Tuesday, January 23, 2007

What have they done to Chowhound now?

Some of us are still getting over the massive redesign of Chowhound from last summer, and here they go and change the format again. Pros:
  • You can see more posts on a page now
  • There's finally a place to list one's blog on one's profile (no self-promotion, though, please!)
  • You can post photos on each post.

Cons:

  • It's been really slow and buggy since the changeover, but perhaps that will improve.
  • The list of boards is a colorful jumble now instead of a neat list.
  • Many readers are unhappy with the new format which seems to emphasize large areas of maroon background.
"I haven't felt this bad about a piece of media since Whole Earth Quarterly went belly-up in the middle of my subscription," says Chowhound poster Silverlake Bodhissatva.

9 comments:

Tim said...

They made it look more like Digg. Some of the UI elements are great, but overall, the fact that it looks and acts like Digg is a turn-off.

If you want a UI built for 14-year-old gamers then Digg is perfect. Otherwise, it's a bit dispiriting to see it cloned, more so on a great site like Chowhound.

It's their site, to be sure, but I have to imagine they could do better. With that in mind, perhaps it's time to be a little patient and assume that they will smooth out the rough edges as time permits. It could be much, much worse.

Anonymous said...

FYI, I just noticed that if you click the arrow next to "Boards" then you get the original list of boards by topic..

Anonymous said...

That's "bodhisattva"

Anonymous said...

That's Hedley!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this - I thought I was losing my mind last night as I did a search and kept getting the chow.com page.....with that said - I HATE IT. With all this time spent on OVER designing while their search engine is horrible, HORRIBLE. Why can't good be left alone or if better is the goal then don't release better until it is BETTER. Over all experience : FRUSTRATING.

H. C. said...

not sure if it's something I outright hate (and will continue hating) or if it's something I need to get used to. But for now, with its bugginess and slow load times, I can't stand it and will probably sit it out for a week before doing a re-eval.

Anonymous said...

They also broke the RSS feed. Instead of getting the original item and having to click through to the comments, every comment comes into my reader. I unsubscribed because there was just too much noise to get anything of value... and there is no way to leave any feedback.

Anonymous said...

Redesign or not, Chowhound's practice of arbitrary and unexplained deletions of posts continues unabated. You would think the redesign fiasco would have humbled the founder and his cult, but their disrespect for those who contribute the content to Chowhound persists.

Anonymous said...

They deleted my posts for no reason at all!!! I wasnt even using bad language, Im always cheerful & respectful to others! I HATE CHOWHOUND!