Yep the old forum was nice.
So I was looking around, for an answer to a problem. Could not find it anywhere and since 2008 I have submitted 40ish enhancement request and voted on a few more because they were close enough to what I was looking for.
I got so lost that I missed the time to go home.
Y’all have a great day and hope to be seeing y’all a little more.
The old forum was on the Jive platform, which was no longer being supported. I wasn’t confused by the decision to move away from it. What I was confused by, and still am, was the decision to move it to that god-awful platform it’s on now when there are numerous dedicated forum platforms out there that would have worked many orders of magnitude better than the one they went to.
What really sucks is that they appear to be getting quite a bit of traffic over there. Problem is that there is really no good way to answer questions and “Diagnose” stuff. If it’s not a question that can be answered in a single response, more than likely it’s not getting answered or solved over there.
A good bit of that traffic is guys harassing them, but like I’ve said, the people that run that mess think traffic is traffic and they conisder it a success.
Meanwhile, here, we’re seeing a real uptick. We had that initial spike all new sites get, and then settled into real growth. We’re above the initial spike now, and the growth is accelerating.
In the same way that much of the traffic over there is complaining about over there, a good bit of the traffic here is also complaining about over there. Which is not ideal, but it comes with the territory.
This chart shows the daily traffic at the bottom, with the rhythm of low traffic on weekends In the middle is the weekly traffic, and at the top is the monthly traffic.
image.png
You are right Glenn, that’s what I meant. They shuted down the whole forum and switch to that “super-duper” new plattform with such of great (rather not so great) functionalities, while there are other and imho better possibilities.
Where I work we often use the metaphor of a relay race. When you are running and handing off the baton to the next person, you DO NOT LET GO until you know the other person has a firm grip on it and knows what to do with it. In the case of the forum transition, not only did the next forum not have a firm grip on it and did not know what to do with it, they even went off the track!
We are like the spectators watching our goalie make a self-goal for the other team! We cannot believe what just happened! The angst!! (Wow! Two sports metaphors and I’m not even a big sports guy!)
Though I am in their user focus group meeting bi-weekly, I have to bite my tongue and hold back what I really want to say because they just shut down their listening. (For a while I even had my meeting name changed to “Dennis-Bad Cop”.) Some things I recently told them they are perking up and going “Yeah, we should do that.” or “Great idea!”. But almost all of these things I told them over a year or two ago. They did not listen then when they had the chance to do something with them and avoid the mess they now have on their hands. And I was not the only one.
Many, many times I go to the trouble to write up my ideas in a separate Word doc so I can review it and edit it to make the idea clearer and better organized. I find these to be more complete and easier to review than just the dynamic comments and conversation in a GoToMeeting so I am offering that same thing to the other members of the group. I submit it to the group and only get an obligatory acknowledgement of receipt - there really has been no further discussion of these ideas.
About two or three months ago I put together a good collection of suggestions and links for addressing the Top Ten List debacle of the last couple of years. Two weeks ago that was finally the focus of one of these meetings and I unfortunately could not attend. I didn’t even know until a few days before the meeting this was going to be on the agenda. Afterwards I watched the recording of the meeting and reviewed the notes and then provided a thoughtful response. That was a week ago. In our meeting yesterday it was not even mentioned. I have absolutely no idea what if anything is going to be done with the TTL this year. There has been no follow-up discussion. Really?! Yes, I was very critical of how the TTL has been conducted the last few years, but I was not alone. However, I also offered a lot of constructive suggestions for making the TTL great again.
Their official forum was clearly guided by upper management and marketing types and their “futurist” visionaries and evidently without a single person representing an actual forum and SWX user. I must be a glutton for punishment because I keep attending the meetings and keep trying to push for improvements. It seems like frustration has become my hobby.
I’m trying to decide if he’s just really stubborn or very persistent…
Keep sayin’ this but trying to turn a platform like that into a functional forum in the end may just be a fool’s errand:
