Hello,
I can understand the need to improve, and I REALLY like the new dark theme, but the site pretty much killed my joy of reading here in its current form.
- opening page ('home', 'features' tab) literally contains nothing I want to know about. Perhaps that's because my interest is programming in general rather than games, so it may be me.
- 'activity' (at 'home') or 'latest' (at 'forums') tabs is totally unsorted topics (that is, sorting on latest reply time doesn't look very useful to me) where I have to spend a lot of mental effort to understand what each topic is about. Perhaps if you visit the site every 5 minutes it makes sense. (I visit once every few days.) For me, more order in categories would help. (But perhaps not enough, as I am not interested in all topics within a category.)
- 'forums' and then 'categories' tab gives order at least. '5,804 topics' in Artifical Intelligence is just non-information imho. No information where new posts or new topics are.
- opening a forum category, I get a list of topics, but no information what I have seen and no information where I replied. My memory isn't so good that I remember every topic I ever replied to, so it takes a lot of mental effort to decide each visit what the interesting topics are, mostly only finding that it is an old one. I stop doing that after the first 2-3 entries, assuming I have seen everything new that could be useful for me, although I have no idea if that is true.
- Clicking 'forum' at the left again jumps back to the useless 'activity' tab, forcing me to explicitly select 'categories' each time I want to switch category. This is so de-motivating that I sometimes work around it by clicking on a category that I see in a random post on the front page. I am done with that game after 2 forum categories or so.
In all, in its current form it is too tiring to read and reply here. Perhaps it is a result of being interested in too few topics which then get drowned in a sea of (for me) uninteresting other topics??
I stop visiting here mostly for now, until all the kinks have been worked out. Likely I'll drop by every now and then to see whether it has improved.
Sincerely, Albert