Forums

I can not find, nor have I seen any official responses to our pleas to offer any hope that NNTP may or may not be a future option...

This from Adobe employee Dov Isaacs in the Typography forum yesterday:

"...it is unfortunate that the NNTP access is not available anymore. However, Adobe was put in a position where it was absolutely necessary to migrate from the previous service provider for the forums (the old forums and for that matter the new forums) are hosted outside of Adobe itself using third party software. For better or worse, most of the newer on-line forum software packages simply don't support NNTP anymore."

Noel

> For better or worse, most of the newer on-line forum software packages simply don't support NNTP anymore

And they'd have a point if not for the fact that this system does support NNTP.

http://www.jivesoftware.com/builds/docs/clearspace/latest/ClearspaceAd minGuide.html#SynchronizingContentwithEmailorNewsgroups

--

Adam

I invite my fellow NNTP users to sign off here as I think we may be underrepresented in the feature discusion of the new forum.

OK. I'm out as well.

I gave the test forum a good run while they were active and have given the live forums a good run, too. Today, I have spent too much time in just one of the forums I read regularly, trying to read the messages that are new since yesterday (4 pages of message headers at 50 headers per page - I think. That 50 keeps jumping back to 30).

With a newsreader, I would already have scanned all of the messages and would likely have posted several suggestions by now. I would have clear and obvious indications of threads I'm already involved in and of replies to my messages that may need further clarification or assistance. As it is, I have only made it to the second page of messages and have not posted a single suggestion. Just too much click-wait-load for my liking. And, as I feared, finding "unread" messages in threads of any length turned out to be the real deal-breaker for me.

As mentioned, the non-threading emails are of little help - in the threads I am participating in - and I don't even want to try subscribing to an entire forum without proper headers.

I may stop in once in a while in the hopes that they've enabled NNTP or to see of Jochem has managed to create one, but I don't hold much hope.

So long.

[Edit: Changed with proper headers to without proper headers.]

This front-end sucks and NNTP was so much better.

I agree with Ian !

"We" just got an email Today stating why we should upgrade older Acrobat licenses to v9.1.

You bet I'll be replying how Adobe screwed up in killing off NNTP access.

Lifelong NNTP user here. I participate in other web forums and have nothing against them in general, but those are all pretty much 'hobby' forums.

I don't know how much time or control Adobe had over picking the forum replacement. This seems like decent software that just needs to abandon some silly components for some effective ones.

So hopefully over the next month they'll be made more usable.

My biggest complaint, however, is slowness. Adobe's servers were never fast. Putting heavy web forum processing on top...well, it's as expected. What ever happened to the minimum wait time for web content?

I'll still try to participate but the volume definitely won't be as heavy as it used to be. I still like to help where I can...but I can't afford to double/triple the time.

So here's to hoping that these web forums will be made efficient and, someday, NNTP access will return (because, as noted, it IS possible).

Erik

Instead of sending email, I used the direct phone number in the email of the "Demand Center Representative" and discussed this with him.

I hope this avenue of "feedback" will bear some fruit.

Yes, bing it back. BTW, there are other Adobe groups on the USENET. I'll be just using those. Bye!

I am really an outsider in this discussion, as I have always used a browser to accede these forums (which, by the way, makes me in no way happy with the new forums). However, I have some related information that may be important to know.

For the last year or so, I have been watching closely what happened in the forums in Spanish. These were really two subforums: the ex-Adobe ones, and the ex-Macromedia (ex-MM) ones, although they were never called so.

Nearly everyone using the ex-Adobe ones used browsers and so never knew or cared about the NNTP problem. Users of the ex-MM were another story. First, almost all of them used NNTP access. Second, for reasons too long to explain here (and not fully known by me), for years there were no moderators of any kind in there, and almost no interventions of Adobe personnel in the forums. And third, and because of all this, they developed a strong feeling of a close community, considering their "newsgroup" as independent of Adobe. They never accepted that it was really an Adobe forum, and only thanked Adobe for providing the hosting for theit independent newsgroup.

Well, to make the story short, when they heard the news that the change of the forums would end the NNTP support, they protested violently (in their newsreader and in Spanish; i.e, where nobody from Adobe was likely to read their protests), and most of the regulars announced they were never coming back. And, as far as I can say (their messages appear now posted by "Newsgroup_User" and I can't recall all their names), none of them has come back and, most probably, none will evercome back. In the last few hectic days, there were several messages suggesting they opened their own newsgroup, and for all I know, they may have succeeded.

Compared with the number of participants in the forums in English, I am talking of a small groupd of users, so their absence is not likely to worry Adobe . They were, however, very active, and served a useful service to the Spanish speaking community of ex-MM users. I doubt they will be easily replaced.

well I can't find any reply button on the page this email refers me to, not

very user friendly is that?

so I am attempting to reply by email

Here goes:

my new ISP (Comcast) has discontinued support for NNTP, formerly I signed on

with Bellsouth

I found a free service: freenews.netfront.net

and have re-joined alt.graphics.photoshop

If most of you NNTP readers will join I know we can make it better..as of

now only a few cranky old guys and a couple of long time regulars are left

over there & unmoderated will mean using your blocker options more often for

the jerks trolls and spammers

Look forward to seeing some of you over there

(KatWoman)

'Remember me doesn't keep you logged in, just fills in your user name.

> We need a *user* forum.  Adobe is going to continue to jerk us around on this company-controlled clunker.

For ColdFusion there is alt.comp.lang.coldfusion.  It used ot get a reasonable amount of traffic but in all honesty these days it's almost dead - in fact up until recently I usually pointed anyone that posted there to these forums instead (which obviously I won't do any more).

Maybe the CF crowd could migrate over there and get some traffic going again.  I definitely still check it every day (more than once), and will continue to help out there where I can, if people post there.

--

Adam

Another one gone if NNTP does not come back. Apart from the fact that my personal work-flow is better off with newsreader access, they way this transition was handled was ... sub-optimal.

Claudio González wrote:

so their absence is not likely to worry Adobe . ...  I doubt they will be easily replaced.

And the same will happen with NNTP users. They are generally the most computer-literate users (newbies can't figure NNTP out) and thus often had the most to offer the new users. Many hosts used NNTP exclusively. I wonder how many of them will be quitting?

Any message that I post (whether via the website or email) doesn't get

emailed back to me. This is probably by design!

Sure is, and a lot of people have complained about it. It will be put right,

we've been told.

Can't find a way to post via email except as a reply.

Send mail to an address like

discussions-community-general-forum_comments@mail.forums.adobe.com (for this

forum), using the email address you have registered with the forums. The

address is given on the Mailing lists page under your profile. You have to

subscribe to notifications from the forum of choice for the posting address to

appear.

Noel

I've been a regular reader since the late 1990's (Adobe lists 2002). I haven't been able to offer much help but I've learned a lot over the years.

So long

Welcome back. Sign of the times I guess. Add insult to injury my internet provider no longer supports RSS feeds in order to save money or so they say.

Not cool, Adobe, not cool at all!  I was never an NNTP user but I know for a fact other high volume posters have dropped out as well, they just vanished shortly after the Jiving of the forums.

Mark A. Boyd wrote:

 

This message was processed and edited by the most pathetic Jive software.
It shall not be considered an accurate representation of my words.

Thanks for the laugh, it's so true.

Pretty soon all we'll have left are people complaining, and people complaining about the complainers.

Just a couple of final related notes.

1. As far as I can tell, none of the many and very active participants of the ex-MM forums in Spanish, all of them NNTP users, have come back on a regular basis, although a few have done so very occasionally. I think this suggests they don't need these forums as they are. Perhaps they formed their own newsgroup, as they formed group with a high degree of cohesion, but have no way of knowing.

2. Private groups can be successful. Here is a link to a Chilean one that has been active for many years. Although it's in Spanish, it gives an idea of their work even if one does not understand the words. The group started as a Macromedia one, centered mainly on Freehand if I remember correctly, and managed to survive extremely well the absorption of Macromedia by Adobe.

http://www.mmug.cl/index2.php