or not possible at all directly from the menus... you get to the all forums page and there is lots of scrolling to find what you want 

There is already too much scrolling before you see any post at all in the Beginners and Business subforums

much less user friendly 

The menu is divided into categories of subforums to help with the scrolling and finding what you're interested in. All Forums is going to show the full list.

But there are alternative, in some cases possibly better ways to use GameDev.net now available if you're interested in specific forums or other content areas. For example, you can follow forums (or members or any other content) you're interested in and use the Following tab on the front page or setup an Activity Stream to show those forums. 

FYI, For Beginners is now a group with a forum, not just a forum: https://www.gamedev.net/announcement/30-for-beginners-is-now-a-group/. That's actually why it's so far down the All Forums listing. With Groups we can expand topic areas to include resources, news, and other information that forums are not intended to do.

On 5/1/2018 at 4:22 AM, khawk said:

For example, you can follow forums (or members or any other content) you're interested in and use the Following tab on the front page or setup an Activity Stream to show those forums. 

I don't understand how to use these features.

I have several forums followed.

When I select the default story stream Content I Follow, no posts are displayed. The story stream seems to be set to list both unread and read. There are unread posts in some of the forums I follow.

On the Following tab from the main page, it just says I haven't followed any members, which admittedly I haven't, but I would expect to see (unread) posts from the forums I follow here as well.

2 hours ago, Lactose said:

When I select the default story stream Content I Follow, no posts are displayed. The story stream seems to be set to list both unread and read. There are unread posts in some of the forums I follow.

On the Following tab from the main page, it just says I haven't followed any members, which admittedly I haven't, but I would expect to see (unread) posts from the forums I follow here as well.

I noticed this for myself too a week or so ago. I don't have an explanation for it yet (maybe the way the search index works), but have you tried following something or someone new since then? Once I did that, all my followed content showed up (everywhere it should).

1 hour ago, khawk said:

I noticed this for myself too a week or so ago. I don't have an explanation for it yet (maybe the way the search index works), but have you tried following something or someone new since then? Once I did that, all my followed content showed up (everywhere it should).

Well, I just hit Follow on you, so we'll see soon enough ?

I am totally lost at the site, and have pretty much reached the point to just give up.

I have subscribed to gamedev challenge and beginner groups, yet clicking "following" at the home page says "you don't seem to be following anything".

Groups are pretty much not findable (lots of top bars, with lots of buzz words, but not "groups"), but when I do find them, I get a post history of the day ordered by time or whatever, at least not by topic. No way to ever understand a discussion, unless you are online 24/7, and reading the site all day or so.

28 minutes ago, Alberth said:

I have subscribed to gamedev challenge and beginner groups, yet clicking "following" at the home page says "you don't seem to be following anything".

I'm glad you're giving this a shot. Right now it's experimental and only applicable to members you follow, so I'm going to update the text to reflect that. Content/areas you follow will not show up, and I understand the "Content and Members" wording would be confusing that way

29 minutes ago, Alberth said:

Groups are pretty much not findable (lots of top bars, with lots of buzz words, but not "groups"), but when I do find them, I get a post history of the day ordered by time or whatever, at least not by topic. No way to ever understand a discussion, unless you are online 24/7, and reading the site all day or so.

Groups are under the Community menu right now. 

Now within each group, the group header has a set of tabs. This needs to be made more obvious somehow, I understand. Here you can see GameDev Challenges has the Home, Activity, Members, News, Topics, Images, and Schedule tabs. For the forums, you'd select the Topics tab, for instance.

For Beginners is a little less straightforward. You'll want to click on the "For Beginners" tab for the forum.

Groups are new and experimental, and I'm going to roll them out slowly and expect a bit of a struggle - they're both exciting for what they can offer the community and industry, and they're a bit challenging because they're a completely different approach from GameDev.net's past.

There are a few pain points that need to be addressed before we really open them up (members could create their own). But it's comments like yours that help identify where the pain points are at so we can address them.

I have a concern with the sub- sub forums. Mostly the Community -> Forums -> Visual Arts. This forum has two sub forums known as 2D and 3D Art and Critique and Feedback. These two forums get little traffic as it is and I feel like they have been shoved deeper down now.

I think having a drop down like the older design when hovering over "Visual Arts" will fix this.

22 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

I think having a drop down like the older design

It's a limitation of the menus right now to not be able to go 2-deep on nested menus. I do want to find a better solution and/or address the limitation. It's not a quick fix though.

Along those lines, I'm open to suggestions for how to improve GameDev.net for artists. The art forums have always been a low-traffic area (all of us who started the site were programmers, so makes sense), but being a place for all disciplines I'd like to create a more welcoming place for artists.

Thanks for the explanation.

1 hour ago, khawk said:

I'm glad you're giving this a shot.

Well, you moved the challenges to a group, what choice does one have? ?

1 hour ago, khawk said:

Now within each group, the group header has a set of tabs. This needs to be made more obvious somehow, I understand. Here you can see GameDev Challenges has the Home, Activity, Members, News, Topics, Images, and Schedule tabs. For the forums, you'd select the Topics tab, for instance.

The words on the bar don't mean much to me,

•  "Home" is clear, ie the home page of the group, where you already are, (must be one of the most useless buttons, but fair enough).
• "Activity" I have no idea what it means, number of view last week and today perhaps? Nope, apparently a log. "Recent changes" or "Last updates" would work better for me.
• "Members" does do what I think it does,
• "News", hmm, yeah, not sure this counts as news, not to mention the "Browse" -> "News" from the very top is what I see as News and it's not even close to what "News" here is. "Announcements" could work.
• "Topics" is confusing, it doesn't link to anything useful for me. I think a group is a topic. "Forum" would work, "Discussions" would work too.
• "Images" and "Schedule" seem ok as title, the former is a mess wrt layout, but it uses too many sites I don't trust, so that's expected.

The entire bar is quite non-obvious with the black-ish image above it, I start reading at the grey background at the Home tab, "Welcome to gamedev challenge" etc.

EDIT: the bottom line then refers to News tab, which is a dead end after two announcements.

This may also be a matter of not expecting more bars than just the main one at the top, where "Forums" and "Groups" don't exist as main topic.

About News of the group, I have read the defender challenge, and the comments, but it doesn't look like it remembers me reading them, the "7 comments" balloon keeps the same colour, and it doesn't say "0 new comments" or anything like that.

In the beginners group, the tab named "for beginners" is confusing to me, as it's the name of the group! some sort of self-reference is my thought there. "beginner resources" would be starter kits with sprites and sounds and books rather than articles to me, but then again, I am hardly a member of the target audience (unless you count my number of games that I wrote ? ).