John, I understand your frustration - I'm frustrated too.  As an explanation to the delay in improving the user experience, here's the lowdown:

• This site is a custom .NET app, and we are using single signon so that you don't have to log into the site, then the forum, then the Questionnaire, etc....
• We needed to find a good community platform (forum, blogs, videos, wiki, etc.) that integrates with our existing site architecture and provides all the capabilities that we need to support candidate campaign "spaces" (for use by Candidate Selection Session finalists for PR and communication purposes) and our membership conversations such as the forum
• Most community platforms are opensource PHP, and although free or low cost, PHP integrates horribly with .NET single sign on, so...
• We pursued and won a partnership with a premier .NET community platform provider who gave us a great deal on their product in direct support of the GOOOH cause (big score because their the platform is quite expensive and used by Fortune 50 companies), but during testing we discovered that it was necessary to stand up an entirely separate server infrastructure and additional hosting fees to support it - i.e. large and unexpected expenses to turn it on.  This was early 2008.  We decided to wait and see if we would be viable in 2008 before we committed to the expense.
• When it was decided that we weren't going to launch a 2008 campaign, we decided to stick with the current forum for a bit while we look for alternatives.  We would still like to utilize the community platform we have in our back pocket, but can't justify the expense at this time.
• We are currently evaluation 'point solutions' - i.e. just a forum rather than an integrated community platform - to tide us over until early 2010.  However, this means we start from square one as far as development/testing goes.
• Net/Net:  we did a complete 360 and wound up back where we started...

I know this won't ease your pain any, but at least you'll understand how much effort we're expending on our end to fix this problem.  We really do understand and care about providing a good member experience in the forum - you'll just have to be patient with us as we find a good solution.

Thanks,

Eric

You know, it's going to dissuade a lot of people from visiting the website...

We decided to stick with what we have for now.

Again, what's going on? I'm sure that a normal forum system would attract many more users than you have currently... which would increase GOOOH's support base. You said you would upgrade over a month and a half ago.

I'm just curious, how much would a real forum system cost? I'm sure you have enough money for it.

[quote= Eric]Jay, yup, this is exactly what I was referring to when I previously said we were going to implement the ability too "reorder threads (not posts) so that the ones with the most recent activity will be at the top of the thread list".  We will be adding this (and other) enhancements in the next release due in abt 1-2 wks.[/quote] [Moderator's comment - the decision was made to stick with the current forum for now.]

It's been over a month. What's going on? We'd all like to see this inplemented... Are you guys serious that you can't even afford a software upgrade?

-- 4/23/2008 8:37:50 AM.

Wonderful

Jay, yup, this is exactly what I was referring to when I previously said we were going to implement the ability too "reorder threads (not posts) so that the ones with the most recent activity will be at the top of the thread list".  We will be adding this (and other) enhancements in the next release due in abt 1-2 wks.

It's not having the individual POSTS in chronological orderthat is the problem, it's having the CONVERSATIONS LIST in chronological order that is the problem.

The list of discussions in each topic should be in reverse chronological order so that the newest issues are the most visible. There should also be a way to sort the list of discussions by "most recent post" so that a user can see which conversations are currently active, not just recently posted. However, within each discussion, the posts themselves should of course be in chronological order so that a user can read from start to finish.

As a "Director of Technology" (yes, that's my title) with over a decade of experience in developing usable web applications, it's possible I might know what I am talking about ;-)

Honestly, if I wasn't VERY interested in GOOOH, I would never have come back just because these forums are so unusable. It's no accident there's only - what - a few dozen active members of the forum.

As a developer, I know that reinventing the wheel is a pain in the butt. I wrote a complete forum system last year, and I am sure that if you don't stand on the shoulders of those who came before you, you are guaranteed to have issues with your usability.

I run a site that has over in its lifetime probably about 13,000,000 posts, currently at 6,745,613
It also has 28,945 users and I have personally removed probably about 10,000 users.

Please change the forums to a more usable system, this is simply put, almost unusable.

Sean,  please send us your resume at goooh@goooh.com, and thanks for the offer to help!