Paramore-CSI I half agree I understand the wall concept and all but like me and ksull prved anyone can use the wall as a chat spot or a place to fight over celebrity's like JB!!Plus it is really cluttered and i hate that more forums will die now because of it!!

RoHeHa_6264995 Stop complaining. Get used to it. Germany123, I DO read the popular content, it shows me what people like and what's going on on the spot. And I think the more search bars there are, the better, now it's on the top and it will be really hard to ignore it. The club walls are not useless, I use them for important announcements and it is perfect. In fact, that's what I've always been wishing for. And everybody is complaining about drama and spam on the walls, but let's be honest, those JB fan girls have always been awful, and it's not the wall's fault. You can say you'll leave if Fanpop doesn't change back, but I know you wouldn't. You know you love Fanpop. Or at least I know I do. If you want to leave Fanpop only because of some changes in the layout, it means you don't love Fanpop much enough. That's all.

misanthrope86 Oh LOL. Stop complaining about our complaining. We have been articulate here, explaining [b][i]why[/i][/b] we don't like the changes. If you love Facepop, then go ahead and love it. But we have every right to discuss the concerns we have for this place. THAT is what proves we love Fanpop, not the blind acceptance of changes that [u]are[/u] damaging to Fanpop.

lilyZ Ditto! Great article DarkSarcasm.

germany123 [i]Germany123, I DO read the popular content, it shows me what people like and what's going on on the spot.[/i] you are mixing up two things i kept separate. please read what i wrote again to understand what i was really saying.

makintosh I couldn't agree more! Fanpop's new face is driving me insane! Too cluttered for my taste

luinwen I sooo agree, you said everything that has to be said, you are awesome roheha if you love it so much ok love it, but stop complaining about our complains

Paramore-CSI ^right you are missy you have every right

Cinders "Keep in mind that for a comment to be "critical" it should mention something that could be improved, and suggestions for how that could be done. "This sucks" or "Fanpop is Fail" are not examples of critical comments. They're just complaints. But complaints have their place in a public forum as well." This isn't an article and/or comments made up of complaints. They're critical comments. They're constructive and specific. And even if they weren't, I believe complaints are protected under free speech laws.

papa Hello Fanpoppers and Darksarcasm. First off, we appreciate your feedback and DarkSarcasm's thoughtful critique. It shows you care...a lot. Germany123 asked if I have thick skin, and we do (well I do!). So there's no hurt feelings on this end of the equation. I'll try to respond to what points I can in a somewhat haphazard fashion. First a couple of points and perhaps a "mea culpa". First point is that we usually don't make hasty/rushed decisions. We've been contemplating a spot home redesign for 2+ years now. So this design is largely based on some changes we've been mulling over for quite some time. I only mention that because while it's shocking and new to you (and rightly so), it sometimes becomes hard for us to see the forest from the trees when we've become so familiar and comfortable with it. One goal of the changes were (ironically) to clean up some of the clutter on the pages which we felt were becoming overwhelming. So at the very least, our intentions were in line with what you want, though perhaps the results didn't match all of your expectations. Secondly, it's worth noting that some of the decisions we make are business decisions. Fanpop is still a labor of love for us, but the reality is that as the site gets bigger our costs increase (and not always at a nice linear rate). I'll explain some of those decisions when I make some point by point responses, but it's worth noting. Regarding the mea culpa, I think all Fanpoppers have gotten used to the fact that the site evolves and changes. I think in this case we probably threw too much change at you. Usually we can do smaller tweaks and get feedback and react, but in this case we went for a big, big batch of changes. It's certainly something we need to consider going forward. It was easy to make wholesale changes early on when we didn't have a huge (and passionate) audience. I think we're gaining a better appreciation that this approach doesn't work so well at this point in Fanpop's life cycle. That being said, we are reading the feedback and already we've made several changes based on Fanpopper response. The two biggest changes so far are that the wall's position on the homepage has been moved -- perhaps not far enough to siberia as some would like :-) -- and the font size has been decreased (it was much too large, but please remember that some of us in the F4 require glasses and do not have good eyesight!) I cannot guarantee other changes at this point. But I can say we are looking closely at making other "tweaks". Some of those tweaks might address additional concerns you have with the redesign (and maybe bring a smile to your face?) But back to Dasm's points: 1) Layout is more cluttered: As before, our goal was to unclutter the club homepage. But your point is taken. We are looking closely on the impact of the tabbed modules and hiding some of the content. 2) Updates module: This is a tough one. We go back and forth over whether images or videos should be at the top of the page (as they were for a long time) or if updates should be at the top. There's also been debates over whether the updates module which is text heavy is as "interesting" as a bunch of image thumbnails. On top of that, there's the question of balancing the needs of repeat users (who might want updates) with new users (who might need something more visual). I don't have the answer on this one but at least want to give you insight on some of the issues. 2) Popular content. Carries some of the same issues with the repeat fanpopper vs. n00b. But the biggest issue with popular content is that it's very much a business decision. The popular content module is a big boon for our SEO (search engine optimization). Better Google results means more pageviews which means more ad impressions which means we can pay our hefty server bills. Does the module need to go on the side? No, it could be placed further down on the page or back in the left column at the bottom. Regardless, it needs to be on the page and I wanted you to at least understand that this module, while useful for *some* users also serves a very important business end. 3) No link module: I can make no guarantees, but this will likely return. 4) Forums module: Again no guarantee, but we are also looking closely at this one. 5) Image titles below image thumbs. We removed for spacing issues and because scanning on frontpage could be accomplished without. Granted your point about the utility of the titles is valid. I don't think hiding the titles (actually they appear on mouseover) on that module is a detriment to having user-generated titles. 6) Articles module position: Should be improved now that wall has been moved down the page. 7) 3 search bars. Well, we originally wanted 5 search bars. So 3 seems pretty good in retrospect? Kidding :-) Ideally there would only be 2 search bars. On the homepage we'd have the big one and the global search in the top. But we didn't want the club search in the club navigation (grey bar) to be omitted only from the spot home page. It's not ideal, but we figured that it would be acceptable. If it looks like the club search doesn't get used in the new position, we'd certainly reconsider. 8) Quiz/picks which tab gets shown: The modules with the tabs are programmed to show the left-most tab first IF both content types have entries in that club. If a club doesn't have picks but does have quiz questions, then the quiz tab should be active. If that's not the current behavior we have a bug to fix (I will have to recheck). 9) Profiles- Club activity: 2 points. Rationale and an omission. Rationale: The prior navigation on the profile pages didn't have all the activity pages properly clustered together. For instance, you'd have to go to the "activity" page to see what picks I had made and then click on the "picks" link to see what I had voted for. Our goal was to better cluster all the user's club activity in one place and better cluster all their other personal profile content together. If we had enough room, we would have had a grouping of profile-specific links on one side of the grey bar and a group of links to club activity on the other side. But sadly, we didn't have room for that so the alternative was the dropdown. Now on the omission part of the equation. We haven't incorporated a proper navigation link so that you can toggle between content types while viewing an activity page that would allow you to skip returning to the dropdown (which is a pain). This solution wouldn't solve your problem 100%, but it would make it much easier to navigate once you were looking at someone's activity. Additionally, we should probably make "view my activity" linkable so you can go straight to the activity pages without going through the dropdown. Again, this wouldn't solve 100% of the issue, but it would be a big improvement. I hope I explained that well. 10) Photos link vs. props link: Rationale here was that props was now a part of wall and that we wanted to have all the other important parts of your profile page in the navigation bar so photos was naturally included. I think you can go either way on this one. 11) Updates link when visiting another user's page. This was an oversight, it probably should be removed. There are other changes that need to be made to the profile page so I won't respond to all of your comments here since I think some of them will be addressed. 12) Why was this prioritized: Your point is valid. There's a million and one different things that can be fixed on the site. Why this? For this answer, I'd go back to the issue I raised earlier re: business decisions driving some of the choices we make. We're always looking for ways to increase site usage, pageviews, "stickyness". That's our goal. Whether or not we've hit the mark is really decided by you, the audience (and then we need to change course if we've missed the mark). Additionally, the profile and spot changes don't exist in a vacuum. They're part of a larger plan of enhancements/tweaks that will (at this point) be slowly introduced made over the course of the next year or two. So while you can't see where all of this is going, we've got a roadmap that leads to something and some of these changes are helping us move some of those pieces into place. Of course, we aren't making all these changes at once. Which hopefully is reassuring to you because it gives us chances to take a breath, take stock, get feedback, etc. There's no doubt that at any given time we could be doing a dozen other things on the site. Flagging system? Definitely. Medals? Good God I'm already getting a headache thinking about it. Help Pages? Always. It's one piece at a time. Btw, we will be introducing flagging for the walls. Believe me, as someone who has to deal with the stuff that gets flagged I *really really* want this. Ok that's it for now. This is my longest comment of all time. I'm sorry I cannot respond to every single one of your comments/suggestions but we do want you to know that we care. We care what you think. We care when you are upset or frustrated. We all want the same thing a better, brighter, happier Fanpop. We will take as much of this constructive feedback as we can absorb and try to improve the site in a way that meets your needs (which are the most important) with the needs of the business (which are also very important b/c if we can't pay our bills, we can keep the site up!). And I still love all you Fanpoppers. So feel free to vandalize my wall if you need to vent.

Eline_K ^ This is what I love about Fanpop. Users can express their opinion, and it will actually be heard! You all really care about this site, so I trust you with all the changes you made and I'm sure you will perfect it until most Fanpoppers can't even image how we could've ever lived with the old layout.

DarkSarcasm Thanks for the info, papa. While I'm still not thrilled about the new layout, the reason for the change is making more sense now. It's good to know that you guys still care about what we think. And I'm honored that your longest comment of all time was on something I had to do with. =P I suppose I can stop ignoring the existence of the 'popular content' now that I know its purpose... ;)

germany123 yep- thanks papa as always youre a star for listening and helping oot and trying to explain things. i think the quiz activity needs to be worked on as when i view my activity all i can see is quizzes i have taken not the quizzes i have asked. also i have an issue with the comment alerts: much like on answers the comments we leave can not be followed by us when we write on a [b]wall[/b]. if i comment on a wall post or on an answer i would like them to appear like a "regular" comment in my activity section where i can monitor my recent activity at a glance.if i leave a message on a users wall and they "answer" me with a comment i have to go back to that wall to see if someone commented on it or not. i am used to doing this with other stuff (if i dont add a thread to my updates) but this way i dont even have the comment i left in my "history" of recent activity. i still think we should be able to subscribe to answers instead of getting an alert EVERY time a question is answered- also we could subscribe to walls.(this way the people who like them get updates on spot walls the people who dont like it can filter it). another plus when subscribing would be that we get feedback for the questions we ask on spots we are NOT a fan of. i think it should work like all other content not have one update process for articles/quizzes/picks and another for answers!

papa ^ A bunch of problems you've pointed out are bugs. We'll need to fix them. This includes some of the navigational things that Dasm mentioned as well as the disappearing quizzes-i-made link Germany mentions. Will knock these off one at a time. After that we'll review the other issues raised. But first thing is to get the stuff that should be working to work again.

OceanCoast Papa, thanks so much for listening and actually caring about what the Popper's have to say. You don't know how many sites I've left (Flixter, I'm looking at you) because the site made "business model" changes and could've cared less about what it did to cripple the site and users that made it so popular. It means a lot that you care so passionately about your users, that you have acted as fast as you did to fix things and keep us happy. Your amazing. Thank you.

misanthrope86 Yep thanks for the explanation papa because, thus far we haven't had much response about these issues from the people that actually know about them.But, like DarkSarcasm, I don't feel a whole lot better about it... I still can't, for the life of me, understand why half the content of a spot is now hidden. Which, by the way, is a nightmare for those of us who don't have the best internet connections. Sorry to the F4 if it seems like we are just yelling and complaining, but we yell because we care.

dave We weren't trying to hide the content intentionally we were actually trying to help clean things up a bit because we just had SO much content that we thought it was overwhelming and cluttered so we thought we would streamline it and consolidate with the tabs. We had no idea that everyone actually used the club homepage so much to navigate. We honestly didn't even know people were using Links that much anymore. Now that we know, we'll take that into account and reconsider.

dave And yes, the F4 have feelings too and we take it kinda personally when everyone says our hard work sucks and that we failed. You know we care about you guys and are doing our best to make things constantly better. Although some of you hate the walls, many who are unhappy with them are ironically using them to voice their opinions more easily and openly. That's exactly why we created them, so people don't have to go misusing Answers and other features that hide their opinions in places where people don't see them.

misanthrope86 I can assure you links are very popular. Especially in bigger spots like the House MD spot. And I don't know about anybody else, but I always used to go to the main pages of my favourite spots too look at the recent activity because every section was on display and I could see new images/videos/links/articles/forums all on one page. So thats why the new layout seems to be "hiding" things, from my perspective. I haven't yet used the wall except to comment on things that other people have posted, and I have been forced to use it for props. I still don't know what the spot walls are for really. So far I've seen people use them to shout opinions, ask questions that would normally be Questions and ask questions that would normally be picks. Is the wall going to replace the Answers feature? Or is the wall just an outlet for... general comments? I'm sure its terrible to do all that hard work and then have crazies like us question it. We don't mean to belittle your work or be unappreciative. Its just a little upsetting to have the Fanpop we know and love ripped away without warning, at least from our perspective.

shieldmaiden Thanks papa for explaining everything so clearly and thanks to the F4 for working so hard on this site. I've loved it so much for the past 3 years and seeing it go through a HUGE change so quickly (in my view) and with what I felt was little warning (probably because I don't check this spot often) is probably why I've been feeling more than sour about the change. I apologize if I hurt your feelings by bashing the layout, it was never my intention to do so and hope you know that I am so very thankful for this site's creation. Without it I wouldn't have met some of the incredibly amazing people I now know, like smoore23 (who I still miss terribly!!! >.<). I'm looking forward to seeing the site continue to grow and develop and I will always be willing and happy to provide feedback! Thanks for making this site the most AWESOME site on the internet and thanks for really taking our concerns seriously and explaining to us in detail what's going on. I think the fact that you guys do that sets you high above a lot of other sites, especially Facebook. This will always be, to me, the Fanpop I first stumbled upon in '07 and fell in love with. :)

papa Oh my feelings aren't hurt! I appreciate the feedback and the sentiment. We're having a lot of internal debates because of it. And a lot of small changes are happening daily that are addressing some of these concerns and bugs.

HouseJr Here is my opinion. The Wall: Very unoriginal and facebook-y but could be useful, I am much more a fan of it now that it has been moved to the bottom of the page instead of the top. Now it didn't win me over at first for one reason and that is when I went to see how it was working out in my spots (the two that I created) the first thing I saw was spam from one of my less active users asking for people to fan them. I was just about to yell at them but thought "Well she is a member of the spot and besides.." in the end I decided against it purely because I didn't want to be called a hypocrite for posting right after (which I was going to either way) what I consider "good" spam (if there is such a thing XD) gently reminding my members to stay active and invite any of their friends that might enjoy the spot. So yes the wall is a good thing in a way that it can help sometimes passed over and "dead" spots liven up with a much easier way to get message out to the spot's community. For example on another spot I run I am at the end of a new banner contest and was able to remind everyone to vote before the pick closes in just a few days. The New Layout: This is where I draw the line, the new layout is cluttered and covers waaay too much up under tabs that half the population isn't going to bother to click. And my biggest pet peeve with this would have to be the lack of links on the home page, I've heard that the F4 is planing on fixing this, I just wish they would hurry up cause it annoys the crap out of me. When I come to a spot I do two things 1.I take a quick look at the updates box (which has now been shoved over to the right and made a little difficult to see or notice) 2.I manually check for new content in each of the section, EVERY SINGLE ONE, so now that is hard for me, not only do I have to click back and forth on tabs to get most stuff. But for links I have to go to a whole new page!!! All of these unwanted and unwarranted changes only affirms what I believe a lot of people including myself are thinking, the old fanpop is gone and/or quickly vanishing. I consider myself a part of a very close group of people from the House MD spot, which has become smaller and smaller because of several key people that have left FP and moved on. And between that and the changes and the new comers, even the small group that is left hesitates to be active, because personally it doesn't even feel like the same website anymore. Take all of that the into consideration next time you guys decide to do something like this, and maybe you'll think twice. Maybe you'll realize keeping the loyal and true users like me here, instead of making a bunch of useless changes to try and attract new people, is the way you should go. EDIT: I really should read all the other comments before I vent shouldn't I? XD Oh well, thank you very much papa and dave for commenting on this and making me feel much better about it all. I'm so happy to see that you guys care so much, keep up the great work. No matter Fanpop will always be my favortie sit, EVER!!! <3

michael Papa may have thick skin, but MY feelings were hurt (for a couple hours after launch as I frantically tried to fix as many bugs as possible)... but I'm over it now. We have a bunch of fixes in the works, but remember we only have two programmers at Fanpop. Please be patient with us, we do try our best to make this site as good for our users as it can be.

Squibblings DarkSarcasm, I adore your imput at the debate forum, and this work is just a supurb. You've voiced what I don't like about this updated layout better than I could.

emmett This is a great article and pointed out a few things I hadn't even realised yet, so thanks :) I'm kind of maybe possibly getting used to the whole wall thing... still not my favourite thing on the site but it's not absolutely awful and horrible as I once thought.