Reply #47: I've dipped my toes in, haven't plunged in headfirst, but ...

[eppur_se_muova]

my big complaint re. layout is that my subscribed groups/forum now appear in a vertical column on the left, rather than in a compact, multi-column table at the top. This is one of the "features" that annoys me most about **many** different Web sites. It just doesn't make as efficient use of space, leads to titles wrapping around too much, and requires more scrolling. It doesn't make much sense to have this list constantly gobbling up screen space when I spend more time jumping from message to message, or thread to thread, than from group to group. If I'm looking at just one group/forum, I like to have the titles etc. *for that forum* running from margin to margin of the window. It makes for faster reading and a lot less scrolling. I would think by now some efficiency experts would have concluded the same thing, and recommended against the use of too many vertically-organized lists and menus.

{At least on DU3 the leftmost column doesn't require constant LEFT-TO-RIGHT scrolling to read lines of text that go off the right edge (hardwrap is the bane of laptop users). Sites that do this should put the lists/menus on the RIGHT edge where they can be accessed by scrolling if needed, but don't gobble up screen space when they're not needed.}

The new feature that I like best is the "latest post" (oh, and the fact that clicking on a name takes you to user info in the first place!), which is one I had suggested myself. Now, when someone disappears from DU for a while, we won't wonder if they really have gone silent -- we can check.