Holy Double-espresso, Batman! Where's my Javalobby?

[davidsalter]

Originally Posted by rick

We're working our tails off - you already know that.

.. and I think the new site is looking impressive. Congrats.

The only downside I can see is that its quite difficult on the forums home page (http://forums.dzone.com/) to see which forums have new posts. Could the forums with new posts be in bold or highlighted somehow so its easy to scan over it and see.

[rick]

Originally Posted by davidsalter

.. and I think the new site is looking impressive. Congrats.

The only downside I can see is that its quite difficult on the forums home page (http://forums.dzone.com/) to see which forums have new posts. Could the forums with new posts be in bold or highlighted somehow so its easy to scan over it and see.

Thanks for the positive encouragement, David. It is much appreciated.

I think there will be a function specifically to let you view unread postings, but we haven't yet got it worked into the interface effectively. Also, I think the idea to bold/highlight forums with new threads is a good one. We have this within a forum, for threads with new replies. It seems we could do the same at the forum level.

[charlesg]

Where did new.eclipse.org go?

I relied on these, as part of eclipsezone as my company blocks news reader access. without access to this, dzone has very limited value to me.

[matt]

Originally Posted by charlesg

Where did new.eclipse.org go?

I relied on these, as part of eclipsezone as my company blocks news reader access. without access to this, dzone has very limited value to me.

Hi Charles. We're still looking into how we can return the gateways using the new forum system. We know this was one of the things that people liked about EclipseZone, so keep an eye on the forums and we'll let everyone know when we get things put back together.

[fmarines]

Some people in this thread are being a bit mean. I think we should remember that JL has been a free service for so many years, and Rick Ross himself has been actively fighting for the interests of Java developers for some time.

On the identity front, after reading these comments I'm wondering why not have the url javalobby.dzone.com? That way you can still use DZone infrastructure to serve the site up, but also retain the identity of Javalobby in a stronger and more recognizable way than just the logo.

Floyd

[andrewm]

(I apologise slightly for the tone of the following letter. I am upset enough to write this, but am slightly embarrassed by the strength of my feeling on the subject)

Originally Posted by rick

Agreed - I will fix that. Thanks.
I'm afraid we'll disappoint on the conspiracy theory front. The simple reason to move to forums is to provide separate threads to have intelligent conversation about the multiple, significant issues that are emerging.

I'm practical enough to know that there is obviously no conspiracy and you've driven the move to consolidate out of a real desire to create more content and bring javalobby fwd. I think i understand that.

But, I'd like to concur with the feelings of the other longtime contributors. It feels (at the moment) like an (inferior) InfoQ clone. (I really like InfoQ by the way, but that's another discussion). We're getting a lot of enterprise articles (which didn't used to appear on javalobby) and some silly newsy articles (the ones by Maureen O'Gara, who will instantly be familiar to anyone whose read criticism of her "anti-open source bias" on groklaw.net).

The new site just doesn't have that previous feeling of cohesiveness. Is a community defined by the fact that we share a common filter setting, or is it something more?

Originally Posted by rick

Will, you know that Matt and I both care about the health of this community, and we have nurtured it through good times and bad for many years. We're not going to destroy it, and fear of change is the most natural of human reactions. Did you really say faceless conglomerate?

I know you do care about the community -- we've seen this often enough. I'm not accusing you of malevolence. However, as a deeply committed user of javalabby in the past, I was shocked that:

1. we got no notice
--> fair enough, you may have got caught out by circumstance. perhaps the hosting plan ended and it was costing you big-time? who knows? however, to my eye it was such a shock that it literally looked like the community had evaporated instantly. After a few days, I still feel this way.

2. too many things changed at once
--> it's a fair point, people hate change and have to be pushed into it. however, too much changed for the worse, IMHO. you face having to retrofit it back on a selective basis. don't get me wrong -- i appreciate and respect the need to consolidate for saving resources and moving forward.

3. some useful aspects seem to have no replacement
--> the announcements section seems to have disappeared (there an announcement section in the articles section, but surely that's not the same?). The feature article I wrote on dependency injection has disappeared. fair enough, perhaps it was time for these things to go, but i found them useful and I warrant that others did too. I guess i could submit my 2nd article in the series to another site, but I really like javalobby for this type of thing.

Perhaps it's time for me to move on from Javalobby at any rate. Perhaps you did what you had to do to keep the community moving forward, and perhaps regeneration involves more or less recreating the community?

As for the argument that you provide all this for free, I appreciate the point. You've been at the forefront of java advocacy and done a lot of good work, and obviously feel this is a labour of love. However, the community has done all it can to try to help -- e.g. i've bought products from ads off javalobby, i've mentioned to those people that i found the products off javalobby. I've turned my adblocker off to try to sort out the ad revenue thing. At the end of the day, if you want to get some return from the site you will need a solid community -- it's a reciprocal relationship. It's surely not "you get it for free, so what's to complain about?" (to paraphrase floyd m. -- who i've not seen post (much) on javalobby at any rate).

Cheers,
Andrew

[archimboldo]

After trying for a while, I can't get used to the new format either. Way too much whitespace, huge title fonts, too much scrolling needed.

While it was probably unintentional, Google had the right idea. No fancy graphics, compact representation, no frills. I heard one theory as to why the Google page is so no-frills is that neither Serge Brin nor Larry Page were GUI types.

One thing that is nice is the better reply page. There are probably other nicer features that I just haven't had occasion to use yet.