Leave the old forum open for public use

Hi RMA,

How about leaving the old forum open for public use? McNeel doesn’t have to frequent it nor answer questions, but if it were left open, we who like the older format could continue to use it. Also why not use the older forum as a place to post 3dm files and vb and python scripts?

I get such quick and useful help in the old forum recently Pascal and William posted a paint by numbers script I needed and the updates to tweak it were fast almost instant. So for us users the older forum would still be still be a great place and format to continue to post and share files and even get quick help just amongst us users.

RM

Hi Roland,

We have two goals:

  1. Provide quick, useful help to as many customers as possible.
  2. Consolidate the many places where we and our customers interact with each other (this should improve our chances at #1).

If Discourse is successful, you’ll be able to do everything there that you do here.

We cannot achieve goal (2) and keep yet another discussion forum open. On July 4 we’ll decide which stays open: This newsgroup, or Discourse.

I’m sure you can guess that my preference is to shut down this newsgroup and keep Discourse.

It has only been one day that the discourse server has been available to the public so it is pretty hard to make a decision like this right now. Brian and I worked on arbitraty file attachment support today and I think we may be able to get that feature working in a reasonably short amount of time.

That would be good, that’s one of the showstoppers. The others are how it works on Android phones, and that apparently the new users hoping to be drawn into using this support won’t be able to post the images they need to get help right away(it would make more sense for first time posters to be REQUIRED to post a picture or file to go along with their question!)

One downside to these web-based forums is that nefarious individuals seem to do a good job of automating login and spamming. I think the image posting delay is designed to reduce the probability that a spammer be able to be super obnoxious right out of the gate. We fortunately never had a big spam problem on the newsgroup; we’ll see if we have a problem on Discourse.

Do you have any metrics in place that will provide a basis for the decision or will it be based on a gut feeling?
w

I’m not sure what metrics would be useful. If people are getting effective support here, our staff finds the system useful, and the general feeling is that Discourse is an adequate replacement, we’ll keep it. I fully understand that some people will be disappointed regardless of the decision, but I’m confident that we’ll continue to provide quality support and polite conversation either way.

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