When I click on the newest posts under community, I always get the first post of the thread.
It would make more sense to see the one that is being linked here.
Also, it is important to see who posted, so that I don’t keep looking at my own posts… 
Also, there seems to be some kind of inconsistency with the display of newest posts.
Sometimes there is no new one under community - flyout “show topics” nor under “show posts” but when I look in the topics themselves (e.g. general), there are new ones. Under “show posts”, very often my new ones aren’t displayed even though I created them seconds ago (updating doesn’t help, they never seem to show up).
Also, it is weird that under “show topics”, the time of the newest post is displayed but not the user, whereas under “show posts” it seems like the time of the original creation of the thread is displayed, which makes no sense to me.
Lastly, it would be nice if one could chose “show posts” as standard or rather that the last choice would be stored.
Again, I worked through all the new “topics” on the main community page only to see that there were 4 new posts in the sub sections. I think ALL posts should be displayed there.
Also can you please include a color coding for read posts please?
I would like to be able to search individual topics.
Also, sorting by title, time and author would be helpful.
I still think that the forum is not very intuitive to use.
Does anybody agree with me or am I the only one?
Def retrograde, compared with the old one, which was OK. The new one’s been redesigned to look like social media, where only the very newest post is interesting, as it flies by, and no one wants to see a chain of posts preceding it - a new post in an old thread is really boring.
(Latest news is that the Young are abandoning Facebook, switching to Snapchat which is even more ephemeral. But the Old are joining Facebook in droves. And I suppose the Very Old still like traditional forums!).
RC forum does have a sop to the old format - Recent Discussions, where new posts in old threads do rise to the top - but it’s an ill-organised afterthought and I wonder how many use it. It does seem that any post in a thread that’s more than a day old is a waste of time, that only a self-selected tiny group of ‘friends’ - Recent Discussion nerds - ever see.
Hi Tom,
thanks for your fifty cents!
I’ve heard that even Snapchat is becoming outdated… lol
The difference in this environment is that people are not just trying to show off or keep in touch with friends, but many are actually trayng to earn their living using the software and by extension the forum.
So being able to use it properly should be the key point here.
Let’s hope that somebody in charge at RC reads this as well…
That’s right - for professionals the old fashioned forum format is essential, in that a whole string of practitioners’ valuable contributions can be collected together in one coherent thread, which reads almost like a book, in logical order that can make great sense as a whole. But many days, weeks or even years must be allowed for those contributions to be added, each usually catalysed by the preceding one(s), and a forum needs to be structured to really support that miraculous process.
It’s so very different from social media, which consists of free-standing snapshot opinions and reactions, which have been catalysed by at most by one most recent post that happened to be seen before it disappeared way down the page, mixed up with other non-connected stuff.
Contrary to the ‘bringing people together’ mythology of social media, if anyone actually gains an understanding that they didn’t have preconceived already, it can only be assembled from those freestanding bits and stored inside their head, not be traceable to a coherent chain that can be searched for and returned to in a proper forum.
So a forum that’s trendily styled like social media is a real disservice to (OK, older) professional users.
Having said that, https://www.facebook.com/groups/CapturingRealityArena isn’t too bad, can be technically useful, beyond its clever-me ‘showcase’ brief, but is only a shadow of this forum, even imperfect as it is.