OK, here goes.
For a long time there has been little or no evidence of any hosts, moderators or Adobe employees in here. John C and kanguyen make very welcome appearances from time to time, and both show an immaculate attitude, but little happens to improve things - although thanks to those who made a proper sticky about the use of this forum.
We have been relieved of a host who was allegedly a Community Expert in 'Creative Suite', but had apparently fulfilled none of the criteria for a Community Expert - such as being an expert in something. Nor did this person have more than a very wobbly grasp of how the forums actually work. With zero credibility, said person annoyed people by moralising and lecturing at them.
So now we have a pretty bolshy group of people who are sitting about, kicking their heels, hoping against hope that someone will sort out this buggy, defective software. Many have made very detailed, constructive suggestions and requests, others have gone to the trouble of making work-arounds. In the meantime they are chatting amongst themselves, which is normal behaviour for bored people in a waiting room who are still hoping for something to happen.
There are people who have used the WebX forums for years and years and appreciated them, even with their faults. These people are still grumpy about being shifted onto something they see as much worse. So there are bad moods around.
In my personal opinion, there have been quite a lot of posts, probably some of them mine, that are unnecessarily off-topic, sarcastic and hostile. A bit of a tug on the reins would be no bad thing in my view.
However, moderating a group such as the one gathered here is not easy. To be successful, it is necessary to show good humour, a sense of humour, a willingness to explain actions, and a degree of courtesy and respect, even to those who are not behaving particularly well at the time. Oz was a shining example, and brought a considerable degree of order to the Lounge (an even wilder corner of the West 
) without antagonising anyone - well, maybe just the one serial reprobate who is unreachable anyway.
The proverbial 'firm but fair' - and a very nice bloke.
To suddenly begin mass deletions, without showing any of these qualities, may well be counter-productive.
For me, Jochem has a head start, since I believe he is the possessor of a minor-planet-sized brain and the skills to sort this mess out in minutes if he were given the chance. Good start. Now we need a better balance between discouragement of excessive pointless and snarky posts, information about what progress is being made / might be made / won't be made on forum fixes and improvements, individual help like JC has always provided for people who have weird stuff going on with their account, and a degree of visible humanity - please - to gain the consent of those being moderated.
1 Correct answer
I still can't get past the idea that "discussion" was invited and yet at the same time not needed.
Jochem,
I don't understand how you can be so hard-headed and stubborn! I do understand that when we, any of us, do something, we generally feel we are correct in our actions. BUT that does NOT mean we cannot learn from others and see that perhaps what we *thought* was correct, is just possibly slightly off-center from being correct. One must be willing to see that there *are* other ways to look at
...
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Replies
David_Powers wrote:
It's perfectly clear that a lot of people don't like the new system, and I'll be quite frank: there is a lot not to like. The fact is that this is the system we have got. I have no idea whether there's any chance of going back to the previous separate Macromedia and Adobe forums, but I doubt it very much.
Which is a very sad thought. 
David_Powers wrote:
Adobe is a huge organization; and huge organizations are slow, bureaucratic creatures.
and they seemed to have turned a blind eye to the problems with the Jive forums. They probably *did* shell out a lot of money for this and for that very reason, this mess should have been cleaned up MUCH FASTER.
David_Powers wrote:
It's perfectly clear that a lot of people don't like the new system, and I'll be quite frank: there is a lot not to like. The fact is that this is the system we have got. I have no idea whether there's any chance of going back to the previous separate Macromedia and Adobe forums, but I doubt it very much.
I don't think folks necessarily think that the forums should be broken back up, but they don't want a broken forum either.
David_Powers wrote:
We've lost a lot of good friends and helpful people in the Dreamweaver forums, but the volume of posting hasn't diminished;
and what of the *quality* of the answers?
David_Powers wrote:
In spite of the problems with the forum software, many product forums are vibrant. We've lost a lot of good friends and helpful people in the Dreamweaver forums, but the volume of posting hasn't diminished; and new people have emerged as useful contributors.
and the really sad, disheartening thing about this is that the loss of the helpful, insightful, highly knowledgeable contributors seems to have been seen as collateral damage. Many of those people literally helped make Adobe who they are today by way of these forums. And Adobe just doesn't seem to care.
Hi all
I think David makes some very valid points. I don't understand why it's a sad thought that you can't return to the days of MM and Adobe forums. After all, how often do you climb into your car and drive to a new destination while constantly watching where you have been? You can't. You have to look ahead and deal with what you have, no?
So far, all the chatter I've witnessed since deciding to subscribe to this forum has been about the perception of a heavy handed moderator. I've seen name calling and other very bad behavior from a variety of individuals. It seems foreign to me. I so seldom see this in the forums I monitor day to day. Sure, tempers flare from time to time, but nothing on the scale of this. It's quite shocking. Kind of like watching an episode of COPS.
My observation thus far has been to conclude that by and large the activity occurring in this particular forum has an unusually high noise to signal ratio. If what I've seen so far is indicative of the past activity, it strikes me that Adobe may have intentionally turned a bit of a deaf ear on the commentary occurring here.
It's my firm belief that all of us (customers, participants, moderators, Adobe) are doing the best we know how to do with what we are given. There is always a learning curve involved with anything. So if we all take a breath and exercise a bit of patience and understanding with one another, things will hopefully improve.
My thought is that if the unneccessary chatter and rudeness calms a bit, perhaps Adobe will take more of an interest in what's going on. And speaking as one who participates in forums all day every day helping others, the more specific we can be the better off we will be. For example, it's not helpful whatsoever to Adobe to stomp in here and scream the forums suck. We need to tell them in specific terms what we don't like.
And here's something to think about. What if we also listed what we DO like about them? Personally, I think it's been infinitely more helpful to be able to post some attachments and screen captures. Sometimes you can see something immediately that would have been totally lost in translation from a pure verbiage standpoint and would have required several back and forth posts. So that aspect has been one of my favorites.
Sincerely... Rick 
Crossed my mind - but I wasn't ready to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Me neither; he eschewed the winkie after all!
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