Obviously, whatever small company ran and maintained Garden Web has sold out to a bigger company that feels bombarding us with pop-up ads and changing to a more bland, lame and hard to navigate system is better.

I don't like this at all.

The link doesn't change color after it's been clicked on; which means I have to scan the whole list to find the forums I use all the time.

Le sigh....

I'm not a fan of the change, have but circumvented some of the hassle by adding individual forums to my "Favorites" list.

Martie

Good idea about favorites. I don't want to start a big conversation about the sale of Garden Web to another company- i village, maybe? That happened over a year ago. But it is only in the past couple of days, or one day, that the list has changed. I find it difficult to read, contrast, font, and listings are not distinct.

There's some place, or used to be, to register comments. If anyone knows please post it.

Thanks

If you can read the forum list at all now, far left column, scroll, scroll, scroll and open "Suggestions and Comments" There's a pile of comments there about the changes.

If you can get to what might be the home page of Garden Web (green banner at the top) scroll to way bottom and there's a link to communicate to iVillage.

Tell them what you think.. At least ask them to change the print color and screwed up columns.

I can tell you from experience that complaints to i Village will bring you only a form letter reply-I emailed concerns about format changes quite a few months ago and that is what I received. Give it a try, but you will find that they-like most big companies don't really give a darn about small time customers, especially ones that don't pay for their services. There were some conversations back a few months ago about this same subject-a search might find them.

I e-mailed a complaint as soon as I found the change. received reply yesterday. the just of response is, they will pass the complaints on. Thought to myself, "how kind of you to do that". I'm complaining about the contrast color, size of print and difficulty reading it, confusing mess that was made, and hubby took one look at the new disaster created by some "incompitent program designer, who never uses the site, came up with some stupid new design and obviously isn't interested in whether those of us who use this site wear glasses, have poor vision, ETC. The damn
pop ups where bad enough, the stuff floating buy was bad news, and the damn bee flashing was enough to cause me to have a seizure, now this." He was furious, since the bee started flashing as he has a seizure disorder and he has had to limit his use of the site because it has caused problems for him. After seeing the new mess, he has me click on the computer help site for him to use and help others. Oh, he's decided not to buy me the present he was going to get me. Paid membership in gardenweb. No way with this crazy change.

Yeah, I miss Spike. Spike could be cranky sometimes, but it just added to the flavor. And he/she (did anyone ever figure that out?) was responsive.

As for the changes in format-- I missed the change. Did the forums change? I'm seeing the same format today, though I did notice that the page with the forum list is different and VERY much harder to read. I've always just bookmarked the forums I post one, but occasionally explore some others. I liked the old list-- easy to find stuff.

Enough complaints to iVillage and they'll change back. I am sick of the popups-- they are irritating and do not inspire me to shop at the place advertized. For a while they turned me off GardenWeb altogether (I've just started checking in again). I've always paid attention to "sponsors", though.

Dayle Ann

Get mozilla, and block the pop-ups. Mozilla is free and is very easy to install. It does not stop ALL the annoyances, but most of them.

I occasionally get a blank page on top of the page I've just clicked on (most often when going to the home page of a specific forum), and there was once a levis ad that behaved badly - can't remember the details, but I emailed ivillage about it and got only a lot of questions in reply, about my browser version, my operating system version and my net provider. I do a lot of web authoring, and know that browser/operating system incompatibilities are the responsibility of the content provider, not the user.

Bottom line, however, is that I still really enjoy GW, and will continue to use it as long as YOU ALL are here!

The new forum page is awful. Too hard to read, and too much scrolling! Why fix what isn't broken? I just put shortcuts on my desktop for my most-visited forums in an attempt to avoid that page.

littleonefb, GW is not renewing paid memberships or accepting new ones anyway - mine expires in December and I tried to renew and was advised that they are "no longer be accepting new contributing memberships until further notice ".

I'll still come here too, until the ads make it too annoying.

I'm worried that since they are not renewing memberships that we will all get popups in the future. I'd rather pay the small fee instead of being bombarded with ads. I will look into Mozilla if and when that happens.

At least those annoying underlined words that linked to stupidity are gone. Remember those? Maybe this will be another passing blip.

I echo the suggestion to use Mozilla's FireFox browser. I don't get any pop-ups or ads due to the various filters they provide.

Here is a link that might be useful: Get FireFox browser here!

I have one of the newer service packs on Windows and that blocks the popup as as well, as long you have it configured to block popups. I only get a few floating adds once in awhile. I doubt I'll see the movie Dreamer anytime soon, since that ad drove me crazy!

If your desktop isn't already littered with icons, you can just click on the little symbol next to the address of the forum in the address box at the top of your browser and drag it to your desktop, where it will create a shortcut. You can rename it to anything you like. A double-click and you're in your favorite forum.

narcnh