I've always found activity on the Forum sporadic i.e. there are a few posts and then it all dies down again.Some other Forums are quieter still. Personally I'd rather have fewer more relevant/ interesting posts than a lot of waffle that you see on Forums elsewhere.

Its also still the Holiday season,albeit the end of it, so maybe this partially explains things.

Regards

" Or is it the necessity of logging in every time you want to post putting people off? "

It puts me off, a little.  Especially from making one-sentence posts where it takes longer to remember the details and log in than it does to write the post.

I find the new website and forum very confusing and unpleasant to use. The forum's chaotic layout puts me off from using it. I only bothered to register to reply to this topic. The old website and forum were actually more nice and easier to use (even though the entire site was inside an iFrame)...

Unfortunately there are some major usability issues with the new website and forum. I hoped the new website and forum would be better, but they're not.

Baccus is a great company and I have had a great experience dealing with them and painting their fabulous miniatures. Too bad their site doesn't give me a good experience as well.

I also miss all the stuff that was in the old forum. There was some great stuff in the gallery and lots of helpful info. Now the forum is pretty much empty and dead so I'm no longer interested in visiting it as much as I did before.

The constant logging in is a pain, and some of the threads still don't automatically retain the thread title so that has to be typed in as well. Generally I scan the forum to see if there has been new activity, then log in only if a comment is necessary - like now. Personally I think the forum looks good but it still feels as though it has rough edges which need smoothing off - I would have expected this to have been done already.

This is failry normal when you turn over a forum. You lose a lot of members and momentum. Just a part of the cost of this kind of redesign.

Overall I think the new site is light years ahead of the old in terms of the structure and usability. The old iFrames were a huge problem that drove me bonkers. The real issue is the loss of the old content. My own little hobby web site still draws over 10,000 unique visitors a month becasue it has loads of content. With the loss of the gallery and lots of the articles, and combined with a new look and having to re-register, a loss of users/activity was inevitable.

Once Peter and the team are back to full strength I'm sure they'll have time to devote to it, and help revive it. I know personally I've moved on from SYW to other periods - the Plains Indian Wars and SciFi - which I game in 15mm so other than a quick daily glance I don't drop by as often as I used to .

"This is failry normal when you turn over a forum. You lose a lot of members and momentum. Just a part of the cost of this kind of redesign."

The old forum software (Simple Machine Forums) was a common software that should allow all the content to be migrated to any of the othere main other (free) forum softwares that are available. A simple Google search shows many ways on migrating an SMF forum to any other forum software, or even how to export it and import it into a new SMF database. None of the content had to be lost. I don't know what kind of forum software this is. I hope it's not custom built because that's a waste of money for a small website like this. If not, then I wonder why the content from the old forum was not migrated to the new forum.

"Overall I think the new site is light years ahead of the old in terms of the structure and usability."

It is true that in some aspects the new site is light years ahead of the old site, but at the same time it is also light years behind of what you may expect of a modern usable website. For example why isn't the new website responsive? Any modern website should be responsive. (responsive means that the website automatically adapts to any screen size, whether it's your desktop computer, tablet, smartphone, tv, or whatever)

Building a new website is a big investment for small companies like Baccus. That's why it's so sad to see that the site is already "bad" now because there probably won't be any money to build a new one for the next couple of years. And there are too many tiny things wrong that it's better and cheaper to start from scratch. Until then we're stuck with this site which, although in some aspects is better than the previous site, is still not as nice as I think Peter intended it to be.

Don't get me wrong, I love Baccus' overal user experience and I love their figures. At least Baccus has pictures of all its products on its website... something many other miniatures companies still have to get right!

I'd like to put my money where my mouth is, so if you're interested Peter, I can design a new site for you that does justice to Baccus' great user experience.*

*I'm a professional webdesigner with a large focus on user experience design.

I find the new site easy enough to use, except that for some reason I couldn't get my avatar to stick.

I have noticed a general down turn on virtually all wargaming chat groups however.  I don't know why that is.  I would rather slower traffic than some of the weird, off topic mosh pits on formerly wargame related sites though, that is for sure.

Is the sense of a hobby slowdown general or just me?  I certainly have a lot of things going on that are diverting me from gaming right now.  It is an act of will to maintain an interest in the hobby presently, but this is for personal reasons.  Do others see an overall decline in discourse and excitement though?

The only problem I have with the site is that I log in so infrequently (because there's not much to respond to) that I have to do a "forgot my password" pretty much every time because it's so long since I used it I've forgotten what I changed it to last time!

This and the Pendraken forum are the wargaming forums I visit most often. I prefer the regular tumble weed here to the firestorms over nothing on some of the others I dip into.

Would be nice if the forum were more active but other than that I'm pretty happy with it.

Feel free to say some people are easy pleased :-)

I will join you in the easily pleased camp, ithoriel.