@jym626 at least I know what that is. The abstractness of the other one is too jarring for me. I’m not sure why but the fact that I can’t make it into anything is incredibly distracting. I guess I will choose disturbing over distracting.
Thanks @bgbg4us – but as I mentioned I am only guessing.
And each report has been handled.
Highlighted featured threads have always been the newest 2 featured in each forum. If the newest is several years old, then that what the system highlights. So no, I’m not seeing what you see.
See above. Might I suggest that the more positive approach of suggesting to the appropriate Forum Champion (or moderator for fora without a Champion), a newer thread which could be featured?
Right now I see two featured discussions to the right of the posts:
What Does Lehigh Look For? Thoughts on ‘Chances’ - last post was in March 2011
and
Social Life - last post on September 2014
I don’t think the “featured thread” feature has ever worked as one would imagine. It’s opaque to us users how these threads are ever selected and why they persist for so long, but it’s always been that way, it’s not a problem with the new design.
No one could tell users that you can click on the mortarboard icon and get to a forum list??? And that’s despite multiple posted questions?
It took one poster to find it? Well, kudos. @Knowsstuff .
I rarely use that feature. Nor Recent or Featured. I work off Latest or Bookmarks. But it’s too hard to get a glance, power through. Then get back and forth.
I need to switch from cell to my tablet to get visibility to pending notifications and check who agreed.
Ps. I dont think the eye strain issue will get the ship moving.
Just for grins, I looked up some traffic statistics for CC.
The typical pattern is that page views fall of a cliff towards the end of May, which makes sense as the current cohort of students makes their decisions and don’t need further help, plus people aren’t focused on college so much over the summer. Then, around end of August/beginning of September, page views start to climb as the next cohort begins their search.
Last year, after the last re-design in April 2018 or thereabouts, traffic dropped off a cliff over the summer - page views dropped by 50%, a larger than normal drop. Except this time, page views didn’t begin to climb until December, and at the peak were only 60% as high as the year before.
So there you have it, empirical evidence that the previous redesign was a complete bust.
In light of that, I’m guessing this redesign was pushed out only a year after the last one in an attempt to undo the damage from the last re-design. Unfortunately, based on the feedback so far, it appears they’ve made it worse.
One can only imagine the panic at CC HQ in the face of these numbers.
https://www.trackalytics.com/website/collegeconfidential.com/
And this site is not the only source of free online advice.
@skieurope @CCadmin_Sorin
As an example of what @thumper1 is complaining about, here are the two “featured threads” in the Parent Cafe that I am seeing at the moment. Neither one has been commented on for some time and therefore, in my opinion, are taking up valuable real estate and resulting in unneeded scrolling.
Featured Threads
Thoughts on the Movie “Lady Bird” and the Portrayal of the College Search Process
Started by TTG
February 2018 Most recent by cptofthehouse March 22
9.6K
118
Buying a property for child while in college and tax implications
46 new
Started by partyof5
January 2018 Most recent by sherpa March 2018
4.3K
52
@lookingforward what mortarboard icon do you click on to get a forum list? When I click on the one in the top left corner it kicks me out if the forums and back to the main homepage. I can’t find any other mortarboard icon.
Featuring is a confusing thing. Because it easily gets mixed up with pinning threads. Remember there are a limited amount of moderators and a lot of forums with hundreds or thousands of threads in each one. The majority of the moderators time is spent enforcing TOS. They also act as “forum champions” for threads without one. Please be patient as it’s a lot of work to deal with the moderation queue. If the forum has a designated champion then reach out to them. I typically only feature the current “class of ___ discussion” and “class of ____ decisions” threads and some other key ones in the forum I manage. The rest are left to the most recent to least recent.
@doschicos Thanks. I have pushed some more active ones to the top
In terms of the last redesign, I thought that was fine. The site had needed a refresh badly and we got it. It was just a real skinned version of the old one. @notrichenough idk why views plummeted more than usual at that time.
Better yet, just get rid of them completely. I get the lack of time therefore are they really needed/warranted? If it is a more recent thread, people will easily see those first without having to be “featured”. Seems a tad redundant to me. 
Above my pay grade. 
Nope. For example:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/national-merit-scholarships/
One of the featured threads was started in 2013. I’m not going to go check every sub-forum, but the featured threads have pretty much never been the most recently created threads IME. I never even look at them because they are typically old or just don’t seem worthy of being “featured”.
Agreed that I don’t know what the purpose of featured threads is.
Page real estate is at a premium now with all this white space and the current font. Get rid of some of this fru-fru stuff and let us see and reach what keeps people current and posting.
Am I the only one who has been here for years and years and had no idea there were “forum champions” for certain forums???
@abasket This is a relatively new addition from last year or was it two years ago? Idk I’ve lost track. Here is the current Forum Champion Team: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/2094692-introducing-the-forum-champions-team.html#latest
Since forum champions specialize and are passionate about a specific topic, it is prob likely most stick to their own forums and don’t venture too often 
Sorry, I was less-than-clear, so I corrected my earlier statement: highlighted featured threads have always been the newest 2 featured in each forum. So there can be several threads that can be selected as featured (which is done manually), but the 2 that show up top are the 2 featured threads most recently created.
Probably not, but they were announced.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/community-forum-issues/2094692-introducing-the-forum-champions-team.html#latest
No it wasn’t, they changed from <i forget;=“” phpbb?=“” vbulletin?=“”> to Vanilla Forums, and in the process a lot of the navigation features were lost, along with a concise way to find things as the white space was drastically expanded then, too.<i forget;=“” phpbb?=“” vbulletin?=“”>
Really, a tremendous number of these issues would become non-issues if CC would just have a top-level forum page that had a compact, concise way to show all the forums and sub-forms on one easy to navigate screen, like virtually every other site that has forums. But for some reason CC has made the main forum page be CCEdit_Torrey’s blog page and pushed the forums off the top of the page, and added a bunch of other cruft as well.
How many page views do you think you get for a new user to decide to spend some time here? If they have to waste those page views trying to figure out how to navigate around, or showing them stuff they don’t want to see, you’ve lost them.
The proof is in the page view stats.
That’s the point, because it’s a manual process which seems to be ignored most of the time by whoever is supposed to be updating the featured threads, it has become a useless feature which just wastes screen space.