Thanks for the feedback. Very often, site visitors and members aren’t privy to what’s going on behind the scenes, And behind the scenes, things were very much broken, and more importantly, potentially insecure. I won’t share too much about what happened with vBulletin, our former platform, as the drama of it’s development (or lack thereof) by its owner is well documented elsewhere, by many website administrators and former staff. Short version, the platform and a major plugin that we used lapsed in development and timely security fixes. The company behind the platform basically tried to push existing customers to its newer and supposedly better version. It was not better, and was actually worse. As we couldn’t rely on the platform developers to continue support for or even commit to developing new features for our version of the platform, we had to make the major decision of switching platforms. We actually debated that decision for years, but there were no alternatives worthy of moving to. It took well over a year of planning the move, backing up 10+ years of data, testing and retesting data restorations, all while introducing a brand new platform. And that work was specific only to the Forums, and doesn’t include the work related to 10+ years of daily posts to our content management platform. We did unfortunately lose some forum data, but overall, we’re happy with how the move went.
As for your issues, perhaps some small changes in how you view the Forums homepage will help you find specific topics. It sounds like your homepage is defaulting to the Latest view. Have you tried changing the view to show the Category view instead?
To change your default home page view, do the following:
- Click your avatar in the top right corner,
- Click on the gear icon,
- Go to Preferences | Interface
- Change the drop-down setting for Default Home Page to Categories
- Save your changes
From now on, whenever you visit the Forums home page, you will be presented with the Category view.
With the Category view, you get easy access to all of the main categories and subcategories, including Trading Systems, which is what you’re after.
Regarding any topics or posts that you make, you can see a historical record of that activity under your Profile.
To see your Activity, do the following:
- Click on your avatar
- Click on your username
- Go to the Activity section
- Select either Topics or Replies from the left-hand navigation to review your activity
As you come back to topics/threads that you’ve read in the past, the new system will remember where you left off, instead of just dropping you off at the beginning or at the end of the discussion. This way, you can get up to speed on the discussion without missing anything.
And as you track, watch or engage in discussion, the Unread view (another option you can set for your default home page) will show you what topics have been updated since your last visit. So discussions most important to you are all in one place. No need to go searching. Again, this feature only works if you’re logged in, and if you track, watch or reply to a topic.
Regardless of your default homepage choice, you can get to any of these views at any time from the Forums home page.
If you need more information on what a view provides, simply mouse-over the view icon and a tooltip will appear with that information.
The new version of the Forums really does offer more in content discovery and tracking than vBulletin ever did. It takes a bit getting used to it, but once you know where to look, you’ll be better off.
Let me know if you have any questions.