> I use this mailing list because I like to practice my poor english and
most english contributors are here,
Your English is fine and your ideas are typiclaly really good. I My French
is limited to
La chat est sur la table
and
Où les oiseaux?
...which are useful phrasees in only a very narrow range of situations ;-)
My compliments to you for operating at a high level in a second language.
> but if they were more on 4dbb I wouldn't. 4dbb is made with 4d by 4d
people:
> it's good for 4d-the-product we use. Censorship is inconspicuous.
> I know some of the authors, I've seen once a small part of the hidden
part of the iceberg,
> I use it daily: despite many shortcomings, they made a great job. IMHO.
I hope that whoever wrote the forums (I have no idea who they are) do not
think that the criticisms are personal. They aren't, at least from me. The
criticisms are based on the forum itself. It's crowded, it's ugly, it's
hard to get started with, and *it is very hard to learn.* Once you've
learned some things, you know how to do them. It still takes me a few
minutes to figure out how to start a thread, but I'm getting there. I now
can make things bold and I can vote. So I've made progress. But it's not a
great piece of software - I wouldn't expect anyone to show it to a customer
and expect to get work based on it.
I'm using the forums because 4D has *officially* repeated, more than once,
that anything said on the NUG is officially ignored. I think that
demonstrates an incomprehensible approach to customer relations, but I
don't run 4D. Their company, their rules. So, I'm on the forums to see if
comments and such there are better received and get some feedback. So far,
no. Nothing from Engineering on any of the threads I've followed. At all.
I've also got what looks like a really important V16 bug and I've submitted
it through "proper channels." (Complete with a simple database that
produces the problem in about a minute.) After a few weeks, here's what
I've gotten back from France:
That's an exact quote ;-)
For those of you that use the forums, do you get useful responses there?
I'm far too new to them to generalize.
But, really, no one responsible for the forums should take any of these
comments or criticisms personally! I don't even know who the people are.
That's not the point - the use of the tool is the point. If I wrote some
software or a paper and heard these sort of comments, it would hurt. I
understand that. It might even make me mad. I understand that too. But I'd
also try and see if there were some truth to the comments. There is. Forget
about the pride of authorship and move to taking pride in the product! I'm
sure that the forums can be improved. It's certainly a pretty hard job to
write a forum software. Frankly, it was always going to be a challenge to
make a good forum when what you're competing with are the existing forum
platforms that have been getting refined for *decades*. Some of that stuff
has roots older than the public Internet. You need to be *at least* that
good to hit the mark. Perhaps 4D should throw out this custom solution and
adapt one of the well-established forum softwares instead. One of the
benefits of writing your own tool is to give you a much better
understanding of how to pick an appropriate piece of off-the-shelf or
customizable software. When you've been in the guts, you understand the
issues much better. That makes it a lot easier to assess available options.
Just because you wrote something doesn't mean you need to keep it.
So, here's to hoping that the forums prove to be a useful place for
interaction with official 4D people (so far, not at all for me), and here's
to hoping that the platform improves. If it did, it wouldn't be hard to get
people to try them.
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