What About Moderators in the New Forum?

[John T Smith]

Read the spam thread for awhile and you will see that moderation works well in these webx forums

You will also see messages concerning the LACK of moderation over in the cfusion side of things

Will the new forum software/structure allow for "this" moderation to continue, or will it fall away to "that" style of non-moderation?

[Ramón G Castañeda]

I will not. Earn your keep as a forum bouncer. :D

[Ramón G Castañeda]

The "offense" ( offence down under and in your native land) originated from a careless reading of my post. It would have been the same if the post had contained no German words at all.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Parenthetically, Oz wouldn't have survived in the Photoshop forum, where I've answered questions in German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian not sure about Portuguese or Afrikaans. :)

Our forum host, Neil, goes the extra mile and provides manually-polished machine translations if and when he sees fit.

[Ann_Shelbourne1]

Having the help of such an accomplished multi-linguist has been invaluable in the Photoshop Forum where we frequently get questions from all parts of the world; and a number of them come from people who either post in their own language or obviously are having great difficulty expressing themselves in English.

[Guest]

Sigh. :(

[Guest]

I don't doubt it, Ann. That's why it's important to use other than English with discretion. Clearly we don't see eye to eye on this particular instance.

[Guest]

I think that, while appending a translation to advice given in English in order to help someone struggling with the language is reasonable, the flaunting of linguistic "talents" in a verbal attack is not acceptable.

[Guest]

On a separate note the more vociferous "defenders" of the old Adobe ways should take a step back and re-read some of their comments.

I think it was Peter who mentioned "Pedal Marksmanship®" . ;)

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Ozpeter, I doubt you and I see eye to eye on anything . :D

[Guest]

I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and relax. i don't think anyone would be here if they didn't care about adobe's products and the forum.

I think that's where all discussion should begin and end on the subject, by those participating remembering that one fact...

relax everyone. we're all on the same team. more or less. ;)

[Ann_Shelbourne1]

I don't think that so many of us would have got so steamed up about this subject if the tiniest effort had been made to meet ANY of the requests and suggestions that have been submitted by numerous Adobe Forum members.

I feel that all of our support, our efforts to fill in surveys and to help in the process have been treated with total disregard.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Well we shouldn't have had high expectations. Just remember what they did to the Adobe Exchange. :(

[David_Powers]

> Incidentally, where are all the non-aces from the other side?

That thought had also crossed my mind, because there is a link on each former MM forum pointing to this discussion area. Unfortunately, to get in, you need to create a separate account; the Adobe ID that's used for everything else, including the former MM forums, doesn't work here. It's a minor barrier, but a barrier nonetheless.

The other reason I suspect no one else has joined the discussion is because the web interface in the former MM forums is pretty awful. Almost anything that replaces it would be an improvement.

That doesn't mean the views of users of the original Adobe forums should be ignored. I think many people have made excellent points about lack of clutter and ease of use. What I find difficult to comprehend is all the anti-Macromedia hostility. The person responsible for the switchover to the new system is John Cornicello, the Adobe manager who created the system so beloved of long-term Adobe forum users. After reading his posts carefully, I get the impression that he's doing his utmost to create a system that preserves the strong points of the current Adobe one, while introducing features that will help attract new users. As John says in one of his posts, forum usage is falling, although I certainly haven't noticed any fall off in volume of posts in Dreamweaver-related forums.

Let there be no mistake about it, though. Pressure for the introduction of forum features that most of you don't want certainly didn't come from Adobe Community Experts on the former Macromedia side. We were kept completely in the dark about the planned changes, and learned about them only in mid-February, by which time certain decisions much to our disliking were already fixed in stone. Many of the former Macromedia forums deal with coding issues, so fancy things like the ability to embed images is unimportant. For our purposes, NNTP access is the ideal way to participate in a forum; but once the switchover happens, NNTP dies.

That affects us in a huge way, and many people are just as unhappy about it as Adobe forum users are about the introduction of features they regard as unnecessary fluff. Some regular - and very valuable - participants have said that the day NNTP is turned off, they will walk away from the forums.

So, be under no illusion that it's just Adobe forum users who are unhappy about the proposed changes. Unlike those who have said they'll walk away, I have decided to give the new system a try; and I hope that we can feed some constructive criticism to John Cornicello and his team once the preview system is up and running.

> "authority" and "status" in the old Adobe forums is earned through practical contributions

The same is true in the former MM forums. However, the Adobe Community Expert scheme extends beyond the forums. Forum participation alone is rarely enough to qualify. Many Community Experts write books, give presentations at conferences, and write articles and video tutorials. Some Community Experts rarely set foot in the forums, but are awarded the title for the work they do in other fields.

> these "college kids" appointed by Adobe

I'm certainly no college kid. I left my college days behind me nearly 40 years ago. Adobe Community Experts come from all backgrounds. I have met many of them at "summits" held at Adobe HQ in San Jose. They range from whizz kids in their late 20s to grizzled old hands in their 70s. They also come from all over the world. At dinner in San Jose, I sat alongside Community Experts not only from the USA, but also from Israel, Egypt, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and the UK (which is where I come from).

Membership of the Community Expert scheme is for a year, renewable at Adobe's discretion. In the recent roster refresh, a deliberate effort was made to increase the geographical diversity of Community Experts. This year, for the first time, there's a Community Expert from Hong Kong. There are also Community Experts in parts of Eastern Europe that weren't represented before. That's the point of the "community" in the title. The community isn't just the online forums, but the places where we live. We're expected to be active in our local communities, helping people use Adobe products.

There's far more to it than just a title or a badge in an online forum.

[D__McCahill]

Okay, there were 200 messages here, and I only scanned some, so I apologize if someone else has already made this point.

Concerning avatars. It was mentioned way back there that someone with a slow modem would have problems loading 50 85K images on a page. I believe that someone else pointed out that an 85K image is too large. I know many forums have a 20 or 25K limit on avatar size ... we occasionally get postings in the PSWin forum asking how to reduce the file size.

But the big fallacy to that argument is that no thread I have ever seen on this forum has had 50 "different" posters in a row. Usually it would be 20 unique images, with the other 30 being repeats of the others. And anyone who understands HTTP knows that the 30 repeats do not add overhead.

And, unless you have set your browser up to prevent caching images, perhaps another 10 of those 20 images will be in the cache, leaving only 10 images, with a maximum of 250K to download on the odd page that has 50 new messages. Not quite the multi megabtyes suggested in the earlier message.

That said, one would think that there could be a preferences switch that would allow the users the ability to turn off avatars, if they want to.

[Kath-H]

>Unfortunately, to get in, you need to create a separate account; the Adobe ID that's used for everything else, including the former MM forums,

Ah, that may go some way to explain why, for instance, the Web Design forum is so very quiet. Golive is discontinued, and DW users probably haven't made their way over in any numbers.

[Jacob Bugge]

I thought quite a few of the contributors in the Web Design forum were dream weavers.

[David_Powers]

Kath,

I had no idea of the Web Design forum's existence. In fact, when I tried to find it from the main forums page, I couldn't find it. In the index it's listed only as "Design Discussions". It's only when you enter the Design Discussions page that you find "Web Design".

After Adobe acquired Macromedia, I decided to explore some of the Adobe forums, but was put off by the labyrinth of different discussion groups. It might work well for regulars, but is very confusing for a newcomer. One thing that I find bizarre is the split between Mac and Windows forums. Although there are some differences in the way programs work on Windows or Mac, those differences appear to be fewer and fewer. To an outsider, this seems unnecessary duplication. To get the benefit of the available wisdom, it means visiting two forums instead of one.

I don't know whether the current forums will be migrated as they are, or if there will be some consolidation. I suspect the former, as it's probably easier to do. However, some consolidation would seem to be in order.

But that's another can of worms...

[PJonesCET]

> example 300DPI image would print an excellent photo but would be several megabytes in size and would slow down to a crawl even a 1MB DSL connection.

> again NO. see here: http://aikodude.tripod.com/difResTest.html

> the top image is 72ppi, the bottom is 300. they are both the same exact size and the same exact pixel dimension. on the web, ALL THAT MATTERS is pixel dimension. ppi (NOT dpi) is simply a piece of META-data that tells a printer what to do with your image. it is MEANINGLESS on the web. it does NOT increase file size (check the properties of the top and bottom images in my link).

> But for posting on website, anything over 150 dpi is wasted bandwidth on a Website.

> for posting on the web ANY ppi is wasted bandwidth. 10000ppi 800x600 image will display exactly the same as a 1ppi 800x600 image and will be exactly the same size! try it yourself if you don't believe me but stop spreading misinformation on the subject!

----------
your not getting what I am saying. I know the image seen on the screen will look identical in size whether at 300DPI or 72DPI.

I'm saying the actual size of the file on the Server or computer will be smaller as the DPI goes down.

This is because as you decrease the DPI (or resolution) you are throwing away bits and pieces of the file that the naked eye can no discern of a Computer screen.

If you wish I can send you some images (jpg) I just took of last night's snow fall in VA. both are identical in size. however one is saved in the original resolution of the camera (300dpi). the other the only thing done was that it was re-saved as 72dpi image (re-sampled). No added compression yet the 300dpi image is 3.7mb. the 72dpi image is 832K. And I could have saved some more by having program make web ready by removing resource (592K)

[Kath-H]

I agree the navigation can be confusing - we certainly get a lot of people turning up in entirely the wrong place to ask their question. It's something that has been talked about quite a bit. We've asked before for more clarity and a clearer introductory page, but that's not part of these forums, so none of the forum hosts here can do anything about it.

As far as separating Mac and Windows discussions, mergers have been tried in some forums but didn't seem to work too well. Quite a few questions are in fact only relevant to one operating system and people weren't very good at specifying which they were using. Also, platform wars tend to break out.

The merged forums were re-separated, mostly to people's satisfaction/relief. It's not perfect either way but people seem to prefer them separate.

Don't get the idea everybody over here thinks everything is perfect as it is ;)

[Kath-H]

Phil, couldn't you please take this to a more appropriate forum?

[_Murray_Summers_]

Just for comparison, the Mac/Windows merger seems to work very well on the DW forums (PLEASE - no comments about crappy forums!), and has done so since my early days with DW2. There are just NO platform wars over there. And the post number remains consistently high from day to day, with quite a few repeat posters as well as new posters.

I would support reducing the navigational complexity by merging these two forums. A quite significant number of the questions and the answers are relevant to both.

[Ann_Shelbourne1]

>I would support reducing the navigational complexity by merging these two forums. A quite significant number of the questions and the answers are relevant to both.

Not in the Photoshop Forums.

That is partly because a great number of the posts are directly related to the OS being used and problems related to it.

There are also a lot of discussions concerning suitable hardware configurations which are of absolutely no interest to someone using another platform.

Another reason is that Photoshop-users are heavy users of keyboard shortcuts and Mac and Windows shortcuts are different and it is just too much trouble to post both sets.

[Stan Jones]

Would someone please post #245 in a new thread in a photoshop forum, and post a link here to that thread? While it has some relevance here, I would like to hear a more technical explanation that is not really suited to this topic. You do not, of course, resample when simply changing dpi, but I am prepared to learn something. The main variable that would change the size is the quality of a jpg.

I'd like a link to that thread because I don't track the PS forums. That said, Ann, given your history of helping users on these forums, I just don't get your intensity. So I visited and looked up some of your posts. Very professional and helpful (very much in line with your post #249 here, which came in while I was composing this). I'm not a PS newbie, but I learned a couple things. So I do hope that the new forum format is something you can settle into, and that you can get back to helping us users that seek assistance.

[Ann_Shelbourne1]

Thank you Stanley, for your kind comments concerning my past postings.

As for the future, at this stage I can only say that if the Forums turn-out to be organized in the way that the preliminary posted design has indicated, it is unlikely that I will any longer take the time and trouble to participate very often if at all.

[_Murray_Summers_]

@Ann

That is an interesting point. So perhaps if there is a decision to be made about whether to split a forum into OS-specific groups, such issues should also be considered.

On the other hand, I will say that Dreamweaver has similar OS-specific wrinkles as Photoshop seems to, and it has not proven to be a problem on the DW forum. Many of the DW users are keyboard oriented. Many of the internal files are in vastly different locations (even from one version of an OS to the next). Even some of the menus are different Mac vs. PC, just by virtue of the OS-provided functionality, and this has not caused confusion for us. In most cases, when the question is not also accompanied by an OS specification, the responder is careful to ask the necessary questions early in the thread.

Even when hardware issues are discussed, I don't see a revolt among the non-OS-friendly readers. Everyone there seems to have the notion that a nugget of information can lurk in threads which don't seem (at first, at least) relevant.

Personally, I think a much larger problem is the incredible lack of a sense of how to post a question, with a disturbing number of new threads being opened with a subject of "Help". But that is off topic here....