NNTP Users Say Goodbye
It has been four days since the turn over to the new forum and the NNTP news feed where turned off. This was the first time most NNTP users learned of the change since the new forum was not mentioned on the news feeds. If one used a news reader to access the forums one seldom, if ever, accessed the web user interface which was the only place the announcement of the pending new forum was.
Thus there have been some very active threads about the lack of NNTP access to these forums.
1) NO NNTP News Feed = A loss of a lot of helpful people.
2) Bring back NNTP forum or I'm quitting
If you review these threads you will find a lot of people who are not going to continue to use these forums without NNTP access and detailed reasons why the e-mail and rss feed are NOT acceptable as a substitute.
This is my resignation letter. I will not be contributing as much as I am used to doing. I may not have been the most prolific or most knowledgeable NNTP contribuitor, but I liked helping my fellow Adobe nee Macromedia nee Allaire ColdFusion users. I would review the CF forums several times a day between work tasks when I needed to take a mental breather. I have tried the e-mail subscription feature. The messages are jumbled, the subjects are unreadable, the content is fragmented and the headers do not follow the RFC standard so that my e-mail reader can not thread them properly. I have tried the RSS subscription feature. It is better in that the messages can be threaded and the subjects are readable, but it is one way and there is no convenient way to answer without opening a browser and waiting for two pages to render over and over again which takes a long time subjectively. And there are 6 RSS feeds for every forum and no explanation that I can find on why one would choose the different options.
I invite my fellow NNTP users to sign off here as I think we may be underrepresented in the feature discusion of the new forum. In the old forums we where all lumped together as a single user, it may not have been as apparent how many of us there are and how much we contributed. Doing some basic number crunch with the data I have access to, we may have been a small group of people but we seem to have been a prolific group, collectivily contributing almost a quarter of a million posts which is over 14% of the 1.6 million posts of all the forums.
I can not find, nor have I seen any official responses to our pleas to offer any hope that NNTP may or may not be a future option. Weather their will be any improvements in the e-mail feature and|or the web service API that would allow us to roll our own solution. Or any other commentary to give us an inclinning on weather our needs are being considered, this will probably be it for most of us.
I wish Adobe Forums good luck in the future and may check in now and agian to see what improvements their may be.
Ta Ta for now.
Ian
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