Many of our regular customers may remember we used to have a vibrant forum on this website, but earlier this year we removed it. I’ve recently been asked if we plan to bring it back and it made me ponder on its value. See, we had a forum for nearly 15 years here and to remove it was a big step. Maybe it was the right step, or maybe the wrong one – I’m not yet certain.
The reason we removed the forum is because it was starting to cause problems that greatly affected my personal ability to get things done. I was starting to spend more time dealing with issues related directly to the forum that I had. The problem stemmed both from the design of Forums and its technical quality.
Most Forum software that we’ve seen that are really good at their purpose do not integrate well within our website forcing people to have multiple logins for the same website so we were constantly getting support requests that I – as the administrator – was being sent where people complained that they could not login to our store or to make a comment to my blog posting. The problem was that they had a Forum login and it didn’t work with the rest of our site and I only found expensive plugins that sort of worked to fix that issue.
Secondly, nearly every time our website was hacked – it was through the forum software. When you spend a couple days every month dealing with cleaning up hacks from people who use the forum software as their entry point into your server it gets old fast. Finally, we saw many discussions over and over again that were answered in other forum posts, but were too deep in pages of discussion that nobody ever saw the answer. With all of those issues we decided not to have a forum anymore.
On the other hand, we did find the forum valuable for feedback. So we aren’t saying that we won’t ever bring it back, but if we did – it would have to resolve the issues above.
I really miss the forum, but I understand that it is a time drain for you. As long as we can still contact you through support conversations, feature requests, and Twitter, I’m okay with it for now. I miss the sense of community we had though.
That is one thing I miss as well. I’d really like to re-instate forums. I can do so with a few WordPress forums, but I really want something that has an option to mark an answer as “Correct” and bubble it to the top so that someone looking at a topic would look at it and go aha – I see the answer.
I also miss the forums for various reasons. Of course, quick and easy access to support is available, and a decent facility to make enhancement requests. And that’s great. But what’s now missing is (as Tom says), a sense of community – meaning questions/issues/suggestions/viewpoints/proposed better or different ways of doing things are actively commented on/answered/discussed by other forum members (and sometimes by you and your team). That was very useful in making better use of PI and productivity in general. Totally understand the 3 real issues you have though. Hopefully, there’s something better out there that can address these issues.
I haven’t participated in the Forums hardly at all (maybe once or twice), but I do come to the site often to check on the latest and greatest blog, which I always read.
In my past experience as a community manager for chat, community groups, and message boards (back in the day), forums can be an administrative nightmare. To keep a forum informative and constructive on a product that is growing, it often takes a team of diligent people to manage it. It can be a nice problem.
That said, the good news is that you are now free to devote your time to making Informant even bigger and better. Not having a forum is ok by me. I just hope you can find the time to continue the blog. It’s like being able to use the back door to enter Informant’s world, and I would take that any day over a forum.
Have a great day!!
I’m definitely open to doing daily blog posts – I just don’t know what you guys are interested in hearing about. Give me some ideas of what you’re interested in hearing from me about and I guarantee you’ll get some 🙂
For blog ideas, you could write about the common problems your application solves by providing case examples (think social proof), or you could write about Best Practices and Lessons Learned from your experiences or the experiences of others in day to day events. Even including Time Management suggestions, organization suggestions, you could even focus on the market niches your application excels in.
Agreed! Great topic suggestions. I enjoy reading about the updates that you post, and the trials and tribulations you and your team face in product development. What is important, though, is that you write about whatever you want to write about. Your posts are informative.
Have a great day!
Will there ever be a Windows version? Or can this sync to outlook 2013 or 2016?
Hi Alex,
There is only one thing left that I need for pocket informant for iOS: Is there any way that you can prevent it from auto-inserting the contact name in the Location field? I love the auto insert completion/insertion for call/meet/etc. but the contact name and gps info in the location field throws off Waze navigation every day. Thank you for creating and supporting the best iOS calendar, todo app around!
Michael