I appreciate that whomever is making the decision(s) to change the homepage doesn't care one bit what I think, but the new design looks horrendous and I'm baffled as to why anyone thought it was a good idea.

All I can figure is:

1) Someone felt the need to change things to justify their continued existence; and

2) Someone was tasked with finding a way to increase page clicks.

If that was the motivating factor, then I guess the redesign is a success. Well done...

Thanks for the update - yep, the ad redirects are fixed at the moment, and links appear to be working generally as well. From a tech issue to a UX one, if I may: the loss of the quick-jump to most-recently-active thread is a big hole; as others have indicated, it makes it much more difficult to get more immediately to your forums of interest. While that might be useful in terms of "forcing" more clicks on the home-page content, I wonder if the trade-off is that more people will bookmark internal pages and just jump there directly (defeating the purpose a bit). That's certainly a path I might take at some point - and I used to peruse the front-page items every visit before.

On the plus side, I like the more posterized, photo-rich design. I'd just love not to have lost some key functionality along the way.

The new form really sucks

Awkward on ipad...I used to check several forums a few times a day.,.just forced myself to look at them. Where is the search function? I cant find it.

This is true as an independent statement, but not really a response to my point earlier. The link (now gone, it seems) to your most recently active thread was a way to, in a single click, go directly to a forum (and thread) that interests you.

By forcing organic navigation through the hierarchy each time, it adds several steps to an operation that, I suspect (and you probably already know, from looking at usage paths and logs) is a frequently-executed operation by visitors. I'm not sure that's helpful from a UX perspective - unless your analysis of the logs and usage show that most people are already drilling down every time from the home to the forums list to the forums sublist to the forum itself. In that case, my use of the functionality may just be an outlier.

I must agree - the front page as displayed on my iPad looks hobbled and not very "eye-tractive".

Well here we are again the WHOLE site has this new crappy unuseable re-design - SUKS!

Since I found Flyertalk about a year ago I have been viewing it on the full(desktop) site using my iPad...didn't even know there was an alternative mobile site until this morning.
Like many others I found out about the homepage redesign last week and wasn't impressed. Then today, when I opened Flyertalk, it went straight to the mobile site so I thought there had been another redesign until I found,after a few pages of exploring, the button to bring me back to the full desktop site. Being as I pretty well dislike all mobile sites and prefer the UI of full desktop sites on my iPad I may be biased...but in the few minutes I was on the Flyertalk mobile site I found it pretty awful IMHO.....but like I said, I am biased against them and pretty well find them very cumbersome. I'm just curious...was the mobile site redesigned recently? Or has its present format been the norm for quite awhile??

It's awful...fortunately, we can just as easily bookmark the forums homepage.

I don't mind the tiles / pinterest approach of the homepage.
Change is always difficult but I'm sure people will get used to it.

However, from a UX perspective. Who decided to make the image thumbnails from the "Older Articles" widget non clickable? That's the first thing people try and click/tap to go to the article.

Thanks for pointing out, we will address.

Ya very fair feedback and we are working on a fix. We underestimated its usage and will find a way to get it back up.

+1 on this. The only mention of the forums, which basically are 99% of FT, is three little entries on the lower right hand corner. Which can be found after scrolling down about 1.5 page lengths. Its looks like we are ashamed of that section. The news articles mostly cover topics that have also been mentioned in the forums. Wouldn't it be lovely to link to the discussion in the forum from the article? More clicks, more page impressions, more lingering visitors...?

That used to happen — at least, more often than it currently does...