If It's Not Broken...DO NOT FIX IT!

Well, I realize that it's been at least a week now since the Gather update, but I wanted to really get a feel for it before I wrote a blog on it. After all, there was a lot of people jumping to conclusions, saying that the change was bad, having hardly used it, and I didn't really think that was fair. It was exactly the same as to how everyone reacted when Youtube put up new channel pages. Sure they had a few bugs, but in a matter of weeks, all of those bugs were fixed, and I now like them much better than the previous channel pages.

This on the other hand, is something that I don't think can be fixed in any way other than going back to what we had before. I mean, I tried the page for a few days, and as where Gather claimed that it would be easier to find everything, it ended up becoming more difficult. I mean one of the changes is that the top of the gather page where it says Share, Groups, Friends, My Gather, had been changed so that it would be easier to navigate the site.

This is not easier however, as everything had been placed in exactly the right place before the change. Sure, it may have been a little confusing to a brand new Gather member, but it took me a matter of minutes to figure it out upon my first visit. So now that they've changed it, I'm constantly looking for links that aren't there, and quite frankly, it bothers the crud out of me.

By the same token, they've moved Mail, Points, and Tasks to the top of the Gather page. This is extremely frustrating, as they're placed in a way that no one would think to look, new member or not. I'm constantly moving my mouse to where Mail always has, and always should be, and it's not there. This gets extremely bothersome, and while I'm sure we'll all adapt in due time, I just don't see a good reasoning behind moving it like that.

What possibly bothers me the most about this change, is that while we veteran members have the choice of the new page and the old page, we don't have a choice over the old Gather and the New Gather. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought that the old Gather was perfect in every way (unless you're a customization freak, as there's not much of that), and this new Gather is just a bad case of, Too much, too soon.

Moving on to the new gather pages, I would just like to ask if I'm the only one who thinks that everything is a little out of place. On every social network I've ever used, your username and picture are in the corner of the page, while all of your feeds are to the right of it. In this new Gather page however, the picture and username and status are all in the middle, above the feed. It's not a huge problem, and certainly something that you could live with, but it's just a little mind boggling as to why they would choose to set it up this way.

I will hand it to them though, it is a little easier with the feeds, as all the group feeds are properly grouped together, and all of the Gather Essential feeds are properly grouped together; there's no confusion with any of them, which is definitely a plus.

Possibly the biggest problem that's come out of this mess, is all of the bugs that it's caused throughout the site. I don't know if it's just me, but I had to post the Saw VI review six times before it actually posted, as every time I clicked submit, it either took me to an error page, or it took me to my gather page. It's kind of a pain.

Also, I was trying to put the poster into the review, they way that I always do, but it wouldn't let me add photos (once again taking me to either an error page or my home page every time I clicked to add photos)and I had to copy some HTML from an old review into the new one, and if you're the average PC user, than you know how frustrating HTML can be at times, no matter the wonderful things it can do. I really hope that I don't have to keep doing this in the future...

Another bug that I've been noticing is that sometimes, I can't delete my eMails. I'll try to delete them, the page will refresh....AND THE EMAILS ARE STILL THERE!!!! Do you have any idea how frustrating this can be???

Anyway, to wrap things up, I'll just recite the age old saying-it it's not broken, don't fix it. Words of wisdom my friends, words of wisdom....

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