seems (based only on the posts generally written on BP recently) that you are not alone in that observation and sentiment. Of course, there are also the passive lurkers and we do not know their opinion - except that at least one regular poster has observed a significant decline in readership levels, too.
But I think this issue is not solely due to the change in site platform nor even just to the attitude of the site owners,
I see (at least) three major changes going on and they are strongly interrelated in their impact:
the site itself which is very impersonal as well as all the other factors which have been mentioned about it and the owners’ policies,
the quality and quantity of Newbie issues raised. It really gives the impression that hardly any Newbies are prepared to actually study anything and just want everything handed to them prepacked and with a profit guarantee. The general level of questions raised is so naive that I cannot believe these people have tried to understand anything beforehand. Also, I suspect that general interest is moving rapidly away from manual trading of standard forex to the cryptocurrencies and automated systems. Perhaps that is understandable and inevitable, given the more widely recognised and accepted poor success rate in forex and its learning curve duration expectations -i.e. it is not instant and fails anyway!
the only reason any genuinely experienced and consistently profitable trader would frequent this site is to help genuine and conscientious Newbies in their development and progress. But if one starts to recognise a laziness and reluctance to study amongst Newbies then one no longer feels any inclination to help, knowing that the person concerned will inevitably fail and usually disappears off BP after only a few posts anyway? So these traders gradually lose interest and move on. It also seems to generate a level of cynicism, sarcasm, and aggressiveness in responses from such experienced traders that rarely used to be here. That is also relatively understandable, albeit a regrettable weakness amongst such traders.
I have recently “muted” all the soft-sale and commentary threads and all those long-term junk type threads, and, to be honest, what is left is so little and so uninspiring that I rarely respond to anything anymore (which may well be an advantage for the OPs anyway, but that is another issue!!).
And on the other hand, any threads that seem to be actually trading-oriented do not attract much input at all!
It is not my intention to get involved in this thread any more than to mention these personal observations and I will now be muting this one too…
I agree with most of this, but although I detest this endless format (as I access off a desktop) some of this is common to all forums - naive and lazy newcomers, useless commentary threads etc. Its mostly just a cycle. BP will come back. Or close.
But the commentary threads on forums give me a lot of laughs. Does anybody on earth use this stuff?
Stuff like “Buy above 1.0001. If price breaks this level, it will attempt 1.0002.” Could I say this stuff is “priceless”?
You haven’t looked at the site’s traffic graph for 2017 and compared it with those of its competitors.
It’s the only “major downtrend” chart among a sea of “major uptrends”.
Looks like a number of perceptive comments in recent and not-so-recent threads in the Feedback forum explain the reasons, but nobody listened, and it’s too late, now. Very sad indeed.
It sounds like the owners entered a bad market order, and even though the market is going against them, admitting they were wrong is painful enough that they just can’t bring themselves to close the position.
I arrived planning to keep a Journal here for a new system, but after looking round for a week or so, I realized it would obviously be way too risky. What are the chances that it will still exist in a year’s time?
My guess is that it can limp on indefinitely as a pale shadow of what it might have been - there are countless noobs discovering trading all the time, and they’re probably the ones who click on onsite ads?
Getting help in forex trading is much harder than I thought. And knowing that you’re going through this misery from five years. It is really hard to believe. How you maintain your inspiration and struggling spirit!!! I am amazed.
I don’t get this response. What is so atrocious? The sea of white? Yea, there’s a lot of that around for sure, burning a hole in my eye. But what else? Scrolling instead of pages? Sounds like there are a lot of dinosaurs around that still run Windows 98 or something. Format? I don’t have a problem getting around. Did they get rid of something? I mean we’re talking about threads and posts. You can only do so much with that. Did the the homepage change that much?
What policies? Any examples?
You’re back with this line again. I’ve been to FF looking for newbie threads on TA. Not much going on over there. Same thing being said over there. The newbs aren’t interested. What other sites are you visiting that I can have a look at? T2W? Elitetrader? Don’t tell me, MQL4 or MQL5? Where are these “major uptrends” you constantly mention? Why is that in quotes anyway?
Maybe everybody is moving to youtube or into cryptos.
I just realized that I have over half of the sub-forums on the site muted. I never, ever want to be notified of all the spam that those sub-forums generate.
And it’s still not enough. I want to be able to mute particular people; I never want to see their ‘market notifications’ or the like again.
Is in normal to have to wade through so much trash on a forex forum?