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18-Opal
April 28, 2015
Question

The end of Adepters (?)

  • April 28, 2015
  • 15 replies
  • 11104 views
Hi folks—

For those of you who may not have stopped to read these messages from PTC/USER, or who may not have caught the implications, here is the summary:

PTC/USER is shutting down the server that runs the Adepters email list.

Their idea is to migrate all the PTC/USER discussion groups to the PTC-hosted PTC communities system. For those who haven’t used that system before, it’s kind of like Facebook for PTC users. They do have a dedicated area there for discussions of Arbortext related questions and issues, and that area does see a decent amount of traffic.

Since PTC/USER are shutting down their system, keeping Adepters running as-is will very soon not be an option. Going forward, some of us have talked about a few alternatives:


1) Follow PTC/USER’s suggestion and migrate to the PTC Community Arbortext board for Arbortext related discussions. The upside to this is that we get to integrate our community with the Arbortext user community over there (which has some overlap, but also some other users who have never belonged to Adepters. The downside is that it doesn’t offer the familiar listserv interface for reading and replying to messages.

2) Migrate to LinkedIn discussion groups. If we want to maintain more independence from PTC, there is a LinkedIn group for Arbortext users. LinkedIn has pretty good infrastructure for discussions, though again it wouldn’t have quite the same feel as an email server like we’ve been using for Adepters.

3) Migrate to another email discussion group service. We’ve looked at a few options, including Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, and they would have a more similar flavor to the current system, but there are also some quirks about them (for example, you can’t create a Yahoo! Account without giving them a mobile number, and apparently some numbers like mine aren’t recognized so they won’t work).

From my perspective, the easiest approach is to go ahead and switch over to PTC Community. But I’m interested in what other people think, and I wanted to open up a discussion, in the hopes that we can come to something like a consensus in order to best preserve the sense of community and mutual support that has made Adepters such a wonderful virtual space for so many years.

I hope that wherever we end up, we’ll see most of you there as well!

--Clay

    15 replies

    1-Visitor
    April 29, 2015

    Correct Greg, for all the content you've participated in (including this discussion I'm typing right now) you'll be notified by email when someone else creates a new reply. To get email updates on all the new discussions within the Arbortext community you'll have to Follow that space, by adding it to a stream or your community Inbox (notification center) and enable email updates. Here's our documentation to help you get started:Streams and Email Notifications - PTC Community.

    17-Peridot
    April 29, 2015

    Okay I wanted to chime in here a little. I’ve been a member of both for some time.

     

    Over the last few months I have noticed a up tick in activity of the PTC Arbortext community. Not in just quantity but also in quality of questions. I would hope to see everyone in the Adepters community make the migration over. That will in turn make the Arbortext Community site stronger.

     

    I wanted to share some links that other may find useful/helpful.

     

    Arbortext Community Link:

     

    https://community.ptc.com/t5/Arbortext/bd-p/Arbortext

     

    Attached to this post should be a PDF called “The Old Farts Guide to the PTC Community”. Written by David Haigh.

     

    Here are some other useful links.

     

    How do I Follow people, places, and content?

     

    https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Community-Help/How-do-I-Follow-people-places-and-content/gpm-p/450714

     

    Streams and Email Notifications

     

    https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Community-Help/Streams-and-Email-Notifications/gpm-p/450779

     

    What Does Making Someone a Connection Do?

     

    https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Community-Help/What-Does-Making-Someone-a-Connection-Do/gpm-p/153071#M829

     

    Community Help

     

    https://www.ptcusercommunity.com/groups/community-roundup

     

    A full list of product communities

     

    https://www.ptcusercommunity.com/groups/community-roundup

     

    A bunch more useful links:

     

    https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Community-Help/Need-Help-Here-s-a-List-of-Helpful-Places/gpm-p/451923

     

    One other note you can also submit product ideas on this site. They are even reviewed by PTC as well. 🙂

     

    https://community.ptc.com/t5/Arbortext-Ideas/idb-p/ArbortextIdeas

     

     

     

    18-Opal
    April 29, 2015
    Thanks for the useful information, Ryan. I think many Adepters participants have been concerned about having to actively go to the PTC Community web site as opposed to just having messages come to their inbox. It sounds like there are some workable ways around this, at least as far as notifications go (though it seems we will still have to go to the web site to post replies, correct?). Hopefully that will ease the transition.

    --Clay
    1-Visitor
    April 29, 2015

    Brian - thanks for the comprehensive list of helpful links, really helps inform this group on the spaces and places to keep tabs on moving forward. I'll also have a similar recap in a blog post within the PTC Community Help group tomorrow.


    Clay - yes, our hope is that continuing to provide email updates about content that matters to you will help ease this transition. As others have noted the main difference is that you must visit the community to actually create content and will no longer be able to create or add replies to discussions via email. We've had a lot of great conversations over the past year plus about this feature and are pleased with the recent increase in activity on this space.

    1-Visitor
    May 1, 2015

    Well, here we are...

    17-Peridot
    May 1, 2015

    Really surprised how well and existing thread transferred over.

    12-Amethyst
    May 1, 2015

    Unfortunately, every discussion has April 30, 2015 1:08 p.m. as the date of latest activity.