I was wondering if there was a way to change back to the old style of CD, IMO the new layout is a unwelcome change that has made this site unusable for me. if there is a way to change it please let me know. thank you.
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No there’s no way to go back to the old site. But I think once you get used to it you’ll find the new site to be much easier to use. Overall, it’s definitely an upgrade.
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While there is no option to revert, I for one am all for migrating away from Discourse.
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For me this web layout is just atrocious, I will never understand why UI developers and designers won’t make an option to keep the old style.
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It’s a totally different forum software altogether. The old CD was on vBulletin and the new CD is Discourse. So I don’t think there is really any way to keep the old style. Though it has its flaws, I do think that the new CD is an overall upgrade. However, It did take me a really long time to get used to it.
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Took me a bit to come around, but it’s so much easier to use this site from a phone now, and that alone has won me over.
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I spent about an hour trying to get my prop bets going last week, only to give up. Certain things are easier but not everything.
I’d like to point out that there’s more options than just vBulletin (old CD software) and Discourse (new CD software). I’d be curious regarding if other platforms, like XenForo, Vanilla, Flarum, myBB, or phpBB could be better options for maintaining the “feel” of the old CD while meeting modern security and mobile browsing needs.
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lol no
Definitely not that one please
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I’m curious what you all think is so bad about this layout.
Everything is easily accessible and essentially self explanatory.
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What like limit?
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If you “like” a bunch of posts, the forum will cut you off. I ran into this problem on a couple strategy threads earlier in the season.
Yeah I read somewhere on Discourse Meta that the like limit is there to prevent likes from becoming worthless.
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Personally I think the layout itself is pretty fine, though everything is so fat and huge that I can only look at a couple things on my screen at once. This makes it feel like the website is very insular, like I don’t have a lot of options at my disposal even though that isn’t necessarily true.
The thing that I really don’t like is the removal of tons of old features. Having the “Home” page with picture Gallery and papers on the left, announcements in the center, and recent threads on the right was a wonderfully dense interface. You could take in everything at a glance and not have to bog yourself down digging through threads.
My team learned how to design FRC robots largely from the Gallery. You couldn’t help but see all the new pictures on the old site. Last year I was sending an average of 2 pictures per week to my design team as reference, now that has dropped to around 1 every month or two. It is a significant learning reduction. Could I spend more of my time digging through the threads or setting up filters that I have to click through and find the pictures? Yes. But ease of use has been reduced.
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You can go back using archive.org, but it’s super slow and asks you to download tapatalk with every button press. It’s good for nostalgia though.
@Brandon_Martus Did you ever get a chance to play with the Custom Layouts plugin? This really seems to be the main complaint people have about the new layout. I’ll admit that I miss it too.
I honestly don’t miss announcements at all. I like the new format with the stickied topics that get unstickied once I read them. The old format took up way too much space for something I really only needed to see once.
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That’s a good point. The real reason I liked them in the center is that they weren’t in the areas that new content came up in 
. In the new site they take up prime real estate.
Becoming… worthless…
Are likes similar red dots on the old system cuz I had a TON of those. I miss them, they were my friends. Someone should make an Etsy store selling red dot throw pillows.
I miss the general forum architecture. Sure, there are different “categories” now that mimic the different topics, but it’s a pretty stark difference between those and being able to drill down into whatever particular subforum you were looking for information from. While the homepage feed on Discourse is similar to the Portal feed on vBB, I miss having the ability to also have a forum layout when I wanted it.
I also miss pages within threads. The infinite scrolling is nice if reading linearly, but if you intend to jump back to prior points in a thread to re-read or cross reference, it becomes tedious (especially on mobile). I wish there was options for either a threaded view or a paged view.
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