Personally I’ve never been that bothered with the forums other than for site specific things (like bug reports). The UK is not exactly short of online facilities for the discussion of natural history topics so it never felt to me like iSpot was adding much with that bit of the site (which perhaps is why the UK forums were never very active).
Of course other parts of the world may have different needs, and maybe iSpot is the efficient way to meet them. But at the margin having the team put more resource into the core site rather than a discussion group feels like the way to go.
Or maybe they just haven’t cottoned on to what’s happening, Amadan? For a new user it wasn’t immediately apparent what’s missing and it’s taken several days to find my way to these forum pages, and i’ve had to spend an hour or more trying to find my way around and take in what people are saying. I notice that there are only a very few people commenting here, so my deduction from these foregoing observations is that most people still gaily posting up observations have simply no clue what’s gone so wrong …
There are plenty of us dissatisfied spotters out here, for me personally I’ve had my say - in a number of different, but the same, unrelated places - this new forum format has me so confused I’ve all but given up. Tony has a spreadsheet of issues that is into the hundreds, somewhere but I only know how to access it from an e-mail that he circulated; Still I live in hope that an acceptable site will eventually surface but until then I shall mourn the passing of the old friend
