Tried various combinations of view & mode. I think I am going to set it on topic/linear and just go with it for a few days. It's different not seeing the subject line of every post in a thread right away, but I don't necessarily think it's better or worse yet, just different. I figure that's the vBulletin default format for a reason, and it might "grow on me" as they say.

I like the hybrid mode within a thread, but I ran into a weird thing with that. I'm a Mac laptop user (Safari browser) and Safari plays fine with the new board, but navigating with the trackpad is funky in hybrid view. You scroll up & down with the two-fingers move and once you get to the edge of the window that shows the whole thread, the entire page starts to move and that disrupts my smooth, easygoing message board reading experience. Mac people will know what I mean.

New train of thought: as for traffic & subscriptions being down, what I think TSL is running into here is a "perfect storm" of several factors: football season ending with 2 losses, basketball having a down year, the economy forcing people to try & save money wherever they can, more people using social media to follow sports, and on top of that the format change. In my line of work I deal with a lot of small businesses and I see plenty of them trying to cope with necessary changes in the current/post-recession economy and it ain't pretty sometimes. There was just a big street reconstruction project in my market that almost killed a couple of restaurants & retailers. It had to be done as the infrastructure under the street (water/sewer) was ancient & falling apart, and there was plenty of advance warning, but most of the businesses affected said they didn't anticipate how dramatic the effect would be. People just avoided the whole area, so things like making sure your parking was accessible turned out to be little help. A couple of my retail clients have moved recently too, and no matter how much you publicize your move there are going to be folks who have no idea & think you've closed, or don't want to go to the new location for whatever reason, etc. Most of my people are happy with their move, but they all said it got worse before it got better. But it did get better. Maybe some of that makes sense. Sometimes you must tear down in order to rebuild. You might run off some of your casual customers, but your core base stays, and if you have a consistently good product you pick up new people and eventually the casual customers return.