So, the new forum layout, clunky mess or complete and utter cluster-funck?

Unfortunately it's Khoros that makes these decisions. This forum has been Khoros based for 5 years (before that Vanilla Forum and before that PHPBB). Updating to the latest Khoros version brought in the changes like the badly designed Show More thing. If you go to the Khoros support forum, it's the same as here.

Here's a few other forums that use khoros. Ones that are on the old version with page number navigation: Canon USA, Atlassian, Samsung, Intel. Ones that are on the version with Show More navigation: Zoom, Dropbox, Meta.

Also, sorry to cast a cloud of gloom over the future, but Khoros got bought out by an AI company in May and a month ago they announced they are going to shove AI crap into the Khoros forum software.

Some quotes from the press release:

Our focus is on delivering AI-powered value at scale by leveraging what made the Khoros Community solution a leader in the first place.

IgniteTech is accelerating the rollout of new AI features across the Khoros platform and reaffirming its commitment to customer collaboration, community-led innovation, and product modernization. All future innovation will be built on Aurora, Khoros' modern platform architecture, which is optimized for AI integration and scalable customer engagement.

IgniteTech is designing the next generation of Khoros to meet the shift from search-driven support to AI-powered community ecosystems. New capabilities will help customers maintain brand presence in AI-generated answers, elevate trusted content from high-contributing users, and guide members from passive consumption to active participation.

Sigh  :(

The AI answers I get on a Google search are usually good but I assume the accuracy depends a lot on the large pool of info it’s drawing from.

For a VR forum, that pool is comparatively small. The repetitive questions would be served well I guess. Not sure AI stimulates user input though.

Looking across a few other VR forums, input seems to be trailing off. The VR YT channels I sub to are posting a lot less too.

The amount of screen space wasted is kinda immense - my screen is rotated 90 degrees and looks like this:

Images are now extremely small, feels like a forum made for mobile phones. In VR, we love to see tiny details which fuel immersion - and the new small image format does little to help here. 

Not much fun posting in here anymore - and whenever I click on anything, the forum takes about 12-14 seconds to update and be ready. That's down to 7-8 seconds on my PC at work, but that PC is faster than my office PC at home. 

Everything just feels slow, and the quality seems very limited. The only good thing I can think of is that uploading new images is easier and faster than before.  

This turd that is the new forum software bails out when you type a couple of letters in the search bar. Please tell me you didn't pay for this software.

I keep getting latencies whenever I try to do anything in here - also going back and forth from this site to other webpage, it's like this forum page freezes for several seconds each time - very annoying. 

Others experiencing the same?

So, there's something else I don't like about the new forum at all.

The new forum displays every new post  in my emails as "Subscription Update in Meta Community Forum", without the title of the thread, like the old forum did.

I have to open every email to see what it's about -  only to find it's just another spam post.
On days like today, when the forum is flooded with Temu posts, it's pretty annoying.🙄

I could have deleted all these posts from the email preview without even opening the email program....... if the thread title had been displayed.