Improvement of the new forum?

I do agree. The old forum was better than this new one... 

Levon said:

I don't understand how changing the forums to something less usable saves Garmin money?

That's not what I meant. I was only addressing this:

"I'm guessing someone at Garmin thought the new format could be used to reduce the cost of providing support "

and this "The flaw in that line of thinking is that isn't what a discussion forum is for."

My point is that even if we think forums are not for reducing the cost of support, that's pretty much the only reason most companies ever had them. It's not like some TV shows or video games where the publishers have forums to build a community of legit fans. IMO, very few ppl come here to discuss Garmin products unless they have a problem, and the fact that Garmin got rid of the "general discussion" forums points to the fact that they don't want us to come here so we can chill and discuss running, for example. Even Runners World got rid of their forums in favour of FB groups, so there's one less place people can go and discuss their training, with fun and interesting threads that can last for up to a year or longer, rather than just a few weeks. I guess r/running is probably the best alternative. The community is certainly there, although reddit isn't suited for long threads (especially as posts are locked after a few monts), and maybe people don't like long threads anymore, anyway.

Which features are missing from mobile? Off the top of my head: the ability to post code and the ability to select text in posted code. To be fair, most people are probably posting code from a computer, but if you wanted to post a short snippet from a phone or tablet, you're SOL.

Thanks for clarifying .. I thought you meant changing the format to this crappy new setup was meant to save $$ over the previous forums.

Agreed, users helping other users definitely lessens the demand for official support and saves the companies money.

PS: I almost didn't see your post given this 'new and improved' forum messaging format :-/

-_- I know right? To be fair, if reply notifications worked, then the threaded format would be fine, except for very long discussions. I’m not sure why this forum has tried to take all the best features from modern discussion platforms and implement them poorly. 

e.g. @-mentions don’t work unless you select a name from the drop down list — simply typing @username does not work 

- reply notifications broken or disabled

- notifications not saved to history, so even if reply notifications worked, you’d only see unread replies

- there’s no way to collapse subthreads

- Quotes not editable and arbitrary text not quotable (have to select existing text)

- Code needs to be entered in a separate pop-up for some reason and posted code is not selectable on mobile so it can’t be copied and pasted 

If this forum was exactly like Reddit, for example, it would still be a lot better than what we have now, although not everyone would be happy. But in reality, we have something that tries to be as usable as Reddit and fails.