Throw out the baby with the bath water

[Hein van den Heuvel]

My informal, highly subjective, quit possibly biased, observations of new-topic rate and reply-rate in the Operating-Systems corner of the world suggests the HP managed to throw away the baby with the bathwater (1)

Maybe areas other than HPUX, OpenVMS, Linux,... do better ?!

Kindly prove me wrong ?!

Please show me the official numbers 4 weeks before, and 4 weeks after the change.

- new topic rate for a week

- reply rate for a week.

- number of distinct authors of new topics

- number of distinct authors of replies.

Best regards,

Hein

(1) "an avoidable error in which something good is eliminated when trying to get rid of something bad, or in other words, rejecting the essential along with the inessential."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throw_out_the_baby_with_the_bath_water

[Dennis Handly]

>observations of new-topic rate and reply-rate in the Operating-Systems 

This has gone way down even in the ITRC since the beginning of the year.

[Pete Randall]

Unfortunately the only such statistics ever published came from Merijn.  You can see some statistics for the old ITRC on his site (http://www.cmve.net/~merijn/#Statistics), but Merijn notes "ITRC forum statistics ended on 22 June 2011 as the forum moved to an inferior new passport controlled site."

Given HP's reluctance to be forthcoming with much of any information other than "shut up and like it" [sic], I highly doubt that we will be seeing any current stats either.

I do agree, however, that traffic seems to be way down.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Hein:

I couldn't agree with you more.  Again, I applaud your directness and the professional manner in which you apply it.  Are you listening HP?

The structure of the old ITRC was simple and intuitive.  The structure of the old HP documentation was simple and intuitive.  Now we need vitural manuals to figure out how to use, let alone find, something.

Things like the HP GEMS and the pretty pictures on the are marketing (branding) banter and in my opinion do not belong on what is purported to be a community forum.  Move the stuff to one of your other (hidden) websites.

The internal search provided works better than the old ITRC internal search but is still a joke.  One can already see questions that have been answered tens or hundreds of times being asked again.  How can any of us say "Is your search ability broken?"

Sorry, HP, you solicited our opinions but I don't believe you listened to very much of the feedback that was offered (either directly or via consultants you hired).

Regards!

...JRF...

[Dennis Handly]

>Now we need virtual manuals to figure out how to use, let alone find, something.

What, google hasn't started working after all this time?  :-)

>Things like the HP GEMS and the pretty pictures on the are marketing (branding) banter and in my opinion do not belong on what is purported to be a community forum.

(Hey, I have to work with several of those guys, be nice.  :-)

One of the guys there was even asking me about the new forums recently.

>Move the stuff to one of your other (hidden) websites.

The videos are there, only that picture and ad are on the forum.

>One can already see questions that have been answered tens or hundreds of times being asked again. 

I would first assume laziness by the user, rather than search issues.  I don't see many users say they bothered searching.

Or did you want to change the New Message button to say "Did you try searching first?"?

[Pete Randall]

> I would first assume laziness by the user, rather than search issues.  I don't see many users say they bothered searching.

And they never did before (in the ITRC, that is).

[Brad McCusker]

I've been a bit too busy over the past few months to take the time to figure these new forums out.  But, earlier today I had a question that I needed answered and that forced me to bite the bullet. 

It was very disappointing to see how little activity there is in these new forums.  Hein - we don't need to see the statistics you asked for, it's very obvious that the use of these new forums is a fraction of the old forums.   In fact over in the VMS forums, I'll bet you could do the counting yourself in just a few minutes time.   

IMO, part of the problem is the usability - I found it to be intimidating which is why I didn't bother to figure it out until I needed to do so.  I'm thinking of putting together a brief session for the OpenVMS bootcamp on how to use these new forums.  The idea would be to help "break the ice" in the hope of sparking some more users to start using them. 

Has there been any "training" or "how to" information posted anywhere?

[James R. Ferguson]

---

@Brad McCusker wrote:

Has there been any "training" or "how to" information posted anywhere?

---

I suppose you could consider the "HELP" link (at the top right where you sign-out) to be the official manual. 

Then too, there are a few HP-supplied "Tips and Tricks" (in the Welcome to the Community) section:

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Tips-and-Tricks/bd-p/tips_and_tricks

Good Luck & Regards!

...JRF...

[TomSmith]

"Throwing the baby out with the bath water" describes this situation perfectly.  It is clear that the folks at HP who gave this disaster the green light did not understand what made the old ITRC valuable. (Or if they did they ignored it) Yes the old ITRC forum had some warts, but on the whole it was an incredibly useful tool. More importantly, the people who contributed to the site were it's biggest asset. 

By replacing it with "Lithium", HP did away with one asset, and the other seems to be eroding away quickly.

Disappointing that HP has had zero comment on this.