This place is dead, very dead, and it didn’t need to happen. In fact, it should not have, as you were warned.
You took a vibrant, active community and turned it into a ghost town by ignoring the users. Ironically, this was a topic touched upon many times over the years. All of the criticisms of Microsoft being tone-deaf to user complaints, programmers designing applications without UAT or end user input at all.
When you changed the format, the rules, went for a more “professional” (READ: Dull, boring and unattractive) website and structure, you were met with a massive response from the user base. Exiling the silliness, clamping down on the antics and destroying everything that made this a useful website has had the very predictable result of driving people away.
Again, as this was all going on, you were warned, and the cavalier approach of “If you don’t like it, leave” has lead to many many people doing just that. This site gets less posts in a week than it used to get in an hour.
Rather than drawing more IT professionals to you, you have driven them away en masse. Strangely, you seem okay with this. Maybe as part of the CBS goliath, you figure that the mother company will just continue to pour cash and you don’t need to worry about the opinions of we mere patrons.
You should.
I’m sure this will all fall on deaf ears and I know this will achieve nothing. Still, I hope against hope that someone will read this and start listening to the folks again, and maybe start to draw folks back.
Just my $.02
