A question for Ronald

Hi - you should receive an e-mail shortly about it. If you have any questions regarding the old forums please e-mail me. This is not really the place to enter discussions about the forums.And just "una cortesia" (a favour really) could you avoid posting posts with "A question for Ronald" or "Ronald...." etc. Send us an e-mail or a PM. It is just a bit weird seeing once name in a post and it doesn't help new users understand what is going on!

Yep =- ronald posted there yesterday to say it would close early, he said:-"So we will be speeding the process up and will be closing the forums to posting by the end of this week. Will send an e-mail out to notify everyone registered on the forums tomorrow about the changes.I assume he pulled it forward from the end of the week as a pre-emptive strike against last minute invective. 'Nice One!' ronnieI will however miss the easy to use format 'over there' - hopefully 'over here' and i will evolve together so I can use this one just as easily - evolution is difficult for us old computer illiterate dinosaurs!

Thanks Al, sorry if I did the wrong thing Ronald , a learning process for me at present, and as I was in a mad dash this morning nothing else occured to me.A

I don't know quite how to take that :)but seriously, I realise this is a radical departure from the previous forums. it will take a bit of getting used to but hopefully as information fills out the various spaces and you get used to the layout it will become easier to navigate.

I know many of us felt the same way transitioning from USENET and mailing lists to forums. It was different and required getting used to. But over time we managed it, and wouldn't have dreamed of going back to the old text-only message boards. Give it a try and before long you'll be wondering why they didn't think of this sooner!

Once upon a time there were Forums. Each forum represented a topic. You chose a forum you wanted to participate in and you just had to start a new thread or post a message. Stop.Then a new community was created and the familiar forum structure disappeared. Now you have different content types, wikis, posts, restaurant reviews, galleries (and more to come!). All this content is sorted by topic and location (not by subforums), so whenever you create some content you get to choose the topic and location.If you want to view specific content you just have to click on the topic button and then choose the topic to view all the posts related to a topic and comments related to it. Plus, the button "new activity" lets you see what changes came in a group or a thread.As we are still working on the software, we hope to improve your navigation through the website further.

• What's in common: the main topic remains ITALY
• What's the difference: taking part in the creation a stronger Community that is more flexible - you can create your own groups, your own topics (via tags) and find things easier. You no longer need to worry about whether something goes under "General" or "Tuscany" or "travel" - you can have all at once.
• Morale della storia: the more you use this new tool, the better you get used to. The more you get used to, the better you enjoy it. The more you enjoy it, the faster you will forget the Forums. the more you forget the Forums, the better you use this new tool..lets hope it all ends well (?)

In bocca al lupo!

H)Ronald I think you have been splendid in fielding all this Comments and questions over the past week. With every thing new you expect the ocassional hicup; but you have been superb in adapting all these difficulties and putting additions on the Forum with consumate ease. Time is a great educator and forum members , when they leap in and use trial and error will get used to this great new format.Thanks.