Okay...who is still here?

every weekday morning. I even ask questions now and again, and today I responded to one. No-one so far has responded to my last question round the water cooler.

Though I can not post with the Hal 9000 User Account. So you are stuck with me in one of my many Alter Ego's. Even if it's unlikely that you'll get blasted out a Airlock.

Col

But I do like to stop in. Mostly to see who might be hanging about from the legacy days. Occasionally I read articles. M. Kassner is always good, and I've seen a few here and there that yet interest me from writers i don't really know.

Recently, I had renewed my disappointment with all the broken links from the email alerts, etc., I had kept. I mean, when I really want to pull up an amusing thread I recall, or find some Balthor-ism, or a comment from one of our dearly departed, it just further dissuades me from coming here, that i can't very easily locate anything. Not much with even a Goog site search.

But before I even largely disappeared, a lot of people had moved their conversation to FB, and just, no. For too many reasons, not the least because of the technical and behavioral "merits" of that platform. I much prefer normal fora and comment threads, but the UX crowd seems bent on taking such simple concepts and rendering them ridiculous, too. So, I rarely and intermittently find both a site and community I could be bothered with. And the curating of spam and idiots rather tends to be seriously lacking most places. Ah, nostalgia.

There's not much reason to come here any more. I still get the newsletters, read selected articles, and respond to some of them. I rarely see replies being made by other readers to any comments. It's as if people want to add their two cents and move on, uncaring if others respond to them, unconcerned about responding to others. I notice a lot of comments are flagged as originating on Facebook; I can only assume that either people don't receive notice there that their comments have been responded to, or they can't find a way to reply, or don't care.

See ya in a month or two. Palmetto.

Although the site has changed tremendously in the last year after what appeared to be a slack in moderator activity, spam made a mess for a while. I waited to see what happened and I'm glad it has been for the good, maybe a little better. I see more members returning and helping out. No other source offers the unique viewpoint I see in the TR forums. Thank you everyone.

I check in every few months but there is almost never any new topics and everyone seems gone.
Today it took me 5 minutes just to find these community forums. I never did find a link. I just typed in the old URL and it still worked.
This site is truly a design nightmare. But honestly I sort have stopped coming when geekend got canceled. Then we had far less interesting discussions.

I get the emails, usually check at least one or two articles and comment occasionally, but I don't get over into the Watercooler very often. They've just now managed to fix the notifications even partway, which was one of the problems. Why come back if nobody has replied, eh?

Heck, my territory has changed at work, too, so I don't get to drive past Charlie's workplace to honk and wave.

Its a real shame what happened to this site. At one time, It was a thriving online community. TR really lost its mojo and its because of all the technical changes it made. This new version of it doesn't have the grassroots feel of the olden days.

Seriously, I don't want to see how many characters I'm allowed in a post and look at the countdown. What are the people in charge of this blog thinking?

I think people from the olden days still look like I do at TR, but when they see what a train wreck it is, they get turned off. Get rid of the freakin' character count. Its a turnoff.

Wow, its hard to believe that whoever did all the updates is still employed. If they even gave a ship, they would have put this place back to what worked in the past. Free speech without being tracked. Oh wow, look, I'm at 1678 word count.

Disgusting, TR. I almost want to run out the clock just to see what happens.

I stop by randomly and very sporadically.
Still receive a number of the newsletters.
Seldom see a Q&A that interests me.
Perhaps I'm just answering too many questions at work.

Chas

I use to come here quite often to help to answer tech questions. That was several years back. This use to be an excellent place to go to get answer to tech questions. What happened?

I originally came here, on recommendation of a colleague, precisely to get a work question answered, back in the days when there were points for answering questions satisfactorily. In recent years my work questions have gone unanswered - no-one with knowledge of SQL etc., whereas there were once plenty of people who knew about Access (my first question got answered in an hour or two).