After Hours·5,412 discussions

Open letter to management: We told you so.

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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

Topic

We are listening

In reply to Open letter to management: We told you so.

Hey Locrain_lyric,

We have been listening, and with that making changes.

I would though like to talk with you more 1/1 to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Would you be so kind as to email me at: Tammy.cavadias@cbsinteractive.com

Thank you!

Tam 🙂

Tammy Cavadias, Community Manager
TechRepublic

Put it all back the way it was.

In reply to We are listening

Simple. Put as much of the site mechanics back as they were before June 2013. Editorial policies didn’t run me off as much as the unreliability of the site in general and the difficulty of using the forums in particular. Almost three years later and I still don’t know if a page is going to load completely, whether I’ll see a comments section, and how many refreshes it will take before I get the whole page.

Remember the 10th anniversary festivities? Nobody is going to travel across the continent or the Atlantic for the 15th anniversary of what this site has become. Nobody’s even going to suggest it.

Thank you.

In reply to Open letter to management: We told you so.

You are too correctamundo. I miss the Ol’ Girl.

[Author]

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