Hi guys! I posted this on the KT in response to a post there, so I hope you don't mind if I just cut and paste here.

I'm sure this news came as a bit of a shock, and we all know that any type of change can be scary. But, I think this is a very good thing for GardenWeb and the future looks bright. Of course, everyone has questions and concerns about the changes and we'll have more information to share with you very soon. I will tell you that everyone at Houzz has been wonderful and they really do want to keep the community happy. They have been working hard to make this a smooth transition and keep it as painless as possible.

Oh, and good news! I did receive some information that the pop-ups should be fixed later today and will no longer randomly and continuously open. The even better news is that once we transition over to Houzz -- no more popups at all!

As always, if you have any concerns, I'm always here.

Tamara

That's great that you posted Tamara! I just received the official email.

Yes, thank you for coming here to share the news personally. I received the email about an hour ago. I think it's a good thing. Houzz brings more people to the table, so to speak!

Thanks for the news about those darn ads. I am delighted!!

Yes, I got the email too. I'm uncertain as I've only been to Houzz once and was just not interested at all, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.

If you tell me it's OK, Tamara, I'll go with that. I trust your judgment on this and know you would not steer me wrong.

Annie

Lets hope that the forum is not changed like the Answer forum a while back. It went from being a great forum to a bunch of kids asking stupid questions.

Not like the CF but Houzz is one on my favorites. My first aliance is to GardenWeb specifically CF and my CF friends.

Tamara, I still have the GW souvenirs you gave us at our luncheon. Thank you.

Tamara, you are our FRIEND and as long as YOU don't disappear, everything will be o.k.!!!!! We know you have our back if we have any issues - we love you, Lady Bug!

SOOOO glad those random popups are going! I was ready to go myself!

I got the email, too, and wondered what in the heck Houzz was. Yes, I'm a little behind the times. Will be glad to see the popups gone as well.

Is anyone else concerned about the cooking forum having a place on Houzz? I have looked at their forum categories; Kitchen design and accessories is as close a match as I can find. Nothing where sharing recipes would naturally belong...

I'm hoping they are still 2 separate entities. These forums are homey to me, and comforting and easy to navigate. The style had better not change. There are so many forums where you have to click on endless pages to read just a few replies, and they allow headers, and signatures, which make the actual message hard to read, or almost negligible in content.

Houzz is so upscale, I don't go there.

As far as the ads and links, I don't see any at all, never have. AdBlockPlus gets rid of all ads on all sites. No excuse not to download it, it's easy and free.

Just to add a bit of clarification, the forums and the way you use them are not going away. You will be able to navigate as you normally would and you won't lose your way because any bookmarks that you have set will still work.

(Love you all, too! Smooch!)

New management, perhaps time for amnesty for all banned former misbehaved members?

Life sentence is for murderers.

dcarch

Thanks, Tamara, I really appreciate your input and explanation.

I have been to Houzz a few times. It used to be a site you could navigate pretty easily, but recently it's been like Annie described, with the registration thing getting in the way.

I have found, before it was hard to navigate, other styles than modern, but you have to do a search for it. I actually like it, or used to like it for ideas. Maybe since we're registered here, we're automatically registered there too? Could that be the case?

Sally

My first reaction is that it's a good fit. There's a lot of cross traffic among some GW members and Houzz. Additionally, social streams are proven ways of keeping people involved with a site after a particular interest has been filled. I'm only guessing, but I'd think Houzz would want the forums, and want to keep them intact for that reason. It's not whether they have cooking, it's whether bringing in the CF to talk about cooking is of complementary interest to the people who frequent Houzz.

There's the whole urban foraging movement, and Williams-Sonoma selling Yuppie chicken coops. I'm sure the Harvest Forum will find traction with the backyard-to-table crowd.

They'd be best served by leaving clunky old Gardenweb alone. I've said this before, but the format where most recent reply, rather than most recent thread start or most popular is on top, and old threads fall off the bottom, is most conducive to lively and always fresh daily discussions. There's nothing duller than a forum where the members expect a newbie to wade through 3000 pages of past content to "get up to speed" on that which has been discussed before. Each discussion is a little different, and (nearly) each new person each thread attracts has something interesting to add. This past year there must have been half a dozen discussions of how to make spaghetti sauce! How great is that!

It's also great that we're mostly self policing, and members feel free to throw in personal news, minor tangents, etc., without having the topic police editing them.

Another great thing is all the white space. Jasdip is spot on about the avatars, animated signatures, etc., that choke most message boards nowadays. The good sized and scalable fonts make it easier to read GW as well.

Summary: GW is great as is. :)

My big question is was GW spun off or was Houzz acquired by NBC?

Thanks Plllog. I love the clean look of this and ease of navigation.
Another style I don't like is Facebook. I think that's a PIA.

Also, for people who have to scroll through a long line of posts to get to the newest comment, there are different options.

End button takes you to the bottom of the page on any website, and
Home brings you back to the top

Tapping the space bar will jump down the page.

I just click on Post a Followup, which takes me to the last comment and I scroll up to the last one I read. Easy-peasy

This post was edited by jasdip on Sat, Jan 31, 15 at 7:41

Interesting discussion about bulletin board layouts. GW is about the only bulletin board I have stuck with primarily because of it's "quaint" format. To me, it isn't outdated at all, it's clean and functional, something many Web and App formats are definitely NOT!

duh! jasdip, that's brilliant about selecting "Post a comment" to quickly get to the bottom of the thread!

Like lpink I appreciate what I've seen some criticize as being a primitive forum. I'm only a member of GW but I do read a few other forums, and to me one of the most irritating things is what I'm assuming is a simple click of the mouse to incessantly quote prior posts unnecessarily.

So often I see someone quote several paragraphs of posts, only to themselves post a simple reply like "good idea."

Worse yet, does one really need to quote the NEXT PRIOR post when responding to it??? Especially when that next prior post was THE OPENING POST??????? Are people really that incapable of following a conversation? I mean, sometimes it's helpful, for clarifying which specific upthread comment you're replying to. And for that purpose, it's easy enough to copy/paste and put quotes around a sentence, like we tend to do here, no? Keeps the thread much cleaner to read.

Linked is a thread with a few examples in it. It's not the worst of what I regularly see, but it's the first example I came across. I'm not picking on eGullet per se.

/rant over.

(Edit - oops, wrong link, among other things. Fixed!)

Here is a link that might be useful: STOP QUOTING!!!

This post was edited by foodonastump on Sat, Jan 31, 15 at 12:56

FOAS, sometimes when you see that incessant quoting it's because the software automatically quotes the specific message/thread being replied to. That's especially true when there are branching threads, with replies specifically tacked to replies to the main topic. It's a great idea in concept, but stupid in reality. We have much more cohesive discussions by having the cross conversations inline. It also helps that we have the 150-ish message limit.

Other times, it's the local culture to do so because people were posting too many "that's a good idea" type things instead of, "Splat1912, using WD-40 is a good idea." Or the post-Twitter, "@Splat1912, good idea". There's often a button for quoting the whole danged thing. Conserving keystrokes is foolish, but typing on a phone can be agonizing...

The great gift of the Edit feature improved the GW experience immensely, and a few other technical changes have been nice as well, without changing the overall experience. Viva la quaint!!!

I'll second that Amesty for former banned CF members!!