Newsgroup : 162 posts by maybe 20 different people
Ning : 0 posts. No reaction at all so far.
(OK, the newsgroup announcement has been around longer, but the first response was 12 minutes afterwards)
Just shows you how different the communities are…
This is not a judgement of which one is better, simply an amused observation, so don’t read stuff into this post please.
----H
I noticed that as well- I did see at least one NING-ster post over here already though… so well, there’s that…
-Pascal
Yeah, for sure, I think maybe more than one… (and then there’s me too…)
Gotta go to bed now, been a long day with a lot of posts in and amongst the madness of setting up a new computer…
----H
Good to know that nobody is too attached to NING – I imagine it’s less of an upset to move from one web forum to another. I haven’t looked at the NING group since trying it for two days and deciding I didn’t like it.
Yes. But what you might imagine is that some people coming from the newsgroup have exactly the same reaction you had to the Ning forum… At that point you had a choice not to opt-in, which you took. Just hypothetically, what would have been your reaction if McNeel decided to close the newsgroup and just use Ning?
----H
I see your point. I would have been pretty upset, but even moreso because NING is an outside company that McNeel had no control over. As I understand it, Discourse is open source software, and they run it on their own servers, so they can tweak it as they like. And Discourse is much better in the most important thing that bothered me most: I could only see a few posts per page on NING. That drove me nutso. And NING had a WAY stronger social aspect that I didn’t want… I have social networking sites. I didn’t need another for my software help.
I see where you’re going, and I would have fought a switch to NING tooth and nail. But I totally agree with the switch, as it’s the cleanest, most efficient forum I’ve seen so far, it’s being developed, and it’s open source. Good enough. We had to go somewhere. I for one was sick to death of not having mobile access to the newsgroup and no useful way to link to posts and search them. The writing was on the wall for NNTP for years, and the leap had to be made. I’m happy with the choice, so I cannot argue your side too well for you. 
I hope the NNTP-devotees can adapt. I figure most will, and some will drop off, but I imagine it will be a very small number in the long run.
I’m not on either side… I am here, as I am also on Ning and pretty much every other forum McNeel has. My livelihood as a teacher, user and reseller of Rhino demands that I stay current with what’s happening, and I have a personal commitment to participate and help out as much as possible in the community. So wherever the forum goes, I go, even if I’m not that fond of the format. I’m not really that fond of any of them, frankly, but as several people have said, you get used to anything. And lastly - this IS my social network…
And don’t get me wrong either, I actually do like a lot of this format, and I am encouraged by the possibilities to tweak it. But I did express my reservations as to some aspects of the formatting as well as the “meritocracy” kind of hierarchy, and that stuff still stands.
----H
Of course one of the issues with the Ning group is that I don’t think anyone’s going to see the notice after a day anyway.