I've been playing with the site and mulling on it since getting access again, and while the burst of nostalgia is wonderful and warming, it has also emphasised a few things that I feel could be tweaked for the better.

A couple of small things -

• is it possible to have an alternate colour scheme? It doesn't need to be as ambitious as having three alternate setting as with the old site, but I am finding the white-on-black quite harsh to read. Black-on-white would probably be better; and have a little colour in the overall page might be aesthetically nice too (right now there is the red in the RT logo, but it feels extremely dark for company who do so much comedy)

• it was wonderful to see most of my old journals get pulled through to the new site (though I note that friends-only ones did not make it. Sad to lose them, but happy overall). However, there needs to be an "edit" option. I understand you might not want this on the discussions - 'edit' in the forums was always a sponsor privilege, even then with a 15 minute window, which I can understand to avoid bad-faith changes - but when posting a journal to your own profile, not having the option to go back and tweak things feels quite restrictive.

The only other thing I'd tweak is... a lot, unfortunately. The site we are using seems to be based on the 2018 site update, which I do understand was being put into place as the old community site was outdated and no longer fit to use. However, the community site was frankly better for forming a community, which I put down to two things - forums and layout.

The discussions template does not feel as good as a forum did. Right now they work by everybody replying to the original post; if ten people comment, we end up with ten micro-discussions. It doesn't "push" the conversation to the top of the list chronologically, it's still considered as old as the original post. Compare this to a forum, where those ten hypothetical comments instead makes a single conversation, with everybody interacting. This feels a lot more like community behaviour.

(Also think how active those forums could be. The Bar threads were often 10,000 - 40,000 posts; the Discworld thread cleared 20,000 posts. There is no feasible way the current discussions format could handle this level of engagement)

And as for the site layout... once upon a time, you'd log in, arrive on your own profile and have a blank journal space waiting for you. Not everyone used it, but many people did, and it was often one of the best ways of getting to know each other. Now, it just isn't there - existing content shows, and a journal carries the same weight as creating a discussion thread, and these show in the same feed (yes, I'm aware there is a dropdown option to filter for journals. The site just doesn't encourage people to write them currently).

It'd be nice to have some measure of engagement - who is online? Who was it who flagged they "like" my post? Without private messaging (which is a mixed blessing and I understand this may not be wanted) or a wall, how do we speak to a specific person? These things could all be done on the old community site, and to be honest these feel like things that helped keep the community in contact with each other. I'm feeling the absense of them right now.

I am hopeful though. I recognise how great the community can be, and I just hope that the site itself becomes something that assists that again.