Quote Originally Posted by RobinK View Post
  1. Reviews: There used to be a really great review section. Many, if not most, people are attracted to niche sites such as this by high quality reviews. Those are gone. I understand that there is a technical problem that prevents you guys from putting the review section, and maybe even the old reviews, back up. But it is a fact that they are missing - badly.
  2. Mentoring: Maybe the idea was good, but putting it to work was too resource intensive. But I still believe that if it had worked, the mentoring programme would have attracted a significant number of recurring, active contributors.
  3. Buy/Sell/Trade: Like the reviews section, this section used to be easily accessible, functional, and offered the opportunity to leave constructive feedback. Again, as far as I understand, there is a technical problem preventing you from bringing back the old system. But, again, the current system is simply worse, and far less functional, and therefore unattractive.
  4. Wiki: My pet peeve. It took several man months to build. After the guys who built it retired, someone messed it up badly. While it sill contains valuable information, it is partly broken, and now also contains subjective, badly written opinion pieces.
  5. The forum itself: When I joined ten or so years back, it was difficult to search, and lots of good information was buried under sycophantic chatter (which is why the Wiki was built, remember?). Well, ten years later, there is still good information there (because, let us be frank, shaving is not rocket science, and the amount of salient information is not very big). But the line noise has got even worse. Clearly, this is a highly subjective opinion, and I appreciate that there is a conflict of interest: some people love the chatter, not least because it gives them the opportunity to provide the same morsels of wisdom again, and again, and again. Personally, I am more of a "give me the facts, and I might look at the chatter later" kind of guy. Setting the minimum amount of characters required to be able to publish a post to 1,000 might actually help.
That is indeed a mess of technical hurdles to overcome, and I had no idea. Let's make us some sausage!

Clearly none of this will happen short of Ivan winning the state lottery, but as a former computer professional, I totally see why anyone would refuse to take on that mountain of work. It would be foolish.

I have long since given up searching for any information on this site using the Google site search feature seeing as the functionality works miserably at best. For example, I will click through to a search result which claims 4 pages of SRP thread information (1234 links in footer)...then finding barely 2 pages of actual thread Or, sections in search summaries that do not appear after one dives deeper into the search target. Made another attempt in vain just yesterday to see if perhaps I was just crazy (besides the point as it turns out).

However, most of us see nothing wrong with chatter so long as a search tool has the expected ability to, you know, search and actually work.