Hi Michael,
All reasonable questions and criticisms, and I’ll be happy to answer.
Creative COW’s origins go back to 1995. There was no such thing as forum software at the time, so we wrote it ourselves.
I say “we”, but this happened before I joined the COW in 2006. And when that original community rebranded as CreativeCOW in 2001, there were no mobile devices, and the very, very few forum software options were extremely limited in features, had no ability to support database tables as large as ours (15 million posts from 350,000 members, tens of thousands of articles and tutorials, etc.), so we continued to go our own way.
Today is a different story. You’re right, we’re overdue for a change, and we hope to launch those soon. Mobile friendliness will be a big part of that for sure.
In the meantime, there are actually more ways to customize your views here than most other forums offer. Those options are at the top of each forum landing page. We have this as user-defined for each forum, because some forums get more posts in a day than other forums get in a month.
But look at the top of the page, right under the forum name. Here’s the one for Avid Media Composer. You have to be logged in to see these options, but check the popup on the left — set any duration you want, from “New Today” to up to four years on a single screen. If you find any forum offering more of a spread than that, let me know. ☺
The pop-up on the right also offers WAY more options than we’ve seen elsewhere. The default view is similar to most forums out there — most recent answers on top.
However you can also arrange by the most recent thread (ie, the date of the first post in the thread, rather than the last)
or by most recent POST, irrespective of thread.
You can even see the threads exposed, and go straight to the individual posts that you want to see. This view also allows you to see the subthreads within a thread, as people respond to each other.
I’m not aware of any forums with more options than this, but again, if you know of any, sing out, and we’ll take a look. We’re always trying to improve, and as I’ve hinted, lots of new stuff rolling out very soon!
Thanks again,
Tim