The Big Picture

[Guest]

I think what is not being understood by some participants in these discussion is the scale of change which will follow the transition to the new forums.

Have a look at http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/clearspace-community and you'll see that the purpose of the Clearspace Community software goes way beyond the objectives that might be deduced of the current forums and their underlying software.

My personal take on things is that Adobe have decided that the whole style of the user interactions and community here is no longer appropriate to their corporate needs. There was a time when provision of a support forum was not seen as much related to the main thrust of company objectives, but those days have gone. Online communities are now one of the chief means of interaction between a corporation and its customers - and it's a two way channel. Interaction between those customers is also facilitated by within the online community but that's not necessarily deemed to be the key objective.

The forthcoming change represents, sadly, the end of this community and the creation of a new and very different one. The functional elements and the look and feel of their presentation in the Jive software are carefully designed to foster a particular style of interaction between users of Adobe software, and beween the users and the company. The functions and form are designed for an over-riding purpose and to support an overarching communications philosophy, not thrown in upon a whim.

It seems very clear to me that Adobe expects that the new community will have a significantly different flavour to the old, and that they will have anticipated that not all of the present members of this (and the Macromedia) communities will feel at home in the new one. There's no need to warn Adobe that some people will be unhappy enough not to return - they will have accepted that risk at the outset.

While there will be an inevitable loss of expertise, and it will be sad to see the last of some regular participants here, it seems clear to me that Adobe are hoping that the new style of community (moulded by the software they have chosen to create it) will bring in new members who may well have considerable expertise in the products, but who have not felt encouraged to participate in the style of community we have here now. The company will also be hoping that those newly requiring support will find the new site to be more effective and simpler to use than the old, and that the site will enable the company image and the strengths and usage of the product lines to be put across more clearly.

That, as I see it, is the big picture. There's not much point in discussing the points of detail unless in the context of the overall company objectives in making these changes - and if you disagree with the whole underlying premise of the changes, then there's little chance that you'll like much of the detail either.

[Curt Wrigley]

> One such example is the request to have check boxes to show whether a question has been answered; another has been the desire to have avatars and status bars or a count of postings; and yet another is the inclusion of the "Community Expert" titles.

You mean features that practically every other forum has with the exception of the adobe forums. That is hardly evidence of a Macromedia conspiracy.

Your inaccurate rants are discrediting any points you are attempting to make.

[Bob_Peters]

Ann Shelbourne:

Why, when a participant posts a polite response, do you find it necessary to frequently reply with yet another rant? I am totally mystified by the level of anger you are displaying.

Take a break and catch your breath. As I said before: You are probably your own worst enemy right now when it comes to convincing others of your Informed Views.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

There's no doubt in my mind that I can live with any and all modifications to the look (the interface) of the forums as long as:

* performance (speed) is equal or better than the current adobeforums.com forums;
* no rating of answers by anybody is allowed;
* the search function finally works;
* the forum hosts retain (or gain, as the case may be) authority to ban posters, that this authority is in fact exercised (including on me, if it becomes necessary, of course), and that the ban becomes effective by being tied to the unique Adobe account, i.e, preventing users from continuing to create new user IDs; and, finally,
* that it remains a free service.

Neither do I have any objection to the Adobegemindefachleute displaying their badges in their forums of expertise, and not in application-neutral venues.

[Guest]

Ramon, are you including speed of identifying and accessing accurately new posts in areas you specify as of interest in your first item above (performance)? Maybe I rate that too highly but it's No.1 on my desired feature list.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Many of the exchanges here have been in fact acrimonious or worse. I hope this will have served as an outlet to vent everybody's frustrations, and that we can live in peace in the future,

There's no reason to fear that the two armies from both sets of forums will have a reason to interact more frequently than we have in the past. The Community Experts need not fear that they might see me in their own turf any more frequently than they have up to now, which is to say most probably never.

If you haven't seen Ann or me in your forums in the past, you won't in the future either.

[EDITED insignificant typos only]

[Ramón G Castañeda]

>Ramon, are you including speed of identifying and accessing accurately new posts in areas you specify as of interest in your first item above (performance)? Maybe I rate that too highly but it's No.1 on my desired feature list.

Absolutely yes! That's an integral part of performance.

[Guest]

Curt:

No-one, and certainly not I, has uttered one word about a "Macromedia conspiracy"!

All that I am saying (and will continue to say!) is that we have never had the features in the Adobe Forums (which you have in the MM Forums) and that I feel very strongly that their addition to the new Forums would be entirely detrimental to the efficient functioning of a Professional Forum.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

And, why not, let's accept the fact that some of us hated Macromedia well before the acquisition and that there is animosity based solely on software issues. I'm sure former or current Freehand users can't be to happy about Adobe killing that application. [Personally, I hate Flash-based stuff and I curse at the screen whenever I run into such web sites.]

Like Macintosh v. PC flame wars, this can be kept to minimum.

[Cindy-]

> and that the ban becomes effective by being tied to the unique Adobe account, i.e, preventing users from continuing to create new user IDs; and, finally,

I have several Adobe ID's of which I could make several identities. This has come about just from the fact that over the years I have accumulated them for one reason or another. If I can do that I am sure others can too. All one has to do is have multiple email addresses. I am not recommending it I am just suggesting that the problem will not go away because of ID's.

For the record, I only use one ID here.

[Guest]

The only forum software that I've seen that comes close to this is http://www.caucus.com/ But I highly doubt that it is capable of scaling to what we have to have either. It's even more homegrown than this WebX software. But I spend time on a daily basis in one forum that uses it. It is as good as this for tracking unread posts and has its version of the message center. In fact, in a lot of ways, it's better. But searching is a problem in it as well... and from what John has said, search in the new will be much improved. That is huge for new folks.

[Guest]

Of all the relevant bits of information about a forum member that could be displayed, I have heard nobody suggest age as a factor that should be shown! :)

We have two entertaining programmes on the BBC called "Grumpy old Men" and Grumpy old Women". Reading this topic is a bit like watching them.

[Kath-H]

Ann, purely as a matter of interest, I wonder if you regularly use any other forums?

[Guest]

I look at a few sporadically but only contribute regularly to the Adobe Forums.

This is one that i have followed recently: It uses a hideous color palette and a center panel which is too narrow but at least the topics are listed in a tightly leaded list so that you can see a wide range of topics at a glance as well as what's new and the number of messages.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1021

[Kath-H]

Thank you. I was wondering if perhaps you didn't realise that a lot of the features you (and I) don't want were not really related to the MM forums, but just typical of much forum software in use at the moment. I get the feeling the MM forum users are even more in the dark that we are and dislike those forums as much as many of us do - hence their reliance on newsreaders, and thier probably dismay at losing that facility.

[Kath-H]

>What Adobe wants to hear is cogent, rational and professional responses to their proposals to change the forums.

See, Oz, that's the problem. We are not being told in any detail what their proposals are, and we have no idea how much we can influence them.

Take the issue of a 'question answered' indication. Will there be one? In what form? Is there any point saying whether we want one or not?

We just get fuzzy, obscure comments about how some things might be there out of the box, it might be possible to add or subtract some features, but we don't know whether or which.

If Adobe wants cogent, rational and professional responses, they (it?) really need(s?) to make some cogent, rational and professional proposals for us to discuss.

Otherwise we're going round in circles.

[Guest]

>Typical of much forum software in use at the moment?

It is almost certainly BECAUSE of that type of Forum software that I so rarely go to something like the Apple Forums (and almost never bother to post there!) unless I am really desperate to find out something that no-one in the Adobe Forums was able to answer.

And that really is a rare occurrence because there are more better informed people on Mac matters in the Adobe Forums than there ever are over at Apple!

[Kath-H]

I understand. I visit a number of forums with different features and appearance, including some pretty unreconstructed phBB ones. I usually find I can live with the annoyances if the content is important to me - nevertheless I would be extremely disappointed to see the current Adobe forums mucked about with to the point I had to grit my teeth even to do some of my vigorous lurking in the Photoshop forum.

I just think you are mistaken in blaming the MM people for what may or may not turn up here, I think they are being treated like mushrooms even more than we are.

I'm even more worried about this mysterious 'reputation management' tripe - living in the UK at the moment, I'm very sensitive to the ever-encroaching Big Brother attitude.

You get a good reputation by earning and deserving it, not by some kind of devious manipulation.

[David_Powers]

> The Community Experts need not fear that they might see me in their own turf any more frequently than they have up to now, which is to say most probably never.

There are Community Experts for ALL Adobe products, so you're likely to see them in all Adobe forums. However, the ones you'll see in the forums you currently frequent are probably people you already know and trust.

[Guest]

> We are not being told in any detail what their proposals are, and we have no idea how much we can influence them.

We were given early warning that stuff was afoot (too early??) - we were told what the software was, which enabled us to rummage around and find some examples which might well not be very representative of what we'll have - we were shown a very preliminary part-page of a possibly layout - and we've all (me included) grabbed at those initial straws and built a monstrous haystack out of them, which might well have not that much in common with the next draft we see (which hopefully will take the form of a working test forum - but I don't know if that will actually be the case yet).

I have no doubt that all cogent views will be considered, but while these are user to user forums, we don't own them, and we're not going to get a democratic vote on each function and visual feature (I would have thought).

When it comes to getting too worked up too early, I have to admit that re-reading the first post in this thread, I rather regret the amount of guesswork I put into it. Too much speculation by me on too small a body of evidence - mea culpa.

Let's see what the next round brings, and meanwhile consider whether we should be sharpening our swords or beating them into ploughshares.

[Kath-H]

Thanks Oz, honest as ever. I'm going to leave this alone until there is some actual information available.

[Harbs.]

What I don't understand about rating answers (whether or not they should exist), is why is it the "privilege" of the original poster to decide whether a post is helpful or not?

Very often, a thread can have many people all experiencing the same problem. Someone might find a useful answer in a post without even posting anything themselves.

If there will be an option for marking an answer helpful, it should be possible for anyone to mark a post helpful, and it should not be limited to a certain number of answers. There could easily be 5 or 10 useful posts in a single thread. There can simply be a number next to a post indicating how many people found a post useful.

I see three purposes for the ability to mark a post useful.

1) It's an easy way to find relevant posts amongst a lot of fluff, or friendly (or not so friendly) banter.
2) I think it's an easy way to say "thank you" to someone for posting something helpful without cluttering the forums with extra posts.
3) It could help narrow down results in the search engine.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

If rating answers is allowed, that's a deal killer for me.

[Guest]

why?

[Guest]

if the system marks "A" good answer as opposed to "THE" one and only "ANSWER" then i'm ok with that. like Harbs said:

>There could easily be 5 or 10 useful posts in a single thread.

nothing wrong with marking them as such so they can be quick picked out of a thread that's dozens or hundreds of posts long.

[Guest]

but i agree that if it marks "THEE" one and only "ANSWER" to the question, that sounds like a problem.

from what i've read, i think we can get the former scenario working.