I'm not sure if it's worth me re-signing into the site for the millionth time since the changeover to add this since noone else wants to pee on the ch9 developer's bonfire, and honestly I don't want to be the negative one all the time even if it seems that way. But..
A) Repeatedly losing my login - never happened on the old site.
B) No link to the 'classic account' login on the login page + plus a warning about classic accounts going away. I probably don't need to tell you this, but nobody likes LiveID logins, especially people like me who have multiple ones for logging into the MSDN Subscriber Downloads as well as hotmail. The day I have to use LiveID to log in, the site is dead to me.
C) No direct link to individual forums in the header. I'm pretty sure web designers had site navigation nailed around 1997. The forums landing page you now have to click through illogically shows the last posted thread next to the last post from (usually) a completely different thread.
D) Video pages more spammed than ever thanks to no-login-required policy. No CAPTCHA is going to stop the people in the 3rd world that are paid to go around adding their "thanks for the great information" comments everywhere.
E) No improvements to the Silverlight video player apart form pinning. Volume still starts at 50%, is not remembered, playback position is not remembered. No smooth streaming so you still need to download if you want to be able to read code.
F) The forums are just awful. The colour scheme and layout is bad in general. The quoting system is a massive step back to the back old phpBB days of having blockquotes of stuff you've already read clogging the page up. I notice there's less and less forum activity since the changeover. Though that could be because people can't stay signed in.
G) The "Browse" section doesn't offer any way to discover content without having to click through page after page. I know AJAX has been banished from the site because it didn't work on the old one, but really it can be made to work - the evidence is all over the web.
H) User's page is gone. OK, the old one was rubbish, but considering the actual user pages have been improved (you can actually list comments as well as threads!) it's odd that the only way to get to them now is to click on a forum post avatar or type the URL yourself.
I) Bing site search is useless.
J) The 'top 3' section on the front page, apart from showcasing table border styles from Netscape 2, doesn't allow you to click the video title to go to the page for that video even though all the other video titles on the page are links.
K) You took the time to implement RSS feeds for comments on videos - a feature that's on most blog engines and which *nobody* ever uses. A Facebook-style notifications system was discussed (I'm told) but not implemented.
L) .... I think I'm done. Overall, it looks like you had a lot of fun rewriting all the infrastructure, but I can't see any significant improvement to the site all all and lots of things are, at least subjectively, worse. It took how long to do this? Either using Azure to build a website is really hard, or you guys really spent helluva lot of time writing unit tests.
