Comment | I agree that it's probably a bad idea to feature a direct link to New Entry so prominently on the dictionary homepage. The number of wrong-forum posts has gone up sharply since that change, and the culprits do seem to be people who aren't even aware that the rest of the forum exists.
And to be fair, you can hardly blame them. If you put yourself in the position of someone who hasn't seen anything at LEO except the dictionary and the New Entry page, there is very little clue _from that point_ that there's any other way to get a translation of a word.
Of course, if they knew what 'Overview' meant, they could click on it. But it's actually not a very helpful choice of words, since it often simply means something like 'explanation,' which could be a FAQ or some other instruction-like text. Nor is that link highlighted or featured (hervorgehoben) in any way that shows visually at a glance that it's _the_ central forum link, the homepage, the one link that every forum user will need to return to.
Within the forum, I still think it would help to take a fresh look one day at all the headings, instructions, and navigation. The New Entry instructions in particular still don't really say what is _not_ a good new entry, or what belongs in another section of the forum.
But all that is a much lower priority than just getting back to minimum functionality: restoring all the dead forum links, and now, also getting rid of the ugly oversized half-Helvetica/half-Times forum.leo font, and restoring the link from forum.leo to the dictionary. (Not actively maintaining the older server is one thing, adding new errors to it is another.) Some days, like Thursday when all this went belly-up, just keeping the forum running at all seems to be too much to hope for.
So, in the short term, I agree that the New Entry link from the dictionary page seems to be more harmful than helpful. It could probably just be deleted.
Whether any of us stay at LEO beyond the short term probably depends on whether the LEO team is able and willing to continue to maintain the forum at all.
For the record, I don't have anything philosophically against the GmbH decision. I really appreciate the investors' taking that financial risk on our behalf, and the programmers' spending long hours to get the new system working.
However, it concerns me that the entire forum seems to be the lowest priority for the LEO team, and that, a month after all the GmbH changes at LEO, things here in the forum still seem to keep getting worse instead of better. Many regular forum users seem to have either already left or to have become much less active. You can't really blame them either.
I really want to be as supportive and patient as possible. But it's just getting a little hard to stay optimistic about the future. Right now, New Entry problems seem to be only the tip of the iceberg.
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