| The Collab is still "open" for a few topics like bug reporting that you mentioned until we determine a permanent place to continue that function. |
What's wrong with here? The bugs are going to get reported here whether you have a specific forum for them or not. I can say that with a high degree of certainty, because the Collab did not always have a suspected bugs forum and the bugs got reported there. And, unless you have no interest in listening to your customers, I can't figure out what you would have against a feature suggestions forum.
The ultimate goal is to close down the Collab in its entirety
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Yes. Hopefully after you have transferred the remainder of the content. Think of that as our "Library of Alexandria", which we spent years building. You have transferred less than half the content to the "new library", doing a fair amount of damage in the process (in particular, all the broken hyperlinks). The new library unfortunately has such a poor indexing system that it is not only difficult to find old material, it's difficult to find new material too. Now you are telling us that you intend to burn down the old library, complete with everything you left behind during the move. Don't be too surprised if you don't make any friends in the Mathcad world when you do that.
| And in fact, more recent versions of Akiva are more similar to PlanetPTC Community's functionality and are less like the out of date Collab. |
What do you mean by "out of date" (that's a real question - I don't know what you mean by it)?
We want to encourage participation around the themes of Showcasing your work, Networking with peers, and Inspiring others. And we know that other topics and content will be posted in parallel as well. |
I'm sorry I have to say this, but I think that is one of the root causes of the problems. Who decided that those should be the goals of the new forums? You and Dan? Someone else at PTC? Some consultant? The marketing department at Jive Software? It doesn't really matter who did decide that though, because I know who didn't. Us. Your users. In fact, your customers. The cardinal sin of product development is to build what the engineers want to build, and not what the customers want to buy.
Mathcad worksheets are not like pieces of art. You don't hang them in a gallery and "showcase them". They are tools, and usually highly specific ones. People take pieces from them for their own use, but rarely use a worksheet in it's original form. Some worksheets are of course worth showcasing, but it's a small minority. As far as "networking with peers" goes, my professional network is on LinkedIn. I have no interest in trying to maintain another one that only reaches a tiny subset of the people I want to connect with.
The nature of Mathcad means that most of the interaction occurs when someone runs into a problem and can't figure out how to solve it. The best type of forum for that type of interaction is one centered around a discussion forum. No need for videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, social networking features, etc etc. As a discussion forum, the Collaboratory may be based on very old software, but the fact is that it is much better than this forum.
