After a couple of months, it's safe to say that the new discussion forum format is terrible

[Dinobot2]

I don’t really care if this is seen as unproductive or not constructive. The new community board is awful. It is constantly breaking and down for maintenance and there are new bugs found or discovered all the time. Even right now, after yet another round of maintenance, I am intermittently being told I don’t have permission to access certain areas (like my profile settings) and will get a 404 error from Cloudflare from time to time.

Even if the new website ran smoothly without issue, it is still a significant downgrade from the old forum. It’s much harder to find subforums and topics, quote posting is less intuitive, and everything just has a significantly less organized feel to it.

The only upside I can really see for the new community layout is that it is significantly more mobile friendly, and I’m sure that was the motivation for changing things (as the old forum was very not mobile friendly). And there are some slight improvements like image posting (when that is working properly) and bolding and italicizing text being easier through keyboard shortcuts. But if you really wanted a mobile friendly discussion forum that has all the bugs already figured out and less need for trial and error, there’s already a website for that. It’s called Reddit. Not only is there Reddit, but there’s actually already an Avast subreddit that at one point was looked at and moderated by Avast employees. Why not just use this existing forum? If you can’t get that subreddit back, then create a new one that’s the official Avast subreddit.

The only downside I can see to using reddit is that ‘subforums’ aren’t really a thing, but those can easily be replaced by flairs and can be organized and separated that way. It’s already mobile friendly but it also has the ability to go back to the old reddit lay out (using old.reddit.com) if you’re using a standard web browser on a computer.

Other than that, it’s just the way to go. A lot of people already have a reddit username so there’s no need to create another one just to access the Avast or any other subreddit. Upvoting and downvoting will help prioritize the most helpful and informative of replies and topics.

Anyways, just my thoughts on the board plus some food for thought regarding the already existing Avast subreddit.

[DavidR]

It has certainly had its problems, whilst changing the forum software is always going to take time to get used to. Which in a way is expected, I hated the new look and it took ages to find things. But prior to this I had been using to old forum for almost 20 years.

However, it seems with each passing maintenance update it breaks something else that was working find before the maintenance update.

This latest update brought it to its knees for me for almost two full days full of Access Denied and 403 Errors. There are other areas, Replying to a post and Editing replies constantly throw up errors.

[Rundvleeskroket]

I agree. It is horrible. For all the reasons already mentioned. Navigation is a nightmare with all the expected results of users posting willy nilly in General.

I will add that I hate how I can’t scroll to the top of a thread quickly anymore. It loads in batches of a few posts, halting every time. I’m sure this is more mobile friendly but for PC users it is crap.