My hope is that if people who are used to the old DU stick with it, it will become second nature very quickly. I've obviously been using DU4 for quite some time behind the scenes as we were developing it, and I zip around the site just as quickly as I ever did on DU3.
I don't want to sound blasé to the people who are having a hard time with the change. I understand that it's not easy to go from something you're used to, to something you're not. But I do hope that people at least give it a chance.
So, the issue with separating the My Posts button out now is that there's nowhere to put it. Bear in mind that anything you add to the layout has to work across all different devices. So dropping an extra button in there on a big desktop monitor might not be a problem, but there won't be enough room for it on a mobile device.
As far as the right-click aspect is concerned, it doesn't work on the Navigate and My Stuff buttons because those buttons don't link to another web page, they link to Javascript code which opens and closes the menu. So there is no page to open in a separate tab.
The buttons INSIDE the menu, however, link to pages, so they can be right clicked. If you have new posts and your My Stuff button notifies you, you can click My Stuff, then right-click Posts and select "Open in new tab" and that page will load separately for you.
With regard to subscribing to the Editorials forum -- there is a way to do this without receiving the left sidebar notifications. If you go to your Feed page -- https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=feed -- you can uncheck "Subscriptions (Forums)" in the left sidebar and those notifications will no longer appear. This is a bit unwieldy at the moment -- currently it's not refined enough that you can uncheck specific forums (which I think would be super useful) but I hope to improve on that in the future.
Which brings me to one last important point -- while there are certain things about DU4 which are now pretty much set in stone (like the navigation system) there are plenty of other areas where we will be able to experiment and make changes and improvements. Part of the reason for making this system-wide overhaul is that with DU3, a 12-year-old design, we were constantly attaching band-aids just to maintain it. DU4 gives us a new foundation to build on, which makes it much easier for us to make adjustments and improvements, and add features going forward.
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