Just one other fact to point out. Aaron keeps touting the forums have
4000+ members while the ML only has <1500. But how many of those 4000
are *active* members? How many have posted in the last week? How many
are members of the ML and the forum? How many of the 4000 are
experienced users? It's impossible to monitor the entire nature of
the community through the forum, which is what the experts do. For
the sake of this e-mail, I'm going to use "I" instead of "the
experts" simply to make a point here. With the mailing list, e-mails
are sent to me, asking for my help, which I choose to give for free.
As Dirk has already pointed out, it is very arrogant to say "thank
you for all your help, but we're not going to ask you anymore, please
come to us, hunt down questions to answer, and continue to do it for
free." If REAL Software really wants me on their forum, either give
me something in return or make REALbasic such an outstandingly
perfect tool that they do not need user-to-user support anymore.
--
Thom McGrath
The ZAZ Studios
<http://www.thezaz.com/> AIM: thezazstudios
On Feb 6, 2007, at 7:06 AM, Dirk Cleenwerck wrote:
This is just my opinion Wink
I know a lot of young people prefer forums. They also have little
or no expertise with newsgroups, *mailing* lists... They just
didn't grow up with them. Maybe the lack of a user friendly
interface keeps them away from the more technical way that
*mailing* lists and newsgroups are set up (I've seen people that
don't know how to sign out of a *mailing* list on several
occasions). I've also seen people complain about the number of
mails you get from a *mailing* list, even though it's easy enough
to sign up for a digest instead (if you know what that is).
What I also know is that the more tech-savvy people tend to prefer
having things their way, the way they can organise it the way they
want. The people that seem to be advocating the forum on here seem
to have one thing in common (and no i don't mean you Aaron Wink )
and that is the newbie thing in their name. The one thing the
people begging to keep the *mailing* list up seem to have in common
is that they are experienced programmers who don't like the way
forums work, because you have to work through categories, can't
have access offline, can't keep an archive of mails on your
computer (i personally have the list all the way back to october
2005 on my work pc, which coincides with when i started using rb).
I only come to the forums if I am completely stuck and hoping that
someone from REAL will try to help me find an answer to a problem
(usually me trying to do something that can't be done in an easy
way, for instance giving background colors to comboboxes on Win32).
Most of the time the *mailing* list is a much better place to ask
the questions, since the people reading this list are experienced
programmers that are very willing to help others.
I conclusion it feels to me like REAL is not fully understanding
the fact that their most experienced users are not located on the
forums but on the *mailing* lists, and that by shutting the lists
down will lose the valuable help these people are providing for
free. And yes it is possible to start up our own lists, but they
won't be official RB lists, so that will never be the same. I also
don't believe that REAL will be able to force those experienced
users to switch to a format they hate (and it think hate is the
right word considering the storm that broke out on the *mailing*
list as a result of this decision), so the free help that these
valuable people provide will be lost for everyone but the few that
actively search the internet to see where they can find help for RB
from outside of REAL. That in my opinion is a big loss to the RB
community.
PS searching the forum for mailing list turns up 1435 hits out of
which 1 is relevant, but searching my Realbasic folder in
Thunderbird gives me 284 relevant mails
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