John C: What about the feedback? 5 minutes a day is all it takes!

[Phos_four_dots]

We're giving you guys TONS of feedback. We're helping to troubleshoot, were telling you what works and what doesn't. We're reporting on problems and helping other uers with workarounds and solutions. We're offering everything we know and can figure out. Yeah, it gets elevated to some pretty noisy bitching at times. Sorry about that, Chief!

But we're not hearing much in return, or seeing much in the way of tangible results.

Example: Since we've heard nothing much about getting rid of the annoying right-side column, we'd made suggetions about putting some quick navigation links in the right-column boxes for forum thread indexes. You agreed that it's a good idea. You asked me specifically to put together a list of links. I took the time and put together a nice set of links for both of the Photoshop forums. I even formatted them in the HTML that it looks like you'll need. I sent you a Private Message about them. You asked me to send the text file via email. I did that.

Then.....NOTHING.

Seriously, how difficult would it be to just copy/paste those links I sent you into the boxes that are already there and waiting for the code? Maybe there's something I don't understand about the way the forum needs to be tweaked in order for those links I put together to work, but I really don't think so. While we're waiting for the big fixes, how about spending a couple minutes to implement those links? I mean, throw us a bone already! At least that would make things a little nicer while you work on the more dire issues.

Apart from a few things that seem very minor, we're getting almost nothing in the way of feedback from you (I use that term collectively, but YOU are the public entity who is dealing with us). Of course we can assume that you all are diligently working on things, but WHAT? And HOW? And with what goals in mind?

How about you make it a point to provide us with a regular digest of what you folks (both the Adobe and Jive people) are doing?

• What's on your "To-Do" list?

• What are you having trouble with?

• What requests just can't be met because of certain technical or other considerations?

--->How about some quick explanation about why something can't be done?

• What things are you trying in order to fix problem xyz that many have been so vocal about?

Please, think about giving us 5 minutes a day (that's all it should take ) to bang out a few sentences about progress being made or roadblocks that refuse to flatten out.

Keep us in the loop. Many of us feel like we're banging our heads against the wall. We have scant little sense about whether the feedback we're giving to YOU guys is being listened to, acted upon, relayed to YOUR bosses, ignored, sneered at or sent straight to dumper. In the absence of a 2-way dialogue, we have no idea whether we should continue to report on certain problems, or bring up new ones. We don't know whether we should fine-tune our scrutiny and the reports we provide to your team.

To quote George Carlin, We don't know whether to s**t or wind our watch.

Don't worry about whether what you report to us is too trivial, or esoteric, or bureaucratically convoluted. Please let us know what is being done.

Like Dave Milbut and others have expressed elsewhere, we're really starting to feel like we just don't matter. And that feeling keeps growing with every passing day where we're kept out of the loop and in the dark.

I appreciate that you have a lot on your plate, that your dancing as fast as you can. I'm glad for the progress you ARE making, even if it's not highly noticeable out here in Userland.

The people who make these forums EVERYTHING that they are deserve to be kept informed.

Please. 5 minutes a day is all it takes.

[Jacob Bugge]

As an addition to what was said in earlier posts about badges and points:

The detrimental effects of badges and especially points were pointed out numerous times by many of us from the very beginning of the trial period.

Just to repeat one specific point about points: Even if they were not destructive, as they are, and even if they were not given in an erratic way, as they are, the points would still be silly because they do not reflect the insight and contributions within in each forum.

[Phos_four_dots]

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before:

We users/kvetchers/idea-generators have gotten some feedback about how difficult and frustrating it is for John C, et al, to be able to sift through all of these threads here, while also trying to get some actual tweaking, recoding, and customization done. I understand the frustration generated because the same issues are being brought up over and over and over, and how issues are being spread out over multiple, convoluted threads, and because topic drift and extraneous emotional exchanges clutter up and hide the important information. One of the biggest problems facing John & Kanguyen's team seems to be that there's just too much to keep up with and sift through, to organize the info generated and to put it into some sort of logically collated order.

Pursuant to that, I'm sure that there must be at least a half dozen of us regulars here, probably more, who have read every post in every thread in the Comments Forum since Jive went live. There are a bunch of us who—in between the course of our various and sundry other duties during our days—have managed to deeply absorb the gist of almost every problem stated so far. We may not know the solutions, but we sure do know about the problems! We've thought about them a lot, we've exerted the thought power required offer up suggestions and some lateral-thinking ideas; we've provided troubleshooting data, workarounds, and more. In the case of people like Jochem, possible/probable solutions have been spelled out at a very competent and professional level.

Then it dawned on me:

For the price (CHEAP!) of one good entry-level employee—s/he of reasonable and relevant education and mettle—would be of great benefit if their job description was to go through the threads as we users have, with an eye toward methodically distilling and organizing the issues we've been hashing over and to prepare the data in a suitably robust resource-organization/GTD app. An info-gathering proxy, if you will, for John C. & whoever else might have their sleeves rolled up these days.

Shoot, with Summer coming up, and an announcement made, it wouldn't surprise me if hundreds of recent college grads would show up to jump at the chance to intern at Adobe doing anything they could, just for the opportunty to get experience, get noticed, and maybe get hired.

Hmm...

[Jacob Bugge]

An excellent suggestion that is in no way punishable because Phos has the point power here.