I agree, I don't like it either.  I too want to see just my neighborhood info. I love the Resource Guide  yet,  I would prefer a separate place to share concerns and ideas with other neighborhoods.

 Here are some of my reasons:

1.  It takes too long to load.  

2.  There is no separation.  Everything is all lumped together.  It is not easy tell what is for your neighborhood and what is for someone else's.   

3.   It take's away the feeling of privacy and the feeling of having a personal site for each organization.

4.   People are not going to be pushed into sharing.   If there is a place to communicate and people are aware of it they will use it if they what to.  But when I am pushed - I 'walk' away. 

5.   If I did want to find  how another neighborhood handled a specific situation or get their opinions on something there is no good way to do it without wading through pages and pages of discussions looking the one topic I might be interested in.  I don't have that kind of time to waste.  

6.  It doesn't seem to have any order.  Posts don't seem to be in order of the most recent time posted, or the nearest neighbor to me, or alphabetical order, or even topic order.  Any kind of order might make them a little easier to look through.

7.   Things when all found in one spot tend to get jumbled together in peoples minds too....was that gotten off a post in my community or from another.....

8.   I am not looking for a blog for communities.  I am looking for a place to get information to the people in my neighborhood and to gather info from them.

8.  In the opening post of this Neighborhood Link Announcement it says "You will still always see posts relevant to your area first."  What does that mean?  It obviously doesn't mean that posts from your community stay on top of the list.

9.   I am not looking for a blog for communities.  I am looking for a place to get information to the people in my neighborhood and to gather info and ideas from them.

I see I made a mistake and have the same thing written twice but there is no feature for me to go back and correct. 

I can however, cut and paste now, which I couldn't do yesterday and that is an improvement.

You are right on all your points We thought this was or is supposed to be used for information sharing for our respectful neighborhoods. Thats how we have always used it.

We have alerted via posting that our neighborhood members if they choose to, should click on the bubble that will only show their posting to their respective neighborhood.

Otherwise the effort by neighborhhod link is great regarding trying to improve the site. I am sure they will appreciate input from those who use it and are probably trying to work out the "bugs".

I love neighborhood link.  I think this new discussion page could be more beneficial if you could have options on it similar to the calendar options.  I know if  I want to see my specific neighborhood calendar I just click on it.  If I want to see the City Wide Calendar of all listings I have the options to click on that link.

It is currently slow loading and hard to get out once you get in to the discussions.  Seems almost impossible to get back to the home page.  I do understand you are working on some of these issues.

I have used the discussion pages for my community to get urgent news out from our police, and to keep resident posted on upcoming events. 

We also target specific issues in our boundaries.  Many residents would post a question, or ask what can we do about something.

If I chose to visit a neighboring communities discussion page as a member I could always do that. 

Anyway I applaud the efforts to update, but think is some cases this is a step backwards.   Spell check is a nice new feature.

Our City Charlotte NC has a terrific Neighborhood Development Department that supports our cities Neighborhoods.  What we do in Charlotte would not always translate to other communities across the US.  Plus as everyone know when it comes to laws or ordinances each city is different.

We also have many government agencies such as Police, Parks and Recreation, City Council and County Commissioners that request we share things.  Now all those posting will be required to be posted under my screen name.  I can still notate I was requested to post, but it was easier to put their contact info on the posting, and do it for them in the past as they often requested.

Last month we had 2670 hits on our discussion page.  This was a record month with 4875 hits on our entire site.  We have worked hard to build this area of our web site.  I hope the new format does not discourage my community from using it.

My suggestion would be to have your local discussion page for you community pop up when you click talk about it.

Then have the option of showing city wide discussion pages.

Lastly have a final link that would allow you to show nationwide discussion listings.