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Yet more confusion - why not ask Forum members what they wanted?

Brian Edwards
I appreciate that MSC tried to anticipate what people like Martin might want.  But why spring this on us unannounced, when MSC knows that there's existing Forum members (from Adams and other MSC products) that are quite passionate and wouldn't mind helping get a new site to have some nice functionality?
 
It just really seems like somebody made a decision in a vacuum without customer feedback.  And even if you nail it with what users want, it's not generally a pleasant experience to find somebody has switched the rug out from underneath you without even consulting.  Obviously it's MSC's ball and they can play with it how they want, but at least from the Adams side, a lot of the heavy Forum lifting was done by non-MSC forum members, and it would be good to involve them in the gameplan.
 
And I hate it when my only form of feedback is a pissy post on a new Forum.  Sorry for my rant!  :)
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    Hi Brian,
     
    We appreciate ALL forum feedback - we want this to be a useful tool!
     
    To be transparent: we did ask a small group of vocal users (like your colleague JS..) for their thoughts. I wouldn't disagree (...Kent's editorial comment...) that we flipped the switch a bit abruptly, but I can tell you that in the background we've been discussing this for a LONG time.
     
    If we could re-do this then definitely we would've:
     - posted a notification to the old forums of our intentions
     - asked for any/all customers to provide comment, rather than the small group that we reached out to.
     
    Thanks,
    Kent
     
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    It's not like you needed to ask every member for permission..
    A simple announcement in the old Forum like "Hey guys, we're doing something next month" would have been better than nothing.
     
    In my case I have been asked by Kent on May 2'nd, if I'd beta test a new platform, but after that I didn't hear anything.
    Obviously somebody decided it'd be more fun to pick the whole community for that beta test.
     
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    Hi Martin,
    Two things:
    1. Very much agreed on announcing changes. We apologize for not giving some notice in the OLD forums - that was clearly missed in our plan.
    2. I was confused about your beta testing comment, because I'd forwarded your "accept" response to my colleagues who were managing this. I must sincerely apologize, though, because I just reviewed the email trail and I can see that I didn't include the person who was managing registration for beta users! That was a dumb mistake on my part - very sorry!
    Thanks,
    Kent
     
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    Don't worry about past things you cannot change any more.
     
    It just leaves a bad taste about MSC's customer policy.
     
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    What has the forum traffic been like since the switch.  Has the number of users logging in decreased?
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    I just this morning realized that I hadn't got a e-mail from the various forums in quite a while and decided to investigate. New forums, with a pretty poor user interface and no combined search for new+old (unless I'm missing something). Nice.
     
    How do I turn on email notification for various subforums? Is it even possible?
     
    My initial impression of the both roll-out and the forum software are that they are f-ing awful.
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    I'm still quite fuzzy on the whole thing, and have no real motivation to try and figure it out. The Help/FAQ has some info, but is lacking. It would be great if it contained info on how to transition from old functionality to the new.
     
    For instance, for those who subscribed to Forums with Daily or Immediate emails, what's the new paradigm? Is it a one-to-one equivalence, or are there things lacking, or is the new intent completely different? And how exactly do I do this? There's a nice big FOLLOW button, but I really don't know the details about what that means or what happens when I click it.
     
    And I still think if I was new to the Forums and searched "bushing" and found exactly two results, I'd think it was not much of a Forum...
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    I suppose maybe the transition wasn't ideal for people who used the old forum, but perhaps this one will attract more new users? I guess time will tell.
     
    FWIW, the options I see in user settings seem very much in line with what other forums use these days. In a way, I'm a bit surprised MSC didn't just pull the plug on the old forum, and leave it to some of the external sites that host MSC software discussions.
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    Ok, so I took the dive and clicked "Follow" on the Adams forums, and guess what? Now I'm getting emails from the PATRAN forums. I can't find anywhere that allows one to manage subscriptions, so I guess I'll be getting all sorts of spam that is of no interest to me...
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    Oh, but I did find one nice thing under "My Settings": I can finally change my email address. (I'd stopped asking about doing this five years ago after we got bought and everyone here got new email addresses.)
     
    But wait! That doesn't work either, I get "An error occurred while trying to update the record. Please try again." So I tried again. And again. And again. I gave up.
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