“Where’d all the good people go?”

[Farrar]

The boards are uglier and harder to navigate now. I mean, it seems obvious to me that the interface is a turnoff. I'm sure there are underlying reasons for the changes, but the graphic design going on makes me hurt. The giant fonts up top? The bad contrast between the screen and fonts at the top for the links? The lack of anywhere easy to click to return back to the main forum page? The automatic drop down menus? It's straight up ugly.

Last time the forums upgraded, I feel like there was a lot of back and forth about the interface and tweaking things to get it back to be user loved. Much less this go around. I guess there's still time.

[Alte Veste Academy]

I do not see any giant fonts at the top. I'm not having any problems with speed, and I didn't have problems logging on after the change. I can see how both of those would not be appealing. 

Does the browse button not take you back to the main board? It does me. Or home, if you are in a thread.

What drop down menus? I don't see that.

It's like we are all experiencing it differently, which I find so weird. It doesn't look bad at all on my screen. 

 

[domestic_engineer]

13 hours ago, Garga said:

Just before reading this post, I was reading another thread about going back to work after being out of work for 20 years.  That thread is something I want to read later—like 4 years from now when I’m ready to return to work.   I usually will copy the link to the thread and file it in a OneNote to read later.  On this particular thread, I really want to read a certain post.  In the past I could write, “See post ##”.  But now, I had to type “See post by So-And-So.”  Yeah.  That’ll be fun in 4 years, scrolling until I find some user name.  And what if that user  has posted 5 times in the thread?   Urgh.  

While the posts aren't visibly numbered within the thread, you can save a link to a specific post in your OneNote document instead.  At the very top, right hand corner of each post, beside the "Report this" is an icon that looks similar to a "less than" symbol.  That will open up a popup window with a link to the specific post.  Copy that & paste it into your OneNote document.

Edited to add:  Alternatively you could save the link that's behind the "time stamp" on each post.

[Garga]

1 minute ago, domestic_engineer said:

While the posts aren't visibly numbered within the thread, you can save a link to a specific post in your OneNote document instead.  At the very top, right hand corner of each post, beside the "Report this" is an icon that looks similar to a "less than" symbol.  That will open up a popup window with a link to the specific post.  Copy that & paste it into your OneNote document.

 

Thank you so much!!!

 

[Arcadia]

1) I can only stay log in on my iPhone. I get logged out often on my iPads 

2) I can’t get to last read post of any thread. Can’t find the dot that you all mentioned upthread. So it has been tiring scrolling through threads to find the last post I have read and continue reading from there.

3) AP exam prep season for my oldest as his first paper is on May 7th.

[crazyforlatin]

55 minutes ago, Arcadia said:

1) I can only stay log in on my iPhone. I get logged out often on my iPads 

2) I can’t get to last read post of any thread. Can’t find the dot that you all mentioned upthread. So it has been tiring scrolling through threads to find the last post I have read and continue reading from there.

3) AP exam prep season for my oldest as his first paper is on May 7th.

We're prepping too but for May 18. Got a passport for DD just for this test. It was the exact incentive to make the trek to the central office.  

[domestic_engineer]

1 hour ago, Arcadia said:

2) I can’t get to last read post of any thread. Can’t find the dot that you all mentioned upthread. So it has been tiring scrolling through threads to find the last post I have read and continue reading from there.

The dot precedes the first word of the title of the thread when you view a listing of threads.  If it's not there, maybe hover and see if it appears?  People have reported that the heart may have an invisibility cloak, and I noticed that the "Report this" link is invisible until I hover over it once.  *shrug*

If you're inside a thread already, I haven't found a "last read post" link like the old forums.  I agree with you that that is annoying.

[poppy]

12 hours ago, Targhee said:

Yes, I’ve noticed it too. But how many actually stay to homeschool? This was an IRL issue too. At our co-op we would have families with 4 kids, the oldest of whom was 5, accepted from the waitlist while we might only have 15 total teenagers.  And then after a year or to they decide it’s too much and go to school only to be replaced by another super young family.

i don’t mean to discourage young families - more power to them! It just seems that homeschooling might be, I don’t know, counter culture trendy?? Trendy because it’s counter culture but so trendy it’s no longer so counter culture, and becomes a main stream token experiment - like cloth diapering, free range parenting, and Voodoo Donuts ?You want to be able to let everyone know you’ve tried it. But in the end you go back to the “normal”, easier life.

I do think (complete speculation, I have no real knowledge of this) there is still a growth in people pulling out their gifted or special needs kids because the school just isn’t meeting their needs.

 

I do think there is a trendiness to it.  We have a ton of self-identified homeschoolers whose oldest kid is 2 or 3 and I don't think that was the case at all 10 years ago.  

But the core groups locally are  two, with a smattering of people who are halfway in between
-religious homeschoolers who are more strict academically (and socially) than public school
-families with one or more kids who are  gifted / 2E / special needs which leads to a child led or 'unschool-y' approach.  
The two groups  are both full of nice people, but, they have, like, separate social worlds entirely. I'm seeing people talk up two different proms. I'm not sure which group is the original. It doesn't really matter, but it's kind of odd.  The religious group is steady but the "square pegs / special needs" group is definitely growing .

[Wheres Toto]

I'm not having too much trouble with the forums but I almost always go on from my laptop.  A lot of the worst issues seem to be on mobile devices.   When the boards first came back up, I couldn't get on with my old email and password, but I was then away from the computer for a few days (I'd like to say I was being patient but....) and it seemed to work itself out in that time.  I was able to sign in with my old account, my avatar, my signature, etc. were all there.

My screen isn't that bright or maybe my house is just dark enough it doesn't matter as much.  

I don't like the Unread Content not being in pages, but I did notice it's easier to find all the threads I started using Content I Started (or something like that).  On the old forum, My Content would definitely not bring up everything.

[Lang Syne Boardie]

17 hours ago, Fifiruth said:

The “kids” of the really committed homeschooling families we are friends with (about a dozen families) are all in the 17-27 age range, and are concentrating on their college studies and whatnot. Some have gotten married, but most are still single. No babies, yet. Having said that, they have all expressed a desire to homeschool their own children some day, so there will probably be a new wave of second-generation homeschoolers over the next ten years. Housing prices are getting so high here, though, that they may find it impossible to make it work. We’ll have to see.

 

 

My eldest and his fiancee sound very much as if they would like their children to be homeschooled, but they are very heavily invested in their careers and worried about the economy. Future DDIL has asked whether I'd have any interest in homeschooling their children. I said I would LOVE to, but only if they have a small family and only up to 6th to 8th grade. She said that suited her plans perfectly, they want two children, and they want the kids to go to her high school if it's still there. LOL

So I'm predicting that homeschooling is going nowhere, but it'll likely still be us...

[Elizabeth86]

Not that I'm  one of the good people on here anything, but I've  been missing because ya'll  can't  compare to snuggling my sweet baby girl.  Also, I used the chat board to see me through my pregnancy because pregnancy leaves me  feeling depressed and it was a bit of escape from the real world.