mrbottles
Well-Known Member
Hello admins, You can turn this off as soon as you read it. Not trying to bag on this resource it is still great. I can't see a contact email so this is the only way I see that I can try to help. The forum is not as active as it was. I believe I see opportunity to bring back the good old days. I know when this version went live a lot of questions were answered about the why. While I stop in every now and again the commercial-ness makes it feel a lot less like a home away from home... Like it used to feel. That and the archives that are now gone make it feel cold. There were times when I just flitted through old posts seeing what was out there. Rereading about this or that. Now a forum like pontils only has one item. There used to be new posts popping every minute. You could reply to find your reply rendered irrelevant by posts made when you were typing your reply. The last three times I checked in the posts are all hours or days old. Not bagging on the incredible vision and work it took to create or keep this going,,, trying to help. Knowing it is expensive to produce or host or create or keep anything updated and going if you want to bring back the good old days of this forum I would try to immediately fix simple things like; Get rid of the ads if people are logged in or not. They are a MAJOR turn off. No one uses them anyway and the second you arrive it gives the impression of commercial enterprise NOT open sharing of information.A better logo. The folded paper serifed font is not good enough for a world class resource. tighten everything up, up top. I have huge monitors and I see two topic threads on the home page. Too many frames and borders. Like the grey line saying forums is completely of no value and pushes the content people come for down. Should be able to see every forum on monitors like mine. Get rid of the image scroll at the top. People are here for the information. Yes images are info but detached from the story is not what this forum used to be about and no one cares. Unless that is the only way to keep them around after posts are archived? Again, don't understand why all the old posts are gone unless it is to save space. Delete all posts about other resources, simply eliminate the category. GOOGLE is how you get other resources. There are people posting about other bottle forums. Make the site look and feel like antique bottles.Get rid of all the web wiki tools and features. Bottle collectors don't care about subscribed forums or marking folders read or forum filters. I wish I could just do it for you. It is really sad to see something so powerful in the antique bottle world losing steam... And it feels like it can be fixed. People still want and need the information. I don't want to take anything from this forum that is to say don't want to be hired to do it. I have a marketing firm with many designers. If you do it yourself maybe I could just have one of my guys lay out a front page and you can have your guy stytle it. Maybe there is a lot more to it that I can't see. My sincerest regards in hope of a AB.NET full revival. All the best, Steven