The say of the natives

"A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.
We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work - he is the purpose of it.
We are not doing him a favour by serving him.
He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him."

Ghandi

other industries are starting to realize that the customer WILL always come first, not SHOULD, but WILL. because if they're not your customer, someone else will gladly fill the need, then they'll be SEPs (Someone Else's Problems).

I've always thought that the WebX forum could have been made to work. However, when a decision has already been made to drop something, it's the easiest thing in the world to think up a few reasons to justify the decision in retrospect.

As Dave says, it's just another symptom of the top-heavy corporate machine losing touch with the customer.

In my opinion,

I find it hard to believe they can't make web crossing work.

>Your site may start with a modest membership. But it is reassuring to know that as your site grows in size, WebCrossing Core grows with you to support even millions of members without speed or service degradation. That is why WebCrossing servers have always been the choice of large companies, universities and organizations with large membership and extraordinary server load requirements.

>Setting up mirrored and distributed servers is easy, via the WebCrossing Core Web-based Control Panel. You can connect WebCrossing Core servers in any mirrored or distributed configuration needed, for hardware redundancy, load balancing and almost unlimited scaling. Messages propagate throughout mirrored servers in milliseconds.

http://webcrossing.com/Home/scaling.htm

i'm fairly sure this is a business only decision, as are all things adobe these days. the customer seems to have moved way down when comparing against the bottom line. in stead of say 60/40 customer focused, it looks from here that it's now more like 30/70 or worse. you know what? when your customers are happy, you can actually MAKE money! the jive sw is a best "bang" for the buck decision. hope they're not shooting themselves in the foot while banging away, again.

I look at it as somewhat of living in a tourist town in some ways, where we cater to the visitors.

Not that that is the main reason from the tech side... the main reason is to be able to combine the two databases from two very different forums into one stable forum. Plus they must have the capacity to efficiently handle the volume of traffic we create.

The ongoing criteria, once those are met, is to manage the software in a way that can be upgraded as needed over time.

Back to the first point, there is not a company that produces forum software just for techs. And it's not just techs that come to the Adobe forums. In fact, I would suspect that it's largely people that are not net or tech savvy that are the ones that end up coming here.

Yes, we need software that is easy for the worker bee's to deal with, but we also need software that people who have never been here before, and who are likely upset and frustrated by whatever brought them here, can effectively find their way about in. From their perspective, I can not say that this software is easy to work with.

This software was designed for us, with us waving the baton, and John doing our bidding. Unfortunately, over the long haul, that worked against us... the software was so customized that when the company did upgrades to the software, they were not able to include us along with their other customers. They are not willing to do that again.

So, the net is, we have to trust John and his team to have picked the very best software available on the market today that will meet our needs. We don't have to like it, but we do have to work with it. Or not. Our choice. All of us can be replaced.

People that 'work' in the forums, even as volunteers, do so out of the pride of helping others as much as anything else. People enjoy doing it, and they will continue enjoying doing it... even if they grumble about the software they end up doing it in.

I'm thinkin' that'll turn out to be the bottom line after all the dust has settled.

I may be old and opinionated, but all the new fangled forums that we keep being referred to are pretty and that is it in my opinion. They may have better search functions, but the readability is poor. There is just too much waste on the screen to scan through and get a quick view of what is there. I often want to browse, but do not have time to read it all (nor do I want to).

I did find the NNTP option to be interesting and I might actually find that I like it, but that is to be gone with the new forums (based on comments from MacroMedia users who seem to prefer the NNTP form to the actual forum structure that many have said is poor).

Thus, are the majority looking for fluff - are they really trying to retrieve any kind of information or just enjoy pretty pages? It is just like the folks that insist on putting graphics and such in their e-mail and that I filter out - no information content. That means that for ease of information flow, simple is often the most efficient. Sometimes a picture is a valued way to pass information and enabling some added features light pictures (without having to find web storage) would be nice.

Said my bit for a while. Have a good weekend folks!

Just take a look at the Adobe store. It has all kinds of eye candy and it is as useless as the Pope's genitalia.

And you think that posted questions that never receive a reply are going to make for happy customers or engender a reputable Corporate Profile?

Or is your object just to have a kiddies playground where you can post Avatars and click buttons mindlessly?

Or are you intending to be the one guy left to field ALL of the questions on ALL of the Forums when all of "the Regulars" have left?

I don't see the point of pandering to the lowest common denominator in the hope that sinking to the level of the least educated will generate more traffic in the Forums because once that Traffic find itself in a one-way street (and a dead-end at that!) because there is no-one there to answer questions or offer help anymore that traffic will dry-up.

One thing to keep in mind: do NOT discount the considerable amount of Adobe software that is sold solely because of the unbiassed recommendations of "the Natives" who selflessly man the pumps in these Forums day after day.

It would be worse to have forums with No questions. The large majority of forum users are question askers. Its true a small number of regulars answer most of the questions, but that shouldn't allow the minority to have more input than the majority.

For the large majority of users, the adobe forums appear old and outdated. Though I too appreciate the efficiency of the current layout, I'm in favor of moving forward with something new.

Once a Preview forum link is posted, you can be absolutely certain that it is set in concrete.

What Jacob, and the many other people who regularly answer questions on these Forums as he does, is trying to make clear to John C and his team is that if the finished format resembles the proposed layout (that John C posted several weeks ago), it will be unacceptable to "The Natives".

If you want Forums filled with unanswered questions, ignoring the requirements of "The Natives" is a sure-fire way to guarantee that that is exactly what you are going to get!