I have been gone for months because DP had trashed itself. I decided to drop in and what do I see? I see that DP is still slower than molasses, it is still flakey, it is still ugly, it still has display issues, and it still is hard to use. One of the most important rules of business is, "NEVER FIX WHAT IS NOT BROKEN." Most of the time, but not always, that is the start of the death spiral for that business. I have seen that happen hundreds of times both in the real world and in the internet world. Example is MySpace, once the premier social site, now just a non-entity that few care about. Or WBS, once the premier chat site, now nothing. Or GeoCities once a major website hoster, now gone. Or a local parts house, once the world's largest with a worldwide clientele, netting $24mm per year 6 years ago, and now not even large enough to supply local demand and losing $250m per month. All because each of them fixed what was not broken. Will DP go that route? Don't know. But when you break such an important rule, there are bound to be consequences. At least for me, DP is no longer even on my list to visit even sporadically, not because I want it that way, but because DP fixed what was not broken and now IT IS BROKEN.
Agreed... we don't fix what isn't broken. That would be silly and a waste of our time. As far as what you think *is* broken... if you want to be a little more specific about what you are finding broken, we can look into it.
Slow? Flakey? Ugly? Hard to use? Sorry but I don't think so... DP is quite simple forum, easy to use. DP is not ugly, maybe a little cheerful color would do the magic, but this is definitly not ugly... The only thing I don't like, is too expensive premium membership... and that's all, and solution for that is maybe: Gold, Silver, Bronze membership?
I did a little checking... I suspect the bulk of the issues you are having is because you are not using a modern browser. Firefox 3.0 came out over half a decade ago (which in Internet years is about 1,000 years). Your browser is 22 major versions out of date now. It would be like asking why the latest version of Photoshop isn't working right under Windows 3.1. Just off the top of my head, I know some issues you will experience with Firefox 3.0... It doesn't cache static content properly (versions of Firefox that old didn't adhere to the Cache-Control HTTP headers properly) Does not support SVG images, which we use here (support was added to Firefox in 4.0) Does not support SPDY protocol, which we use here (support was added to Firefox 13.0) The end result is that Firefox 3 uses an old version of the HTTP protocol that doesn't support things like multiplexing, prioritization, header compression, etc. It doesn't support standard image formats used these days for vector images and you will end up redownloading all static content (CSS, JS, images, etc.) on every page view because it doesn't support caching static content. So yeah... I definitely see how you could have those sort of issues. As a test, this thread took 0.0386 seconds to render on our end. Anything beyond that is handled on the client-side (in the browser). You can find charts of what versions of browsers support certain things... SPDY: http://caniuse.com/spdy SVG: http://caniuse.com/svg-html5 As far as what percent of users are using Firefox 3.0 (or later) on this site... it's 0.0019%... probably not a big enough percent to put too much effort into making an old/non-modern version of the site for them.
I have yet to find a forum that gives good facilities than DP. stopped all the spare time that I have to constantly monitor these forums online and just to get the "Welcome To The Establishment" I want to have a positive impact and be a member of that may provide benefits for this forum. Before getting the facilities provided. I think instead of the main display, but mild for accessible and provide a good service it should be.