Re: New Forum Annoucement

[DaJoker]

Here are my opinions on the New Forms and the comments made by James.

It is not our intention to alienate users, but to offer an improved forum
Let's see...I don't want to alienate users so I'm going to remove all of the registrations, stick in a new board software, and force everyone to re-register. Sound like a perfect plan to me...

A lot of good information never reached many of the users who may have found it helpful
Removing the thousands of posts that were either active or archived is an excellent way of ensuring that everyone is able to access the valuable information. Multiple boards ensures that people have access the information that they want....we didn't have to weed through hundreds of messages to find one which answered our questions...if it was a IIIc problem we went to a board with dedicated IIIc users. Now we'll have to sort through all of the posts which don't relate to us in order to find valuable information.

The way the forum was setup before made it unwieldy and impossible to manage effectively. Though some users found it helpful to have individual boards for different PDAs and topics, the number of boards on the site ballooned to well over a 100.
It is true that the number of boards run by PDAStreet.com was quite large, and it may have been very difficult to manage, but sorting through 200 posts is the same regardless of the number of boards that you've got. When we registered for these new boards you say that there is no way that the messages will all be read...if you had too many boards it would have been simpler, and easier for the users to adjust to the removal of certain boards which were no longer needed rather than having to deal with the total removal of the messages and work that was put into making the PDAStreet boards one of the best.

[stormbringer]

PDA Street just submarined a great board. We lost months and months of knowledge. They have made it easier on themselves to manage but harder for the users to manage. The old board was just fine with me. If you needed help managing the boards you should have asked for more moderators... I'm sure there are a few board lurkers that would have been more than happy to help out.

If you wanted to make it easier on yourself and at least somewhat useful you could have trimmed down the boards to manufacturer rather than model. I do not have time to sift through all of the messages on the board to find one that interests me.

I own a Palm m505 and a Compaq iPAQ 3955 now I need to look through two generic boards to find info.

OH... and the new look... oh that's helpful...

The worst part was I had to reregister so I could complain and let you know that I am not using your board any more. Can you say newsgroups???!!!!????

Oh... how about the real problem was your bandwidth hit on your server... easy way to reduce that expense... let's make it a terrible board and no one will use it.

Good luck!

Later... much later...

PS - I hope you backed up the archives... because when your user base dries up and you realize that you made a bad mistake it would be nice to have the knowledge base of the board restored. If that happens send me an email and I will come running back.

[DrMud]

Well said!
It is clear that the management had little idea of just how useful the board was and what it was that attracted us to it. To lose the enormous amount of good information just to offer another look a like site is beyond my ability to understand. I wonder if they own and use handhelds? Did they ever post? I tried to email the moderator, VisorSpawn, a while ago only to be presented with this message:
"Sorry! That user has specified that they do not wish to receive emails through this board."

It pays to have friends in high places!
DrMud

[Jeff-Russell]

I think it would be fair to say that 95% of the posters agree with me that the ONLY reason we came to this website was for the valuable information stored in the INDIVIDUAL PDA Message Boards. Without that key element, this site is useless to me. If I wanted the latest Palm information, I go to Palm Infocenter. If I wanted software, I go to Cnet Download.com, tucows PDA section, or Palm itself. If I wanted to participate in a message board, I came here because I could find the EXACT information I wanted, not generic information that would not offer the particulars I required for my device. Overall, the one sterling quality of this site is now deceased.

Quality Message Boards, RIP

PS: Anyone here want to try to work together to assemble a replacement?

Regards,

[removed]

This was the STUPIDEST thing they could've done. We lost tons of information. This site is slowly going downhill (speeding up quickly tho).. Like when they changed to a different search ingine. The new one gives you tons of results that you werent looking for instead of the right one of close to it like the old one did.. Well..I'm off to brighthand.com..its much better than this place now >:(

[Gatekeeper]

The ONLY reason I came to this board was for the discussions.

After about 12 years, this is the first board/usenet group that I ever decide to join and post to because I not only found the way it was set up easy, the information very helpful and the folks extremely helpful.

The mass exodus of the contributers to this site proves beyond a shadow that what was done is wrong, folks!! Your value-added service was the numerous go-arounds, links, hints, shortcuts. Lacking these.... you can only imagine what the value of your service is.

Your heart may have been in the right place, but your sure picked a crummy way to implement the idea! :(

God Speed :)
Gatekeeper.

[Tixx]

It was a bad idea to remove all the categories and have to re-register, but this is a better setup which cliesource.com just implemented as well. I honestly didn't read all the posts before mine so sorry if it has been said, but maybe that info and categories are still out there and can be put back into this format. Once again, it was done by cliesource so I think that they might be able to do that here.:)

[jdonalds]

It seems to have been easy to send an announcement to all threads. If you are trying to please your users why didn't you send an announcement on the old board asking users if they would like to change? You would have gotten some constructive feedback and could have made an informed decision to change or not to change. Blatently changing the board without asking the users was a formula for disaster - and the disaster happened.

[lmaglin]

I'll give it a chance, but compaired to the old board, its crap....

[aknighterrant]

This New forum engine can work, I know cause I've used it on other boards, but The reasons that the owners gave have some legitimacy. However the main value of the board was the forums (with the great history of posts) dedicated to specific models of the PALM. It was a great filtering mechanism which I hope they bring back. Especially on HiRes applications, Clie NR70V, Developer and general how to stuff.

Lets make the best of their decision and help guide them back to where we want this thing to go.

[gvenditto]

I'm one of the people who made the decision to make the change. So all of those insults are aimed at me.

The reason we made the change was that the old software had a number of problems that could not be fixed. While many of you who like the old software are vocal here, I was receiving regular complaints from people who hated the old software. It did not let you read an entire thread of comments. It did not recognize returning visitors without asking them to re-login.

And it did not allow us to make a number of enhancements to the PDAstreet network that will come soon. Such as featuring the best posts on pages around the network, so that we can draw even more people into the discussions.

From my own observations, I found the old system had far too many questions without answers. When I see this happening, I see a problem. The message board should be a place where you get a question answered.

We have a lot of experience with vBulletin -- and we have gone through difficult transitions at other sites where we needed to replace the messaging software. From this experience, we concluded that vBulletin is the best message board software around.

And that's why we made the change.

I am sorry to see a number of people aren't happy. But I hope that if you give it a chance, you'll see this place should become more valuable.

- Gus Venditto
editor-in-chief, internet.com
a division of INT Media Group

[DaJoker]

I'm sorry that you were getting complaints from users about the old system, but there is no system in place that will satisfy 100% of users.

We've all noticed the large number of complaints that are coming in right now...does this mean that vBulletin is going to be changed. I don't think so.

It did not let you read an entire thread of comments.
I actually preffered the old system over vBulletin in this regard. The old system did not display the entire thread on a single page - which makes everything easier to follow. The links on the bottom of the page were quite easy to follow. vBulleting lists the posts/replies in the order they were posted...there is no flow between initial post and it's replies. If you're following the posts that have come since you changed board system you'll see that there are many users out there who LOVED the old board system. I think that many of these people would like to have been informed about the impending change in advance. If we had been given a chance to voice our opinions prior to the switch I'm sure that things would have gone much smoother.

I found the old system had far too many questions without answers.
If the questions weren't being answered on device specific boards what makes you think that they'll get answered in a more general forum. If the people who are informed about a device cannot answer a question about that device it is unlikely that someone in a general forum will be able to provide the answer.

And you still haven't given an answer to the biggest complaint which is the loss of all the valuable information that was stored in the other boards. There were thousands...probably even tens of thousands of posts that were either active or archived within the old board system. Surely, you could have ported those messages over to the new system...or at the very least you could have left those boards active so that we would not have lost all of those valuable messages.

[gvenditto]

We can re-arrange the sections here and create new sections very quickly. The logic of this setup is that we are trying not to overwhelm people with too many sections. People are able to create their own threads easily. And we want to avoid one of the problems in the old system where many sections were empty. We had too many then.

As I said before, a prime goal for me was making sure people would get an answer quickly. Many of the threads in the whole site went weeks without a post.

But in response to the comments posted here today, we have added more and we'll continue to work to re-arrange the sections until it makes sense for people.

I am also seeing a strong interest in those old messages and we are looking into that. Whenever you make a technical change, you always face the backward compatibility problem. If we let 2 systems run in parallel, they'll both be weaker than 1 good system.

- Gus

[removed]

Ive got an idea..How bout archiving the entire old forum for people to search thru and find stuff ? Thne we'd still have the old posts ...

[emuuga]

The old froum is still here...I found this today:

http://www.palmblvd.com//boards/

Try this! When you want to go to a forum, you need to modify its address so it will have two slashes (//) before "boards" or else you will get kicked back here.

[janjan]

One way to get to threads on old board:

type in board name (make sure caps, dashes etc are correct) after the url : http://www.palmblvd.com//boards/

e.g. http://www.palmblvd.com//boards/Palm-m100
http://www.palmblvd.com//boards/palmm515

If you are not sure of caps/dashes in the board name, go to old board, scroll to board name and RIGHT-click then click "properties". LEFT click will bring you to the new board.

The thread links work fine after that.

Hope this helps.