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My opinion is the website isn't much different but the quality of the articles has gone way down. In fact the lack of competence is a complete joke. Your writers may be experts at something but it's not the technology they are writing about. Getting writer from tabloid tech sites and so on, not grounding your conclusions, the list goes on.

Wish you guys the best of luck!
 



Can you point to specific articles that aren't up to the "Tom's Hardware" standard? It would help me a great deal.

 



its not that the articles aren't up to standard...
no complaints of the quality of articles... when I do read them...
more of a complaint of the content...

for example 780i motherboards have been out for a while...
no reviews on this site...

if a review was done on one board... a week later on another...
it would feed your site with more content...

then do a final comparison...

we are hardware enthusiasts...
you have articles on cars?

most of us overclock...
would be nice if there was a nice write up on it... instead of having to dig through the forums...
well that is what it use to be before it became commercialized
 
I like the new layout. It'll take awhile for me to get around.

Although I am not too crazy with the light cyan color on the front page. It's too hard to read. I think black words are better for most people.

Just a thought.

Darkk
 
Same thing here (obviously). The URL needs to be changed to the forum home page instead of tomshardware.com
 
Another vote for the scrolling forums.

Another vote for something better for the 29 page articles. Maybe a 'single page' option?

Is it just me or does the back arrow not work as expected?

Is it just me or does the site now re-connect every few seconds?
 


Sure, how about the article about Vista and RAM. One of your conclusions was with 4 Gb you are better with x86. However none of the benchmark support this conclusions. I'm not even saying it's the wrong conclusion but the closest you came to grounding it was that x64 uses more RAM. Then my favorite one is the liquid cooling road-up. In this video test you tested liquid cooling mediums. The odd thing was plain H2O was omitted which should have been your baseline. Then folks out there would know how crappy premixes really perform. Sure many add additives for component protection or non-conductive solutions for safety but you need a baseline for any test. There are many others but those are two examples off the top of my head.

I also have an issue with some of the hardware test where the opposition is oddly omitted. Now if this is because vendor X imposed this requirement that's fine but in the old days that would have been pointed out.

At one time I had so much faith in the articles from Tom's that I started with the conclusion and dug deeper for what mattered to me. Now I grab the headline and Google other sites for the complete picture. I guess I was lazy but I liked the one stop shopping aspect of it.

Lastly the forums are filled with posters posting blatantly incorrect information. I'm not talking about the subjective stuff either. Best I can tell nothing is done about it, ever. Just about everyone has made a bad post before but some of this stuff is posted by someone who really doesn't have a clue and it's posted as fact. These are usually the posts asking for advice. Part of me says, well they will learn their lesson from not fact checking and corroborating the advice the other part of me feels sorry for them. There are many different approaches that can be taken on this and it's just as much a community thing as a Tomshardware issue but it needs to be addressed.
 


Bad Kittah, BAD!!!!! No kibbles for you!!!! :non: :pt1cable: 😉

Unlike ombudsman, Im not employed by BoM, but I was around long enough before I was a mod to bitch&whine some answers out folks. So, Im going to give some answers to a bunch of questions.

1) Intelitext: or as I like to think of it 'retard-i-text'. Yet another lameass paid advert, but one with 2 functional solutions:
a) disable flash in your browser.....errr.... or quicktime. I forget which one it is, prolly flash as that tends to be the scumbag advertisers weapon of choice.
b) Opt out. Clic one of the lame retarditext ads, on the more info option, go to the parent site. NOT the advertisers site, but the actual Vibrant site. Look for the "opt out" option. Its in REALLY small text (almost like they didnt want you to find it....huh) Clic on the opt out option. Let it cycle then close the browser and reopen. Poof!!! Retarditext gone.

2) 29 page articles.....see 3) Sreen width

3) Screen width.
"The page width, which we fight over back and forth, on the design end, is based on the reported resolution of people's browsers"
Click to expand...
O RLY???? Well thats friggin news to me. See way back when, when BoM actually shrunk the screen width down, it had nothing to do with "reported resolutions" it was to make the site more 'mobile' friendly, i.e to display better on cell phones, PDAs etc. So they could reach a broader audiance.........and advertise to it. Same thing with the umpteen page articles....nothing to do with "editorial choices" when it was implemented.

4) Ads and retardicles: Get over it folks. It sucks, but when Omid pimped TH so he could sell it, he achieved what he wanted: a commercialized, quantity over quality, high hit rate site. And thus, he got what he really wanted.....a buyer with a big offer....BoM.

5) Text clipping, french subtitles, broken links etc: LOL....they really didnt scrub this new layout. The first time BoM changed the site, when they first bought out Omid, they (or at least Freddi) asked the mods, admins and whoever they could get to go through the new layout before it went public. This time however, like the last big update, they simply dropped it, flaws and all, into place Que Sera Sera......get used to seeing half lines of text and wonderful little pop ups like "Afficher la colonne de droite" , whatever TF that means :sarcastic:. And, if this update procedes like the last update, its going to be months before this gets squared away.

Sorry folks, thats the unofficial, unpaid, been here too long list of answers.
 
You could use Adblock Plus to block IntelliTxt too :) I'm not complaining about having IntelliTxt, I'm just saying it's stupid to have it where it is. It makes the heading difficult to read especially if you are red/green colorblind.

Wow, this ultra wide forum feels weird now. But I'll get used to it much more easily than when they made it narrower than the artistic streak of a maths PhD.

I also don't get what the "reviews" thing on the profile is all about. Are we able to submit reviews or something?
 


1: The Green links, Echotopics, are not working as designed they're in the wrong places. It's being worked on.

3: Screen width: Under the new design, pages should be wider. The left hand navigation has been removed, meaning more article space. There have also been changes to the forum widths, which I'm a little surprised no one has commented on yet..

I'd rather focus on the here and now issue of "How long should the page be" on this issue, rather than the past.

4: I don't know Omid and his decisions well enough to talk to what Turpit is saying.

Bestofmedia is a very metric and proof heavy kind of company. One of the metrics is "are the users happy?". I contend that "The users like their Tom's Hardware to be hardcore. They want well written technically perfect articles based on evidence." and to prove that it's what the users want, and not just me making stuff up, I need my own evidence, such as direct feedback from the users in the forums.

Much comes down to "what gets prioritized"?

For example, the feedback is pretty overwhelming in favor if that scrolling forum thing on the homepage.

The followup I have to ask is: What elements of the scrolly thing do the users want?

In this case, I"m guessing that it's a way of getting an overview of all forums activity, without having to navigate through the forums.


5: The quality at launch of this set of updates stands on it's own merits, for better or for worse.

If this fixes on this update go like the last set of forum updates, it means I will have failed, and I should be fired from this job.

I think it would have been a good idea to show the updates to the mods. I have no idea of why it didn't happen.

I made the request to change that "Afficher la colonne de droite" thing 12 hours ago. I'm showing it fixed on my view right now.


 
"Much comes down to "what gets prioritized"?

For example, the feedback is pretty overwhelming in favor if that scrolling forum thing on the homepage.

The followup I have to ask is: What elements of the scrolly thing do the users want?

In this case, I"m guessing that it's a way of getting an overview of all forums activity, without having to navigate through the forums. "

Thats it exactly,
a good overview of a wide selection from the forums not just 6 or 7 links.
this will keep the forum traffic high and not kill it off.

otherwise it just takes to long to troll through the forums to spot and interesting thread.

to illustrate the point:
i live in the uk but i always used the us .com site because of the scrolling forums section.
the uk site had the static thing just as the us one now has and i deliberatly avoided it as a result.

 

Didn't you read my previous post? It's nice to be able to hide the "latest news" on the right hand side of the forum to make it as wide as possible. Thumbs up for that, should have been done a long time ago 😉 It's weird, my monitor is 4:3 but this almost feels like 16:10 now :lol:

Now just speed up the backend so that I don't sit at the "Message successfully deleted" screen for 15 seconds :lol:

I'd still also like to know what the "reviews" thing is in the profile box up the top.
 

I posted my comment earlier, but must have put it in a different section as I don't see it here.

I dislike that the "Latest News" headlines are so long that they wrap to a second line. That in turn means that half as many headlines can be seen in one glance. I would 1) Edit those babies so they only take one line, and 2) Scroll them.

 
I'm not sure I get the logic of this (actually, I'm sure I don't get the logic at all)...

The TH site is fixed at a narrow width in order to fit on a 1024x768 resolution monitor, yet it's okay for the Forums to resize dynamically. Not only that, but in the Forums (which are 1350 pixels wide on my 1680x1050 monitor), I can hide the right column to make them even wider! Running the Forums at full 1680 width is like trying to read a tennis match. I actually have to move my head from side to side--that's too wide--so I'll keep the right column visible (god, is this guy never satisfied?).

So, I don't get it. Why can we make the wide part of the site even wider but not the too-skinny part? And if it's okay for one part to resize dynamically, why shouldn't the whole site do the same?
 
Two other notes about the site:
1. When I click the arrow to get the drop-down to see the many sections of a story, only the first 7 sections have a white background (thus blocking the writing underneath). All the rest are transparent, so it's hard to read.
2. The charts in the stories are good, but I wish each one had a note in the legend "More is better" or "Lower is better", etc. I know I should be able to discern it by seeing in the left legend that the scale is in MFlops or parsecs/millisecond, but the point of graphs is to give the reader a quick way to visualize comparisons, and this would make it a little easier. It's done in some graphs, but not others.
 



There's no single reason why something as complicated as fixed vs dynamic is put in. Dynamic, for example makes it much harder to troubleshoot, and get to look nice, because there are an infinite number of possible layouts.

I know that mobile has been evaluated. The idea that you can pull up Tom's Hardware on your phone as you are in the aisles at your local computer store has merit, but a decision like this is not only going to be made on that issue..

I don't think it's too much of a shocker that the designers wanted to try dynamic sizing on only one part of the website, rather than put it everywhere.

Is the site better in terms of width? Are the layout glitches worth it?
 
Hi,

Very bad news concerning this acquisition by "Best Of Media"

Fusion, Acquisition or whatever are all time bad for customer.
I HATE monopoly.

Just look now how practically all paper news, paper magazine, have same proprietor, owner.

To have power I will not permit any Fusion, Acquisition.
It's just good to Rich and bank.

So I think Tom's Hardware will be less good soon and many people will lose their job cause "restructuration".

Capitalist is c**p but 99% of people love it. The 1% dream to Communist, which is c**p too.

It's pity TM sale his soul.
But all Companies do that today.

🙁



 
Forum stuff:
Forum options' signature box is too tiny to do anything.
Also, is there ways to remove the personal profile thing up top?
Can we have a checkbox in the quick reply section to disable signature for the post.


Website stuff:
With only 10 forum threads listed on the front page, it seems like there is no point having it on the front page any more. More posts or remove it. It is a waste of space right now.
Wider page option please.
It is Tom's HARDWARE. I would rather see more hardware stuff listed on the front page instead of being a portal. I've said my word about how much the old front page sucked. New one is even worse. I guess I'll just change my bookmark to tomshardware.com/review then.
 
I typically take a look at Toms hardware at night these days on a P4M 2.0ghz cheapo laptop with 1gb of ram. With the new format change, I've noticed massive increases in processor usage and some downright silly behavior. I run Firefox 2 with Noscript installed and I can see the many many piles of junk that also load with the tomshardware pages which is a major frustration in itself. However to use the article pulldowns (to go to another page in the article) I now have to allow the base site in addition to bestofmedia... it would be convenient if such basic function was a component of the base domain so that I don't have to spend time diagnosing what to unlock just to see tomshardware pages. Also, tomshardware is now one of the very few sites that simply bogs this older laptop down completely, chewing its battery up.

Does tomshardware and the associated sites really need to run such intensive and inefficient content? I can watch video laden or heavily intensive multimedia sites that are not as hard on this laptop. My suggestion would be to work on making the code for this site more efficient and to cut down on additional crap content for users of less powerful & mobile machines. Yes, of course I have more powerful laptops and some very powerful multi-processor multi-monitor machines but I don't think that is an excuse for a website that bogs down older hardware. It seems to me that as the tiny web browsing machines like the eepc, olpc, cell phones, etc become more popular that tomshardware and its sites should be simplifying rather than bogging down simpler hardware.

I enjoyed the site 2 revisions ago when it actually linked directly to reviews and content as well....
 
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