New "speedometer"
While I always criticised the ranking system (actually in my opinion we don't need any as we also don't need any kind of gamification) with the various stones where many people (including myself) could not tell the precise order and some confused the stone names with the name of the poster, its my feeling that now it got even worse.
While with the stones the criticism was that they don't communicate their meaning clear enough, the new "speedometer" does and even though I think that things got worse. While we could happily ignore the stones, now functionality, comfort and usability are also impaired. The speedos are much too large and distracting and the whole page looks ugly and like a mess. Furthermore the graphics take up much too much space - especially vertical space (but also horizontally, resulting in the need for otherwise avoidable line breaks).
All this results in less information available per screen making more scrolling necessary which is a loss of comfort and usability without gaining anything worthwhile.
I really wish we could get rid of those speedos or get an option to hide them.
The best solution IMHO would be not to show the rank in the overview of threads but just show it with all the other information when you mouse-over the name.
Just look at the pic and compare space consumption without and with those speedos (it would even be better if we could get rid of the leftmost column of white space only!)
EDIT: Oh, I just noticed that it looks we a having speedos and still stones, too !!?? Only difference seems to be that the stone names now are not coloured as they used to be.
