Gloomy bellwether missd by most

Report · Apr 06, 2009

Report · Apr 06, 2009

Adobe just turned into ToysRUs …

and their new web sites and Forums are obviously targeting those at a similar stage of mental development.

Report · Apr 06, 2009

The Indian needed food,
He needed skins for a roof.
But he only took what they needed, baby.
Millions of buffalo were the proof.

Yeah,its all right.

But then came the white man,
With his thick and empty head.
He couldn't see past the billfold,
He wanted all the buffalo dead.

It was sad... It was sad.

Ted Nugent

Report · Apr 06, 2009

First of all, Ann...I agree with just about all of your negative assessments. We don't have a problem there. I do, however think you're wasting your effort and time by repeating your rants in a hundred different ways and in a dozen different threads. If that makes you feel better, hey, have at it. Just keep your surprise to yourself about the fact that people might get tired of your badgering and tell you to STFU occasionally.

But you kind of missed my point: Adobe didn't "JUST" turn into "Toys-R-Us", and that's the sole reason I spent the time to make that image and spell it out.

I saw it coming a long time ago, little by little, as I'm sure many others did. But it was in dribs and drabs, a tiny little atomic-powered locomotive that no small protests were going to stop. It's now to the point where no matter howoften and how loud any of us protest, the tracks have been spiked to the railbed...and there's no shutting down that atomic train's power plant.

We're FKD, and Adobe doesn't give a SHT.

Report · Apr 06, 2009

>>>If that makes you feel better, hey, have at it. Just keep your surprise to yourself about the fact that people might get tired of your badgering and tell you to STFU occasionally.

Doesn't worry me at all.

>Adobe doesn't give a SHT.

Which has become more than obvious.

I just hope that they enjoy having to pay expensive engineers to spend their time answering newbie's questions in the Forums from now on.

Report · Apr 06, 2009

Ann Shelbourne wrote:
>>>If that makes you feel better, hey, have at it. Just keep your surprise to yourself about the fact that people might get tired of your badgering and tell you to STFU occasionally.
Doesn't worry me at all.

But it should. There is no point in irritating users who may have sympathized with your viewpoints the first 10 times... You are fighting Adobe, not us.

Report · Apr 06, 2009

Ann Shelbourne wrote: I just hope that they enjoy having to pay expensive engineers to spend their time answering newbie's questions in the Forums from now on.

There is no 'enjoy' about it. They simply WON'T pay ANYONE to answer newbie questions.

That's a service which is amply provided by a bazillion other websites and forums, created and maintained by enthusiastic people who feel they can offer great resources to users of all stripes.

What always made these forums great was the sheer speed of replies, the breadth and depth of accumulated knowledge provided by a whole lot of people who really know their stuff, inside and out.

I've long held that these forums are NOT really meant for new users, even though many of us answer the most rudimentary of questions (we may grumble about it, but those questions DO get answered, over and over and over again). Some may think it's snobby or exclusive, but as we all know it's often quicker to use the Help Files and Google to find answers to almost all basic questions. Where these forums have always shone the brightest was when a user comes in who has obviously done their homework (as evidenced by the content and composition of their questions), and is met by a wide array of answers or—at the very least—pointers toward resources that may not be easily found.

If it's a chore for all of the people who formerly engaged in being the "go-to guys", then that magic will disappear.

It's not a problem of things now being different with the new forum platform; it's a matter of it being a chore having to wait for a slow interface to catch up with the speed of the actual, brilliant humans who man the sails here.

Report · Apr 06, 2009

What always made these forums great was the sheer speed of replies, the breadth and depth of accumulated knowledge provided by a whole lot of people who really know their stuff, inside and out.

And THAT is exactly what I can almost guarantee we are going to lose.

Look in the Photoshop Forum right now and you will see that Chris Cox (a senior Adobe Engineer) is out there on his own having to answer questions and getting almost no help from the people who have always been more than ready to provide support.

Adobe chose to disregard its long-standing Users' requirements entirely; with the result that they have created a thoroughly frustrating and stultifying environment where it IS indeed "a chore" to contribute.

If it's a chore for all of the people who formerly engaged in being the "go-to guys", then that magic will disappear.
It's not a problem of things now being different with the new forum platform; it's a matter of it being a chore having to wait for a slow interface to catch up with the speed of the actual, brilliant humans who man the sails here.

The "Magic" is already dissipating … .

Report · Apr 08, 2009

Look in the Photoshop Forum right now and you will see that Chris Cox (a senior Adobe Engineer) is out there on his own having to answer questions and getting almost no help from the people who have always been more than ready to provide support.

Absolutely true, and it's because Dave and Claudio and I and the other Usual Suspects have been trying to debug the forums, which means wasting a huge amount of time HERE instead in Photoshop Windows. The fact that the software sux means that it takes even longer to say it sux. So we will have to let CC take care of telling people how to reset their prefs and put their Wacom stylus away from the pad.

Report · Apr 09, 2009

I have just washed my hands of the New Adobe Forums: the new format is too slow and cumbersome and I am no longer willing to waste my time answering User's questions in them.

Adobe want their Forums this way? Fine.

May they find other willing Helpers because I am not intending to be one of them.

Report · Apr 09, 2009

Ann Shelbourne wrote:
I have just washed my hands of the New Adobe Forums: the new format is too slow and cumbersome and I am no longer willing to waste my time answering User's questions in them.
Adobe want their Forums this way? Fine.
May they find other willing Helpers because I am not intending to be one of them.

I think they're fun.

It's like an initiatve test.

Report · Apr 06, 2009

What always made these forums great was the sheer speed of replies, the breadth and depth of accumulated knowledge provided by a whole lot of people who really know their stuff, inside and out.

What is sad to me is the people who are responsible for this decision will probably never know the difference.

Report · Apr 07, 2009

What is sad to me is the people who are responsible for this decision will probably never know the difference.

Exactly that thought was going through my head.

It is interesting that most of the people in here complaining about the slowness in use of this Jive thing are were frequent helpers in the Photoshop forums.

It was always my impression that those areas were a lot busier than most of the others. Incidentally I wonder why Bridge and ACR have been hived off from the PS collective.

We were simply operating at a faster speed and I'm sure the statistics would prove it.

Report · Apr 07, 2009

John Joslin wrote:
Incidentally I wonder why Bridge and ACR have been hived off from the PS collective.

That has always been the case. Though the Bridge started off as the File Browser in Photoshop 7.x, when it appeared as a new wntity in CS2 it was a common way of communicating between the suite applications. It is no longer just Photoshop's.

Camera Raw is the engine that also drives raw development in Lightroom. Frankly ACR 5.2 (and later) was the only reason I upgraded to Photoshop 11.x, an otherwise unremarkable "upgrade". It deserves its own forum.

Report · Apr 07, 2009

Ramón G Castañeda wrote:
John Joslin wrote:
Incidentally I wonder why Bridge and ACR have been hived off from the PS collective.
That has always been the case. Though the Bridge started off as the File Browser in Photoshop 7.x, when it appeared as a new wntity in CS2 it was a common way of communicating between the suite applications. It is no longer just Photoshop's.
Camera Raw is the engine that also drives raw development in Lightroom. Frankly ACR 5.2 (and later) was the only reason I upgraded to Photoshop 11.x, an otherwise unremarkable "upgrade". It deserves its own forum.

OK, then let's have them a bit easier to find. They could be included as links on the initial PS page here:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop?view=overview

Report · Apr 07, 2009

John Joslin wrote:
OK, then let's have them a bit easier to find. They could be included as links on the initial PS page here:
http://forums.adobe.com/community/photoshop?view=overview

Agreed.

That's the way it was on the WebX forums, and there were links to to them on the maind thread index page of the Photoshop forums.

Report · Apr 07, 2009

i'd prefer it if the links were in their own panel on the right while in the photoshop subforums so that i wouldn't have to go to the main photoshop forums to get to the links. Even better would be if we could customize the links that would appear in that panel

Report · Apr 07, 2009

Bookmark them and forget about the issue.

If these Jive clowns can't even provide breadcrumbs at the bottom of each page, let's not overtax their puny little brains with requests for more sophisticated customization. What's the use?

Report · Apr 09, 2009

That's a service which is amply provided by a bazillion other websites and forums, created and maintained by enthusiastic people who feel they can offer great resources to users of all stripes.

and maybe that's the point.

it's very VERY possible that internally, high up, adobe has come to see hte forums as a liablity and decides to shut them down. they can accomplish that by simply shutting the doors. goodbye, we're gone. which won't look too good. OR they can provide a "new and improved" system, theoretically costing way less than the former system that will force out anyone that ever wanted to help out.

fast forward a year and no one uses the forums at adobe because there are better places to get answers to your photoshop questions and BANG. net gain on the balance sheet when they close up shop because the forums go largely unused.

thank you, thank you.

<re-don's tinfoil hat />

... and having disposed of the monster, exit our hero, through the door, stage right.

Report · Apr 09, 2009

Here's something I find really odd...

It appears that almost all the Adobe forums I have bookmarked in a folder on my Firefox browser toolbar have updated their appearance by adopting the newer, uglier Adobe favicon.

Except for THIS forum (The AI/Windows form no loger exists, per se)...I see the new favicon in the URL/Location bar at the top of my browser, but the old favicon has remained persistent in the folder.

Have a look:

Report · Apr 09, 2009

firefox likes to screw around with those icons, just ignore it

Report · Apr 09, 2009

Phos±four dots:

Good grief! I just noticed that there are horizontal scroll bars in your original post. Why didn't the text simply wrap at the right margin? Any idea why they are present?

Or is this just something weird about Safari(3.2.1) running on OS X(10.5.6)?

Report · Apr 09, 2009

Bob_Peters wrote:

Good grief! I just noticed that there are horizontal scroll bars in your original post. Why didn't the text simply wrap at the right margin? Any idea why they are present?
Or is this just something weird about Safari(3.2.1) running on OS X(10.5.6)?

Heh! That's amusing.

My original post is nothing but an image I created in Photoshop. If you were running Firefox with the "Stylish" add-on, and the custom style sheet for these forums installed you'd be able to widen your browser window, which—because of Stylish—would have allowed the main message content column to also expand horizontally, and thehorizontal scrollbar would disappear.

Apparently, you view using Trebuchet or something very similar, or you may have been scratching your head over why the text in my thread starter post looked so different from the rest of the messages.

Report · Apr 09, 2009

Phos±four dots:

Since the original is an image I can understand why the scroll bars would be present.

DonRicklin:

I don't understand why you do NOT have scroll bars since the post is an image. Are you certain you are seeing all of it?

Report · Apr 09, 2009

Maybe he was looking at a different message and not the original posting with the scroll bars.