New USGS Earthquake Reports View Sucks.

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The USGS, normally one of my favorite places, is upgrading their earthquake reporting system, or at least they think they are.  For me, to see what I want to see, now takes a whole pile of clicks, where one click did it all before.

The old site I sure is fully automated, and could be left up to run indefinitiely, but no, they're gonna kill it off, so they say.   You can even send them a convenient note about the switch, so I made use of their "report a quake our sensors didn't catch" to send them the following:

Since you have a, "here's the new way to report earthquakes  for us, forget the old one we're gonna kill it sometime soon" and there is no place to make public comments about this one sided process, I just wanted you to know that I loved the old map, one click shows all of California in a VERTICAL format.  Did you notice that California is taller than it is wide?  Your new format messes with the natural shape and requires resizing of window.  Also, your default 2.5 quake magnitude setting is a pain too, yet another click required to get into that I want.  Why are you trying to make me work so hard?  I have you on my toolbar, one click, and I see 99% of what I want to know.  Now you've turned the site into and underwater maze, filled with jello.   Let that old one be. It's fine, it costs nothing to run, it's automated, let the consumer decide.

thanks,

Doug

PS, if you kill the old site, I will be visiting far less often.  Or maybe that is what you had in mind.  "See, look at all the clicks and page visits we are getting, since we upgrade, please give us more money, Washington, we be popular.,"  BTW, posting this to my blog, farstars.blogspot.com