venk: I think you underestimate who is building this board. I've earned well over 12 million miles, used to average more than 250,000 actual flight miles a year so I think I know of what you speak. The features aren't the problem since if you stood back, you'd see that each one was carefully designed to make your individual experience on FT truly yours.
Randy, thanks for the reply but here is the specific problem I am pointing to.
(BTW, no freddie for the web site was a joke! that is what people say when a hotel or airline redisgns their site and has problems).
I am sure you will solve the problem from the server side. That is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about pages that have now become much bigger. For example, as I type this, this reply page is over 54kb in size not including any graphics. I am serious about trying to work this from the LHR T3 RCC computers trying to render this page with all the scripting and tables let alone downloading this. I am not against change and the old one had served its purposes but the beauty of that design was that it was so usable from the worst computer with the worst connectivity (I remember browsing once via a GPRS connection through a mobile). That has to be balanced against feature richness. How have you considered this?
Other than that the rest I can get used to. BTW, there are high volume sites with message boards and everyone of them have tried to minimize the features out of necessity.
The ideal would be if I could customize my view of the pages to be minimal in adornments or scripting (or alternatively, a low bandwidth access to the same content without the bells and whistles).
Just a suggestion.
By the way I hope you have realized that this anonymous rating system of posters just results in a popularity contest encouraging the kind of posts that only politicians would make so as to be disagreeable with the least amount of people. A demerit point everytime one doen't agree with someone? Not the best feature I am afraid.