Site improvement suggestion: Buttons need more mouse-over text

Tell me about it. This site used to be the dogs', but in december ( not long before Christmas too) they changed it all around so that now it looks like this. Everything is harder to find now and things just don't quite work the way they are supposed to. It's still a great place for vouchers and deals etc, but it's such a shame that it used to be a LOT better. There used to be an A-Z list of vouchers that you could just scan through to have a look, now you NEED to type in a specific shop to find a voucher, when sometimes you might not have a specific shop in mind. ~It was a LOT easier to find forum threads, post things in them, find vouchers, deals, and discussions before and I still don't get why, after loads of people saying the same thing, it hasn't gone back to how it was before.

Sorry mods, but it had to be said ( again)
This site is still great and I would recommend it to anyone making a purchase ( and I do recommend it to people all the time ).

Well you've got me intrigued now, because I see that it says
"Comments powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.8
Copyright ©2000 - 2007, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd."
on this page:
http://www.hotukdeals.com/forums/sendmessage.php

So do does this mean that, in effect, the entire site is powered by
software written by Jelsoft (an American software house, no?).
If, so I am wondering if there weren't several hacks that were lost
last time HotUKDeals.com upgraded their underlying software... ??

Either way, I am surprised that something like the temperature
voting buttons -- which appear to be a custom-written "plug-in" (if that's
the right term- frankly I'm out of my depth but for now I'll carry on...!) --
surely if they HAVE been custom-written, they could (in principle) be
give alt text buy HUKD developers, no?

Trying to help.


Ship

Not much of it is powered by vBulletin (Jelsoft). Jst the replies to the threads here, private messaging, reputation, warnings etc.

The lists of threads/topics and the first posts, the navigation and the stuff down the right is all in-house.

The backbone of the site is VBulletin, but has been heavily modified. The credit has been left, but could be removed for a fee. I'm guessing its just money saved - and why not credit the original supplier!

So does anyone know what the setup was before the change in December? and why was there a change, especially a sudden change, with hardly a word to say why or anything. There was no discussion with the users of the forum before it happened, and if there is any info out there now it is just too hard to find. It's not very user friendly at all for new or occasional users I'm afraid and I wish it would just get changed back to the way it was. I've spotted loads of threads saying similar things but they end up getting lost in the forum mess.

PS- Please don't flame me ( lol)

Maybe some kind soul will re-cap dozens of threads for you instead of reading them yourself, but the up-shot is: The site isn't going back to what it was.

Some members went on to set up a rival site, I don't know if it's still going.

Suggesting tweaks here and there may achieve better results than going down the road of "What happened", and so on and so on.

And we do, lots of them. Yet most are ignored or not responded to. You don;t know if to bump the thread and see if you get a response, or leave it because it's an idea that's never going to be implemented.

I doubt that most of them are ignored, but agree that a lot are not responded to.

I read everything in the Feedback forum.

Some feedback would be nice