Hello all, this is to let you know that airliners.net has been acquired by Verticalscope inc from Leaf Group.

My name is Jeff, I will be part of the team taking over the webmaster management duties of airliners.net. We will primarily manage the technical functions of the site and support the crew. The long established airliners.net crew you know is still here and will handle the day to day operations. Airliners.net will gain a few new people to look after the technical maintenance of the site. Aside from some much-needed upgrades, we are already working on, you should not notice much change here. Maintaining continuity as well as the spirit of the site is important to us.

Over the next few days, you may notice me or other teammates here making introductions and working on site fixes and upgrades as well as some of the more days to day duties behind the scenes. I will be on hand to answer questions, get familiar with the airliners.net community, and get a better read on the pulse of the community here. My primary focus while making sure this transition moves smoothly for everyone is to work on bringing back some of the recently lost functionality of the site and raise the overall level of user experience here. I will also be able to expedite requested changes and updates for the community.

A little more about myself:
I have been with VerticalScope for over 3 years and I have been a forum junkie since 2003 mainly in the automotive, boating, and power sports area. I live outside of Chicago and fly United to Mexico out of ORD and Porter to Toronto out of Midway 4-5 times a year among other trips. I have met some of my best life long friends on these sites and participated in many events, races, rallies, etc. I am looking forward to getting to know this niche community, you guys have some amazing photos here.

If you have questions please let me know, I will do my best to answer you all as quickly and thoroughly as I can.

Onward and Upward!
Jeff M

One question...why not revert to the previous airliners.net format? That was heaps more agreeable from a UX perspective.

BuildingMyBento wrote:

One question...why not revert to the previous airliners.net format? That was heaps more agreeable from a UX perspective.

Actually, the old one was much, much worse. Very early-2000s, and awful on mobile. That is bad because (1) mobile is the only area where growth is, and (2) Google now penalizes sites that aren't mobile optimized. Additionally, switching from a custom, ancient, slow code to a widely-used 3rd party forum software is much better from a long-term management standpoint. The new forum doesn't clog up when there are over 100 responses to a tread, so no need for the stupid "Part 36" nonsense (although some mods still seem to be stuck in the old habit). Can't believe people actually miss the terrible old A.net.

yeah a.net UI needs a massive upgrade. It's actually old fashioned. There could be much better use of CSS3.. I would suggest a lighter theme based on White colour, that's the most widely used background, and black on white is the easiest to read.
Some other suggestions:
1. Better editing box. Specially for adding URLs.
2. Ability to delete own posts atleast until no one makes a new post.
3. Better quote box. The current simple grey box looks very outdated.

anshabhi wrote:

yeah a.net UI needs a massive upgrade. It's actually old fashioned. There could be much better use of CSS3.. I would suggest a lighter theme based on White colour, that's the most widely used background, and black on white is the easiest to read.
Some other suggestions:
1. Better editing box. Specially for adding URLs.
2. Ability to delete own posts atleast until no one makes a new post.
3. Better quote box. The current simple grey box looks very outdated.

Website looked a lot better when the new version first rolled out, but people who hate any kind of change complained so they made it look more like the old site (including the horrid blue).

Sure, there are still some issues with the new format, but things have largely been resolved and/or improved. Anyone who prefers the old user interface to this one obviously doesn't visit other forums... the old A.net was a snapshot of the way things were on the internet at the turn of the millennium. I am actually surprised that it didn't use frames.

Hello , i noticed some serious problems of the website recently or before i noticed too but i didn't see any changes on it . First of all , some photographers can upload many photos even over 50 60 90 ! I think it maybe is a bug ? But i think it is no fair to others it should be revised .Second , it is about the correction .I am a Guangzhou China Spotter and i always can see some photos that is not took in Guangzhou and i always help them to correct it but it doesn't change over a week and then i correct it again it still doesn't change i don't know why it is so slow or the system , administrators cannot receive the correction information ? I think it will give many spotters wrong information.
I wonder whether this problem can be fixed ?
Cheers ,
Junjie Lee

VetteDude wrote:

Actually, the old one was much, much worse. Very early-2000s, and awful on mobile. That is bad because (1) mobile is the only area where growth is, and (2) Google now penalizes sites that aren't mobile optimized. Additionally, switching from a custom, ancient, slow code to a widely-used 3rd party forum software is much better from a long-term management standpoint. The new forum doesn't clog up when there are over 100 responses to a tread, so no need for the stupid "Part 36" nonsense (although some mods still seem to be stuck in the old habit). Can't believe people actually miss the terrible old A.net.

It is probably a matter of taste really, but I think many people still miss the old A.net.
Actually, I find the new one very painful to read on all kinds of screens and especially on my iPad (never tried on my phone though), as it makes very poor use of space. Where the old site could let me glance at a page and know much of what was happening or what I would like to read at a glance, the new one requires me to scroll, scroll and scroll again. Painful, especially on touch screens.
That being said, I do not think anybody claims the old site was not buggy. But it is not like anybody was convinced that fixing those bugs required making browsing and reading a chore.

anshabhi wrote:

yeah a.net UI needs a massive upgrade. It's actually old fashioned. There could be much better use of CSS3.. I would suggest a lighter theme based on White colour, that's the most widely used background, and black on white is the easiest to read.

Disagree completely, the blue is what makes A.net what it is - and judging by the way the previous administration had to ditch the white design that just about everyone HATED to bring back the familiar blue last year, such a move would be incredibly unwise. It's a wonder that A.net is still around given what happened, the transition to a new responsive design was totally botched.

If I had to say anything to the incoming owners, it's this: Don't act like the previous owners and try to force sudden change on a userbase that has been on this site for 20 years and try to sell it as 100% positive when people complain. It comes off like snake oil sales, not at all transparent, tone deaf to the people who are supporting the brand. Respect that people who have been on this site for decades and actually LISTEN to what they have to say.

anshabhi wrote:

No thanks. The white was terrible.

Primary things that were good about the old site that suck about this one:

1. Ability to selectively quote posts without moving on to a new screen. This way you could grab snippets of many different posts without having to scroll the tiny little box and sifting through and deleting the irrelevant content.
2. Hover over airport codes to show text of what city it was in

We welcome and bow down to our new masters. (We need emoticons.)

The new format of the site was fine once I got used to it, but the two-tone blue color scheme being brought back after the relaunch was a massive help. The white was awful not only aesthetically, but functionally.

N202PA wrote:

anshabhi wrote:

yeah a.net UI needs a massive upgrade. It's actually old fashioned. There could be much better use of CSS3.. I would suggest a lighter theme based on White colour, that's the most widely used background, and black on white is the easiest to read.

Disagree completely, the blue is what makes A.net what it is - and judging by the way the previous administration had to ditch the white design that just about everyone HATED to bring back the familiar blue last year, such a move would be incredibly unwise.

Count me in as one of the haters of white websites. Utterly, eye-strainingly, lack-of-imaginationly, unergonomically, lazy excuse for website "design".

On-topic - taken over again already?!? [wonders if this is a good or bad thing...]

Rdh3e wrote:

anshabhi wrote:

No thanks. The white was terrible.

Primary things that were good about the old site that suck about this one:

1. Ability to selectively quote posts without moving on to a new screen. This way you could grab snippets of many different posts without having to scroll the tiny little box and sifting through and deleting the irrelevant content.
2. Hover over airport codes to show text of what city it was in

Ditto this. But also do the hover thing for airline codes as well as airport codes. That feature alone retains new users/readers by eliminating the frustration of reading posts by oh-so-cool Av-geeks who have little sympathy for the new guy.

I was a member for only about 6 months before the last big change and was able to enjoy reading in the forums from the get-go. There are still to many acronyms and secret codes in common use, but most are fairly easy to deal with. But airline and airport codes can be death to understanding, and many old timers like me just don't have the memory capabilities we might once have had.

So, please bring back the old hover feature ASAP.

Thanks so much.

P.S.: Bring back the modest membership fees if you need a few bucks

........ and make it possible for Windows PC users to post an Avatar photo. I can't get it to "save" after uploading the photo.

Cheers

take a look at Aviation.SE: http://aviation.stackexchange.com

it has everything that I would say is minimalistic and modern yet powerful.

reading there is such a pleasant experience. Open a.net & aviation.se in 2 adjacent tabs and notice the difference.

Utah744 wrote:

We welcome and bow down to our new masters. (We need emoticons.)

There are tons of them

I agree that the blue color scheme is better than white and black, and that the main functionality gap in the current site as compared to the original site is the lack of ability to easily quote multiple people and reply all in one post.

Rdh3e wrote:

anshabhi wrote:

No thanks. The white was terrible.

Primary things that were good about the old site that suck about this one:

1. Ability to selectively quote posts without moving on to a new screen. This way you could grab snippets of many different posts without having to scroll the tiny little box and sifting through and deleting the irrelevant content.
2. Hover over airport codes to show text of what city it was in

3. You could see what post number was being quoted (I think even jump to it? Can't remember) which made it easier to go back and reread the original post that was quoted to get full context.

Overall though the new boards are understandably a much better foundation than the old ones. The age was really starting to show.

anshabhi wrote:

take a look at Aviation.SE: http://aviation.stackexchange.com

it has everything that I would say is minimalistic and modern yet powerful.

reading there is such a pleasant experience. Open a.net & aviation.se in 2 adjacent tabs and notice the difference.

Honestly some of that may be improved with current software. The UI can use some work at some places, but that is different than the guts actually running the board, which in the old forums were old and difficult to update to include modern standards.

I also miss the popups with the airline/aiport codes, but that also requires someone to maintain a database. The codes on the old forums had not been updated in years and with the airlines particularly had out of date info or no info at all for newer airlines.

Thanks for the feedback and info guys.

We can look into some additional skins or color combos once we get up to speed.

Jeff M

Here are some issues I have with the new version of the site. On the old site, I could quote portions of several different posts and respond to them in the same post. Now, if you hit the quote icon, it opens a new post, with the entire post that is quote. It's easy enough to delete part of the quote, but that leaves the person posting multiple times, in order to respond to multiple quotes.

I also think the photo search is too limited. The old version of the site used to have airline, aircraft model, and airport as part of the search functions. Now, I have to type those in manually.

anshabhi wrote:

take a look at Aviation.SE: http://aviation.stackexchange.com

it has everything that I would say is minimalistic and modern yet powerful.

reading there is such a pleasant experience. Open a.net & aviation.se in 2 adjacent tabs and notice the difference.

Seriously? That site looked incredibly bland and boring

anshabhi wrote:

take a look at Aviation.SE: http://aviation.stackexchange.com

it has everything that I would say is minimalistic and modern yet powerful.

reading there is such a pleasant experience.

Then you're welcome to stay there; leave A.net alone, though. The most frequent users here have collectively spoken, and the blue was our preference.

Welcome, VerticalScope. I do hope you're all going to keep what makes this site great and listen to the feedback of your most frequent users, something your predecessors didn't do as well as they could have.

ckfred wrote:

Here are some issues I have with the new version of the site. On the old site, I could quote portions of several different posts and respond to them in the same post. Now, if you hit the quote icon, it opens a new post, with the entire post that is quote. It's easy enough to delete part of the quote, but that leaves the person posting multiple times, in order to respond to multiple quotes.

Just as a note, after you quote once and enter the full page you can see the previous replies down at the bottom, and from there you can highlight specific sentences and quote from there (and in that part it only quotes the highlighted section), so you don't need to do multiple replies.

It would just be nice to have it like the old site, where highlighting and quoting a sentence:

A) Only quotes the highlighted section
B) Added it to the quick reply at the bottom instead of taking you to the full editor.

EA CO AS wrote:

Then you're welcome to stay there; leave A.net alone, though. The most frequent users here have collectively spoken, and the blue was our preference.

Everyone is entitled to voice their opinions and everyone is free to agree/disagree!

Please bring back the flags. It was a small but significant attraction! Thank you from all of us....

Welcome. Excited to see what is to come.

First of all I got to say welcome VerticalScope.

Actually it bothers me that some people immediately hijack this threat to fight over each other what this site should be like. Sure there's room for that discussion, but please let's not hold it here. There's a place for everything.

One question though. With an American owner, won't this site become too "americanized"? I mean, there are people on Airliners.net from all over the world and that's a lot bigger than America. I myself for example am from the Netherlands, that's in Europe. It doesn't bother me that there are Americans on this site, I think with an international site like Airliners.net that's only logical, as long as there's a place for other nationalities as well.

gzm wrote:

Please bring back the flags. It was a small but significant attraction! Thank you from all of us....

Can you give me some more info on this so we can see what we can do?

I will add it to the punch list of items.

Jeff M

PatrickZ80 wrote:

First of all I got to say welcome VerticalScope.

Actually it bothers me that some people immediately hijack this threat to fight over each other what this site should be like. Sure there's room for that discussion, but please let's not hold it here. There's a place for everything.

One question though. With an American owner, won't this site become too "americanized"? I mean, there are people on Airliners.net from all over the world and that's a lot bigger than America. I myself for example am from the Netherlands, that's in Europe. It doesn't bother me that there are Americans on this site, I think with an international site like Airliners.net that's only logical, as long as there's a place for other nationalities as well.

FYI - VerticalScope is a Candian company with employees in the US and UK also.

Jeff M

Things I really miss about the old site and would like to see brought back:

Ability to quote multiple replies easily at the same time.
Scroll over function for airport codes and airlines.
Markers on replies you have already read when signed in. This was marked in yellow for new posts.
Country Flags.
Membership to post on the forum.

These in my opinion were functionality that made A.net so great that have been lost with the new format.

That being said, I am now a fan of the new forum being used. It is significantly faster and much easier for use on my phone. DO NOT get rid of the blue background. The experiment to the white background was painful. Personally, I do much of my searching on the forum at night before bed and I found myself tuning out of the site because it hurt my eyes.

Thanks for the opportunity to offer input! Welcome!

Peace

Verticalscope runs many niche interest sites with an active forum, so I hope they can bring that knowledge here. Don't know what their preferred platform is, but it wouldn't surprise me if they have a phpbb forum guru

moderators wrote:

gzm wrote:

Please bring back the flags. It was a small but significant attraction! Thank you from all of us....

Can you give me some more info on this so we can see what we can do?

I will add it to the punch list of items.

Jeff M

He is referring to the country flags that used to appear next to a user's name on their forum posts. It correlates to the country that they had selected in their forum profile. It was a feature of the old website that did not make it to the new website unveiled last year.

PatrickZ80 wrote:

First of all I got to say welcome VerticalScope.

Actually it bothers me that some people immediately hijack this threat to fight over each other what this site should be like. Sure there's room for that discussion, but please let's not hold it here. There's a place for everything.

One question though. With an American owner, won't this site become too "americanized"? I mean, there are people on Airliners.net from all over the world and that's a lot bigger than America. I myself for example am from the Netherlands, that's in Europe. It doesn't bother me that there are Americans on this site, I think with an international site like Airliners.net that's only logical, as long as there's a place for other nationalities as well.

This website has had American ownership since around 2008 when DemandMedia purchase the website from Johan Lundgren, a Swedish individual. It appears the new ownership is a Canadian company.

JohnKrist wrote:

Utah744 wrote:

We welcome and bow down to our new masters. (We need emoticons.)

There are tons of them

Seems like we just need to learn where the features are, not many seem to know the old emoticons are there to be used.

bomber996 wrote:

Things I really miss about the old site and would like to see brought back:

Ability to quote multiple replies easily at the same time.
Scroll over function for airport codes and airlines.
Markers on replies you have already read when signed in. This was marked in yellow for new posts.
Country Flags.
Membership to post on the forum.

These in my opinion were functionality that made A.net so great that have been lost with the new format.

That being said, I am now a fan of the new forum being used. It is significantly faster and much easier for use on my phone. DO NOT get rid of the blue background. The experiment to the white background was painful. Personally, I do much of my searching on the forum at night before bed and I found myself tuning out of the site because it hurt my eyes.

Thanks for the opportunity to offer input! Welcome!

Peace

Noted and added to the suggested punch list that we will work on.

Jeff M

Rdh3e wrote:

2. Hover over airport codes to show text of what city it was in

<<THIS>>

Dear Jeff

Is there any posibility to bring back the flags to show where each member comes from? Other then that I am very happy with the website and hope that you keep it this way!

Regards, Lesfalls

moderators wrote:

I will add it to the punch list of items.

Jeff M

Hey.
nice optimization would be:
A: add a second set of message selection ( age, up down ..) and "go" at the top.
B: don't let such selections go into an error and hard stop when they are empty.
show "none" and also show the message selections and go button
( not having to go first back then try again.)
C: "go to unread" should not vanish when all is read but change to "go to end".
There is a difference between "all read" and "nothing read"

It is nice to be able to see that threads have been moved.
Same for deleted ones would be a gain.
Some are deleted on imho nefarious reasons ( as an example
there was a rather interesting one on 20ties to late 30ties route proving activity
(British and German mostly) of various nations that "poof" vanished. )

Tia & G!

GSPSPOT wrote:

Rdh3e wrote:

2. Hover over airport codes to show text of what city it was in

<<THIS>>

Jeff, some detail on this. The old website had a database of airport and airline codes that would display the airport name or airline name of the respective code in the forum post. I believe it uses deprecated <abbr> tag.

An example: I flew OKC-DEN on UA last week. Mouse hover over OKC would display "Will Rogers World Airport - Oklahoma City, OK USA" and hovering over DEN would display "Denver International - Denver, CO USA". While hovering over UA would display "United Airlines, USA".

If we could get a code and database working, I'm sure we could get a few crew volunteers to input all of the data. I would be interested in helping.

moderators wrote:

Hello all, this is to let you know that airliners.net has been acquired by Verticalscope inc from Leaf Group.

...

If you have questions please let me know, I will do my best to answer you all as quickly and thoroughly as I can.

Onward and Upward!
Jeff M

Hello Jeff, welcome to the site!

Could you tell a little bit background of Leaf Group and its mission, as well as reasoning behind acquiring the site?

To quote multiple posts simultaneously, click on "Full Editor" and "Expand View." This will show every post in the thread, and also allows one to pick and choose which parts of the post one wishes to quote.
For example:

jetmatt777 wrote:

An example: I flew OKC-DEN on UA last week. Mouse hover over OKC would display "Will Rogers World Airport - Oklahoma City, OK USA" and hovering over DEN would display "Denver International - Denver, CO USA". While hovering over UA would display "United Airlines, USA".

Finn350 wrote:

Hello Jeff, welcome to the site!

Rdh3e wrote:

anshabhi wrote:

No thanks. The white was terrible.

Primary things that were good about the old site that suck about this one:

1. Ability to selectively quote posts without moving on to a new screen. This way you could grab snippets of many different posts without having to scroll the tiny little box and sifting through and deleting the irrelevant content.
2. Hover over airport codes to show text of what city it was in

These are the two features I miss the most, lets have them back.

Hello,

Many improvement requests are coming out here right now. Johnkrist and airkas1, what about all the proposals "added to the list" in the Airliners.net Site Upgrade Announcement & Discussion ? Should we suggest here again or could a main summary be forwarded to the new owner ?

lesfalls wrote:

Dear Jeff

Is there any posibility to bring back the flags to show where each member comes from? Other then that I am very happy with the website and hope that you keep it this way!

Regards, Lesfalls

I will try it is on the list.

Jeff M

Hello, and welcome !

I'm mostly satisfied with the new website, I'd like a way to get to the first unread post in one click from the forum page, but having half that functionality is something at least. Maybe make it more obvious what threads I have already opened and those I haven't, even an ability to filter.

Maybe a way to tweak the layout to better use the available space would be nice, I mostly surf on a big screen and with a mouse so I can scroll, but a compromise between the old very compact and the new very expansive would be nice.

Alsatian wrote:

Hello,

Many improvement requests are coming out here right now. Johnkrist and airkas1, what about all the proposals "added to the list" in the Airliners.net Site Upgrade Announcement & Discussion ? Should we suggest here again or could a main summary be forwarded to the new owner ?

Give us a few days or so to put together the list and we can review the other feedback thread.

Maybe if you already requested something in the other thread you can link to it here also.

Once we post the list we can start to prioritize items we want to update first.

Jeff M

Alsatian wrote:

Hello,

Many improvement requests are coming out here right now. Johnkrist and airkas1, what about all the proposals "added to the list" in the Airliners.net Site Upgrade Announcement & Discussion ? Should we suggest here again or could a main summary be forwarded to the new owner ?

The old list is very much alive and in a google spreeadsheet, so we will make sure that Jeff gets it. It's also a history document that shows what issues we ran into, what has been solved, and what remains.

Finn350 wrote:

moderators wrote:

Hello all, this is to let you know that airliners.net has been acquired by Verticalscope inc from Leaf Group.

...

If you have questions please let me know, I will do my best to answer you all as quickly and thoroughly as I can.

Onward and Upward!
Jeff M

Hello Jeff, welcome to the site!

Could you tell a little bit background of Leaf Group and its mission, as well as reasoning behind acquiring the site?

I don't know much about Leaf but VerticalScope is the company I work for who aquired the sites. We have been adding new verticals to our mainly automotive focus. The great thing is that we are still original owner owned who has a passion for online communities.

Our History: http://www.verticalscope.com/about-us/our-history.html

Management Team: http://www.verticalscope.com/about-us/m ... -team.html

Jeff M

Please fix the time stamps for posts: "moments ago" doesn't get it even if it was actually "moments ago.".

Many web sites include a link back to the post being quoted when quoting from another post, which makes it easy to get the context behind a quote; that would be a nice feature here.

salttee wrote:

Please fix the time stamps for posts: "moments ago" doesn't get it even if it was actually "moments ago.".

Many web sites include a link back to the post being quoted when quoting from another post, which makes it easy to get the context behind a quote; that would be a nice feature here.

Noted and noticed that also.

Jeff M