V3 rocks!

Thanks for the positivity, Jenny... We need it! :)

I never used V2, but V3 is great. There are a few tweaks and bugs, but I guess you'll have those all fixed in no time.

likealocal, Yes, we will. Thanks for even more positivity! :)

Now you just need your Bio info and all that fun stuff that took me a while to set up too. heh... and uh, add us cool guys to your watchlist too. 加油!

Dear CPod team, I think V3 is not bad (which means, in the place where I live, that it's pretty good, well, ehm, really good, superb...words, we usually do not use...). One can see in your comments (especially Ken's ;-) ) that the last weeks must have been tough. Amidst all the "I miss this, I want that back"-bashing which actually only shows the high expectations cpoddies have by now due to your fantastic (another word we usually do not use!) work over the last year(s) I would like to say: You did a great job with that new version. The only thing I miss here is a "what's new"-section where one could see, what bugs have been fixed or what section does not work properly yet or - to put it the positive way (John seems to like that) - what has been introduced to make language learning even easier for us.

After using V3 for a while, there are some things I like about it: it is easy to copy-paste a clean 汉字 only dialog from the dialog tab of the lessons; I like the way CPOD did the vocabulary in the advanced lessons (I'll stop nagging you about English transcripts for them. they are now more accessible to me.) ; the new wiz-bang stuff (avitars, etc.) is kind of cool; your content is still extremely worthwhile... There are some site navigation things that I'm either not used to or have trouble with: why no obvious link to The Saturday Show? Are you planning to kill it? ; I would still rather that downloads opened a new page (opening a new window and navigating back to the lesson page is rather a hassle.) But not to worry, I use and like the content too much too be put off by these things.

Let's stay with the positive yet critical theme we've got going here. I think V3 is a huge step forward, the site is much more consistent across the board, it has huge potential and I'm sure it will be much more appreciated by newcomers than V2 was. I think it isn't just one step forward, I think V3 is two huge steps forward. But I also think it's one step back. For those of us who've been using ChinesePod for a while, features that have been introduced over the deployment period of V2, and that made us feel we were really in control, we were learning on our own terms, are missing. It feels we're less in control, we're not learning on our terms any more. It will take some getting used to, and no doubt similarly to V2 we need to give it time. I'm sure over time things will polish up and we'll get back all the functionality we once enjoyed in V2.

Nicely put, Masaier. Yeah, it doesn't feel as "on your terms" as much as it did before. Before it felt like a grand buffet (大自助餐) from the very 1st page. It felt like you didn't even need to first take a seat to dig in.

Now we got our own little homes (our connect page) where I feel like I'm having to wait for food to be delievered.. and I don't mean that in an all negative way. At least I'm getting to know the faces of my poddie neighbors (no, not "potty" neightbors... I prefer solitude when I'm doing that on my terms, haha) and I've been able to track more conversations. Sadly I still have yet to actually go to and use the list of lessons page for each level like I did before... just a tad less accessible in the more complex than before menu, and miss the colorful-chinese-like art banners.

But don't take me as being negative. I wasn't even posting much in the old version. I'm just patiently waiting for some of the grand buffet features to come back if they can, in the meantime will be in my "home" (feel free to drop by... but not when I'm on the....errr... pot)

小明