Having now spent a few hours 'getting used' to it, it's still cluttered and crap. First off - despite having paid a year's subscription on 27/12/2016, I now have just 26 days left of my free trial - what happens then..? A four & a half month refund I hope. Among the most annoying things (personally) are: in the 'British & Irish Records Archive', all Irish records are now merged with British ones so for example, for Great Snipe, you now have to scroll through 845 records to find the 20 or so Irish ones, whereas before there were in a section of their own at the end of the British records (rejected records being included in the main (only) list doesn't help either -
likewise, they previously had a section of their own after the respective country). Plus when you click on the balloon all you get is the name of the county and number of records there, but no link to them; When I click on a Birdmap balloon / pin, I only want to know what the species is, not a full list of that day's sightings (the old system worked perfectly - scroll across square, find out the species and if it was of interest then click on square and all the details came up); When I checked Sherkin Island in the sites section, it came as quite a surprise to see a 2012 record of Scopoli's Shearwater listed sixth in recent sightings there - no worries though, it's just one of 1,616 listed records of Scopoli's, compared with 36 listed records of Cory's Shearwater; Type in County Cork and you get offered a selection of 26 sites, not including Ballycotton, Red Barn, Youghal, Galley Head, Timoleague, Courtmacsherry, Clonakilty Bay, Clogheen/White's Marsh, Seven Heads, Rosscarbery, Toe Head, Baltimore, Sherkin Island or Mizen Head (and many others, but it does include Cotgrave CP, Nottinghamshire, which is handy...) so if you're using that as a guide to sites in Cork, you're gonna be missing out on quite a lot (you can type those sites in separately which is all very well if you know about them in the first place - I imagine the same applies to other counties); I could go on but don't have the time to waste, etc etc, blah blah blah. Like many others have said, why mend something when it isn't broken and no, I don't and never will want to subscribe to Birdwatch magazine thank you very much. I do however want a refund when my free trial period is up.
All the best, Julian.