Forums | MacLife

Nobody seemed to be using the old forums as reference.  Our access logs showed no searches and very little other activity in the last week.  Also we figured these forums would be snappier if the other forums were closed.  My experience has been that these forums are indeed somewhat faster because of that.

hey... i was accessing them....

Yeah...I mean, you only gave it like what , 3-4 days?  You can't expect an archive to be heavily accessed every day.  A little dissapointing.

After a little while the forums will become an archive.

That's good; the forums can be a useful resource for troubleshooting. If possible, it would be nice to have the option of including or excluding the archive in global searches (eg, with a "include archives, Y / N" button).

Why? In the old forums if you did a "search everywhere" for a certain term, it would always go through the archives (with no option to exclude), and thereby take an extra eternity to complete its work. On top of that you'd wind up with some really stale threads you might not even need.

(For a lot of searches you can never be sure of which forum [often out of 3 or 4] your answers might be found, so it's easier to search everywhere than to go forum by forum.)

Hrrmm....how to put this nicely......

The needs of the many outweigh the wants of the few...

The many being the 20,000+ members who expect a fast forum experience, and were no longer using the old "pile of files"

The few being the 3 of you who were still using it.

How big is the old archive....HUGE....and it's NOT in a "real" database, it is quite literally a "pile of files"

Here's some interesting stats on the new board which is only going into it's 3rd week of full operation.

Number of posts: 16914
Posts per day: 931.22
Number of topics: 1581
Topics per day: 87.04
Number of users: 20420
Users per day: 1124.25

Interpolate that to how ever far out the old boards went back.....

You start to see the real picture.

Forums are not meant to be an historical archive, they are a form of near -real time discussion and collaboration. 

The point could be taken that there is "important troubleshooting info" in those old threads.

I counter that with 2 things.  This place is a whole lot more than a trouble-shooting forum....And the LAST place I would look for troubleshooting info is ANY Forum....I can find the info I need quicker just about anywhere else than a forum.  There's too much "noise" to wade through on any forum to "effectively" get info in a quick manner.

Maybe eventually the old threads will become an archive of sorts, but there are higher priority things that are still not functioning the way it should...It's a much lower priority.

Ok I'm done ranting



p.s I KNOW that all 22,000 members aren't all active---putting out the flame before the fire

I just wanted to push this forward for everyone, including myself, that missed it the first time around.

I was a little disappointed to read that we aren't able to access the old forums, but it's not a priority for me, and anything that makes these new ones run smoother, i'm all for.

Shoving this to the front since TheConfuzed! was too lazy to look farther than the first page. 

Ummm.... Oh yeah, thanks a lot!