Any opinions? Better or worse?

 

not so easy to read imo and the ads continue to annoy me

 

The only time I'm ever on WUS is if I'm following a FS ad from an aggregator. Seems like it's quicker and laid out a bit better which is nice.

Last time I went, last week, each time you scrolled across an image, a video ad would block it until you closed it. That was terrible. Fortunately doesn't seem to be part of the redesign, at least not yet

 

Still a bit confusing for me.

 

The video Ad is what stopped me from even following a FS listing on Watchrecon- it would open and pop up and I would just immediately close it. I wonder if the people who post in the FS section know how many sales they have lost because of that...although with as much traffic as they get I doubt they even care.

 

This was happening to me, and it turned out to be adware. I cleaned up my computer and it went away.

 

The "Upgrade to Premium Membership" button is an ominous sight. It's actually a pretty reasonable rate to get rid of ads, but I've never seen a forum yet that didn't gradually make the free version unusable until everyone either coughed up a fee or (usually) just abandoned the site altogether.

 

Yet I did not check all new functionalities, but briefly - I like it.
Layout is simple and easy to read.
Posting is faster and without the double-post errors, finally.
Mobile version works as it should be, finally.
$20 p.a. sounds reasonable for the ads-free profile, tho I am not going to use it as even with a regular membership ads are not a problem.
They changed "search engine" so search results may be incomplete until the new engine is done with indexation of data.

 

Awful layout and difficult to read.

 

Looks fine to me.

 

Same format as used on the Seiko Citizen Watch Forum, which changed over earlier this year.

You get used to it after a while.

OF usability is still the best by a long way!

 

I find it amazingly similar to this interface. There are some differences but several behaviors lead me to suspect it's running on the same platform.

I paid the ransom, not because I was annoyed with ads but because they actually provide a service that was worth a mere $20/year.

I run adblockers and have since the original hosts file in the bad old days (for the uninformed, a hosts file is like DNS but overrides it. You point all the ad slinging sites to your localhost [127.0.0.1] and none of the ads show up. It was magic back in the nineties). I've never seen and ad on WUS, old or new interface.

The thing that a premium membership allows is to remove the blank right half of the interface, so it looks pretty much identical to OF.

Perhaps other VerticalScope forums will take the hint and ask a nominal fee for a better interface. Hard to say. But I really see many commonalities in WUS and OF, so I wouldn't be surprised if take-up on WUS leads to some changes here.

 

It is something extra than the adblockers (I assume)
Care to tell us more how to set it up, is extra app needed or something in browser configuration?

 

Well, there are things I like, and others I don't.

On the like side of things, if someone quotes a very long post, the entire post is not displayed over and over again, but only a small portion of it with a window where you can expand it all if you want. Good space saver. Layout is generally clean, and I don't have to read all the signatures unless I want to, which is nice. Seems PM's are not as limited as they were before, because I was always running out of space, and now I don't see anything related to how much available space I have, so hopefully that means I don't have to delete things so often.

On the not so good side...you used to be able to tell quickly what threads you had contributed to just by looking at the index of threads, but now there doesn't appear to be a way to tell that at a glance. Some forums I would click on a post to read it, and then just click to the next post and work my way through the forum that way - that functionality seems to be gone now. Now it's like here, where you must back out to the thread index and select the next thread. To me that is a step backwards in design. And yes, the adverts...there is pretty much zero chance I'll ever pay to have access to a watch forum, so...

There are some trophy things that get awarded to you for something? No idea what that is for, or the "reaction score" or "points" that appear to be in my profile.

I'm sure I'll get used to it...but I prefer OF's interface over most others.

 

What I do is just open the threads in new tabs - in most browsers, clicking the center scroll wheel on your mouse will do it automatically. Makes it easier to read the forum using the "Latest" function

 

I get what they're trying to do, but it's a hot mess – and like, five years too late.

 

like others, I mainly use it for the FS (via aggregators), which means I mostly find myself PM'ing folks. That functionality seems to have significantly improved, which is a welcome update.

 

It's like OF but worse (in every way) =)

 

This kind of thing I could do without:



The gamification of the site is another ominous sign, in my opinion. I don't mean to slam the site admins behind their back and have no reason to think they're not 100% honest brokers, but I think this kind of frippery tends to foreshadow a site becoming increasingly focused on trying to wheedle nickels from its users. Or maybe I'm wrong and watch fans really wish they were playing Farmville when they talk about watches.

 

Yeah, everyone gets a cookie.