Nostalgia. Don't you just love it? A vocal element in the forums is complaining that the latest upgrade was not asked for, not needed, and not welcome. That everything was almost perfect until last week. That developers have thrown the baby out with the bath-water, introducing an unwelcome skin, making the site more difficult to use by design, and creating a lot of bugs.

Personally, I don't recognise their descriptions of a wonderful visitor experience under v2.0. There were good bits, and there were bad bits. Tracking the site's evolution from TVTome, there have been almost annual redesigns (launch in 2005, the WEB2.0 inspired changes in 2006, upgrading the submissions process in 2007, and now this). All have seen immediate critical system failures caused by sloppy code-writing, poor design concepts that made key features more difficult to use, a month or more of workarounds first by users and then by developers, and a year or so in which bugs and acknowledged design failures are not fixed because of limited resources. By tradition, some of these remain unresolved when the next site overhaul is launched on a nervous, under-appreciated and unappreciative user base.

In terms of the look of the site, and navigation around it, we will get used to it: we always do. In terms of lost features, the people behind the site will restore some of them and not others. They always do. In terms of functionality, once fixed, the submissions process will be more complex and cumbersome than it was before: it always is.

Now, who else is looking forward to the submissions overhaul in 2009, or the new look in 2010? Will most of us be begging TPTB to go back to the fabulous v3.0, which looked great, had all the features we wanted, and was relatively bug free?

I apologise for omitting the accents from the blog title: we haven't been able to use non-ASCII characters in titles since v1.0… Plus ça change, plus la même chose…