Inspiring

Question

NNTP Users Say Goodbye

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
April 9, 2009
16 replies
19295 views

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

3) Please bring back NNTP

4) Bring back nntp access

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

This topic has been closed for replies.

Claudio González

Brainiac

Just a couple of final related notes.

1. As far as I can tell, none of the many and very active participants of the ex-MM forums in Spanish, all of them NNTP users, have come back on a regular basis, although a few have done so very occasionally. I think this suggests they don't need these forums as they are. Perhaps they formed their own newsgroup, as they formed group with a high degree of cohesion, but have no way of knowing.

2. Private groups can be successful. Here is a link to a Chilean one that has been active for many years. Although it's in Spanish, it gives an idea of their work even if one does not understand the words. The group started as a Macromedia one, centered mainly on Freehand if I remember correctly, and managed to survive extremely well the absorption of Macromedia by Adobe.

http://www.mmug.cl/index2.php

JolieKatana

Participating Frequently

this is the group I went back to

it is not very active

we could use some new blood.................

comp.graphics.apps.photoshop

Mark_A__Boyd

Inspiring

I am logging in to remove email notifications from various threads/forums and...

...to say that I will not likely ever post here again. By coincidence, a powerfully helpful forum user announced his exit today in another thread - I will miss reading his posts.

I am ever the optimist, but Jive and Adobe have had more than 90 days - since this forum went live - to fix some very minor issues with the email interface that might have been enough to keep me here. Today I hit a final straw with a very simple email issue that is nearly four months old and just cannot deal with this place anymore. It is not even feasible as a good place to lurk and learn anymore. I would not have given ANY OTHER failure of a site/forum/newsgroup more than a few cursory attempts. But I really enjoy using Adobe products and had high hopes for the new forum - even without NNTP access.

As a loyal customer of both the old Macromedia and Adobe products, I will continue to use the software as long as it remains innovative - or at least somewhat competitive. I learned an awful lot from both of the newsgroups over the years, but I just can't waste any more of my time here.

And all this coming from somebody who is semi-retired and still doesn't have a real life.

--
Mark A. Boyd
Keep-On-Learnin' :-)
This message was processed and edited by the most pathetic Jive software.
It shall not be considered an accurate representation of my words.

A

Anonymous

A

Anonymous

I am been a regular user of a variety of Adobe-related NNTP forums since 2000 which helped me learn and build my creative business. This new forum completely sucks and refuse to use it....sure, prolly my loss but the new points system really bugs me....there were already post-whores with vested interest in selling their components, but I could filter them in my NNTP reader. The perpetual login of the new forums and clunkiness totally suck.

4-6 of Adobe products are the conduit for the success of my business today, but now I just use Google to find a solution to my issues. But, I miss being able to help when I can but refuse to do it in the new format.

A

Anonymous

Welcome back. Sign of the times I guess. Add insult to injury my internet provider no longer supports RSS feeds in order to save money or so they say.

D

Dierk_Haasis

New Participant

Another one gone if NNTP does not come back. Apart from the fact that my personal work-flow is better off with newsreader access, they way this transition was handled was ... sub-optimal.

Claudio González

Brainiac

I am really an outsider in this discussion, as I have always used a browser to accede these forums (which, by the way, makes me in no way happy with the new forums). However, I have some related information that may be important to know.

For the last year or so, I have been watching closely what happened in the forums in Spanish. These were really two subforums: the ex-Adobe ones, and the ex-Macromedia (ex-MM) ones, although they were never called so.

Nearly everyone using the ex-Adobe ones used browsers and so never knew or cared about the NNTP problem. Users of the ex-MM were another story. First, almost all of them used NNTP access. Second, for reasons too long to explain here (and not fully known by me), for years there were no moderators of any kind in there, and almost no interventions of Adobe personnel in the forums. And third, and because of all this, they developed a strong feeling of a close community, considering their "newsgroup" as independent of Adobe. They never accepted that it was really an Adobe forum, and only thanked Adobe for providing the hosting for theit independent newsgroup.

Well, to make the story short, when they heard the news that the change of the forums would end the NNTP support, they protested violently (in their newsreader and in Spanish; i.e, where nobody from Adobe was likely to read their protests), and most of the regulars announced they were never coming back. And, as far as I can say (their messages appear now posted by "Newsgroup_User" and I can't recall all their names), none of them has come back and, most probably, none will evercome back. In the last few hectic days, there were several messages suggesting they opened their own newsgroup, and for all I know, they may have succeeded.

Compared with the number of participants in the forums in English, I am talking of a small groupd of users, so their absence is not likely to worry Adobe . They were, however, very active, and served a useful service to the Spanish speaking community of ex-MM users. I doubt they will be easily replaced.

D

D__McCahill

Known Participant

Claudio González wrote:
so their absence is not likely to worry Adobe . ... I doubt they will be easily replaced.

And the same will happen with NNTP users. They are generally the most computer-literate users (newbies can't figure NNTP out) and thus often had the most to offer the new users. Many hosts used NNTP exclusively. I wonder how many of them will be quitting?

A

Anonymous

This is just a test message. When I reply via email, it get posted as

a completely blank message.

I will NOT change my email default from 'quote message'. With a

separate forum server it was easy to change the defualt. For this post

I deleted all original content first.

Two other glitches -

Any message that I post (whether via the website or email) doesn't

get emailed back to me. This is probably by design!

Can't find a way to post via email except as a reply.

- Herb

srjacobs

New Participant

Yes - I would agree - the web is really a very inefficient interface for newsgroups when compared to newsreaders. I don't have the time to waste on this interface - slows me down too much - so for now the only time I will be checking in on any of these forums is when a new release of LR or other products is available so I can determine if there are problems with it that might warrant waiting....

Listen up Adobe - get the provider to turn on the capability that is there with this software - otherwise you will lose a large # of readers who don't want to/refuse to slog through this web interface.

--Scott Jacobs

C

Christopher Glaeser

Participating Frequently

We need a *user* forum. Adobe is going to continue to jerk us around on this company-controlled clunker.

Best,

Christopher

JolieKatana

Participating Frequently

well I can't find any reply button on the page this email refers me to, not

very user friendly is that?

so I am attempting to reply by email

Here goes:

my new ISP (Comcast) has discontinued support for NNTP, formerly I signed on

with Bellsouth

I found a free service: freenews.netfront.net

and have re-joined alt.graphics.photoshop

If most of you NNTP readers will join I know we can make it better..as of

now only a few cranky old guys and a couple of long time regulars are left

over there & unmoderated will mean using your blocker options more often for

the jerks trolls and spammers

Look forward to seeing some of you over there

(KatWoman)

M

MikeV99

Known Participant

My 2$ (inflation) -- bring back NNTP.

S

Skysi

New Participant

Yes, bing it back. BTW, there are other Adobe groups on the USENET. I'll be just using those. Bye!

Charlie Choc

Participating Frequently

I'm a former NNTP user and, while I'm trying to give the new forums a chance, I find them very clumsy to navigate much less figure out which ones have new topics, etc. I expect my usage will continue to taper off.

Erik Lord

Inspiring

Lifelong NNTP user here. I participate in other web forums and have nothing against them in general, but those are all pretty much 'hobby' forums.

I don't know how much time or control Adobe had over picking the forum replacement. This seems like decent software that just needs to abandon some silly components for some effective ones.

So hopefully over the next month they'll be made more usable.

My biggest complaint, however, is slowness. Adobe's servers were never fast. Putting heavy web forum processing on top...well, it's as expected. What ever happened to the minimum wait time for web content?

I'll still try to participate but the volume definitely won't be as heavy as it used to be. I still like to help where I can...but I can't afford to double/triple the time.

So here's to hoping that these web forums will be made efficient and, someday, NNTP access will return (because, as noted, it IS possible).

Erik