What Happened to REEOrder?

I understand the frustration. Please note that we made it quite clear 10 days ago that resources are going to be moved, removed, etc…

The End (of Beta) is Near: What you need to know.

I highly suggest if you have other threads/resources you don’t want to see gone that you speak up, like we requested. So far we have very few responses and I think its because nobody took us seriously. Now you know.

We’re very intent on moving on to EE 2.x and 2.1’s release will bring a more than just a point update. We’ll do our best to work with the community on what stays and what goes, but you have to tell us what’s essential to you and what isn’t. We can’t guess, not even by “last post” date. Last post doesn’t mean still relevant or essential, it just means there was a post.

There are thousands of old posts that need to go. They contain outdated information, etc… and are a detriment to support, especially to new users. We do not have the man power to manually sift through 1000s of posts.

As we stated in the post, we’ll do our best to restore info that is essential, but we can’t promise its possible every time. It certainly wasn’t our intention to remove active resources. But again, we can’t always tell, which is why we need your feedback. Start now. This is exactly why we posted the notice 10 days ago and its why we need your help knowing what you want us to preserve in some fashion.

I can’t stress enough that when 2.1 is released, EE 1.x becomes a legacy product. Prepare for it. Speak up, save resources that are essential to you in regards to EE 1.x, and let us know what you still want available in some fashion.

@Ryan M. As for broken links on Devot:ee, I publicly apologize for that Ryan. We should have given you guys a heads up. We’ll send you, along with the other Community Partners, info on some of the other changes happening in the near future so you can prep for them in-advance.

Instead of nuking information that may or may not be outdated, and may or may not be damn valuable to people, why not preface any thread with a last entry date older than XXX ( a few months or so?) with a note saying that the info is probably outdated, as it applies to 1.6. I can’t believe you’re hurting for storage space or anything.

There are sites out there that aren’t going to move to 2.1 anytime soon, due to budget issues or other organizational capabilities. Why not leave the info up as a resource?

Can’t we have an archive area for removed content? Often forum posts are more useful than documents IMHO.

Leslie - I’m mostly sad my post count is back down below 2000. If Mark Bowen is the scorekeeping type, he’s probably crushed right now.

I dropped you a note via another channel about how we can best figure out which add-ons would have broken links. A heads up on any other updates would be great.

Can’t we have an archive area for removed content? Often forum posts are more useful than documents IMHO.

yes I agree - an archived threads section would be awesome.

Can’t we have an archive area for removed content? Often forum posts are more useful than documents IMHO.

Yes, there will be an archive of the majority of EE 1.x resources (Forums, User Guide, Tutorials) along with active EE 1.x support (for a long time, as promised). Again, we didn’t intentionally kill active resources, they were unfortunately included with pruning thousands of outdated posts.

Again, your feedback will help us avoid this type of thing as we prep for 2.1’s release.

A few more things….

1. I want to clearly state that we could have done this more smoothly. We’re very much in crunch mode right now because we’re serious about “near.” This isn’t the Community’s fault. Please don’t read that into any staff responses here. We’re working hard to get 2.1 and everything that goes with it out the door.

2. What I hope everyone who reads this takes away is that your input matters a lot. You can help make the transition smoother by providing feedback.

3. We will post on the EE Blog about the upcoming Forum restructure that is part of the transition to EE 2.1 so that everyone will have a heads up on the upcoming changes.

I understand the frustration. Please note that we made it quite clear 10 days ago that resources are going to be moved, removed, etc… The End (of Beta) is Near: What you need to know.

From your blog post:

“We will do our best to keep current URLs intact or redirected.”

“We will do our best to notify the Community prior to any major resource change that can’t be redirected in a seamless manner.”

“replacing EE 1.x documentation and support resources with resources focused on EE” does not sound like removing user’s content from the forum without warning. I did not contribute very much to the forum but I praised the vitality, the etiquette and last but not least the outstanding quality of the forum and its users over and over. Today I am a little disappointed.

So far we have very few responses and I think its because nobody took us seriously. Now you know.

Sorry, that’s not the kind of response I have wished to see.

“We will do our best to notify the Community prior to any major resource change that can’t be redirected in a seamless manner.”

There were over 300,000 forum threads pruned. It was not practical to redirect or preserve that much outdated information as some in this thread have suggested. I sincerely regret the removal of some active resources but the pruning absolutely had to be done. This back log of outdated information was proving detrimental to providing effective support.

Since we had no practical way of sifting through old forum resources, we went ahead. We considered the initial End is Near post to be notice. If I were to do it over again we would have given specific notice about the pruning.

This is why we’ll be posting about the upcoming forum restructure so the Community can prepare for it.

According to Big Brother there are ~866 posts have broken links http://is.gd/d8oPB

:down:

A few more things…. 1. I want to clearly state that we could have done this more smoothly. We’re very much in crunch mode right now because we’re serious about “near.” This isn’t the Community’s fault. Please don’t read that into any staff responses here. We’re working hard to get 2.1 and everything that goes with it out the door. 2. What I hope everyone who reads this takes away is that your input matters a lot. You can help make the transition smoother by providing feedback. 3. We will post on the EE Blog about the upcoming Forum restructure that is part of the transition to EE 2.1 so that everyone will have a heads up on the upcoming changes.

Didn’t read your post before submitting my last post.

I’m really looking forward to EE 2.1. But the current non beta version is still 1.6.9 and I work with it every day. The forum is my primary resource (with the help of some custom Google searches and browser search shortcuts) for EE development. Just because something is old it doesn’t has to be bad or outdated. Actually it can be very helpful. Please consider this when you restructure the rest of all the resources. Many bookmarks and comments in source code are broken now. This is the stuff many of our clients and projects rely on for an indefinite time.

(Google doesn’t let me save any forum posts from the cache anymore because it thinks I’m a bot now. :( )

According to Big Brother there are ~866 posts have broken links http://is.gd/d8oPB :down:

Just to put that number into perspective, that’s about 1/2 a day’s worth of posts. We’ve pruned before as Lisa mentioned, a number of times in the past, and much more aggressively, and it didn’t even elicit a yawn. I’m sincerely surprised at not only it being noticed this time, but that it actually impacted anyone, and for that I’m sorry.

So far we have very few responses and I think its because nobody took us seriously.

I actually think there were few responses because most people (me included) are lazy. They need to:

1. Read the blog post, which not everyone does;
2. If the message got across, actively search for threads and wiki pages they find valuable;
3. Go back to the blog post’s discussion thread to state that they want to keep these resources.

And they have to do this within 10 days, which is, to be fair, not a lot. I, for one, can go several weeks without visiting the forums even once. Let alone situations like holidays or sickness.

Instead, I propose a different approach, if you need to prune the forums again. Why not display a message (similar to the Thread Closed one) at each thread that is scheduled for pruning. Along with this, add a ‘Keep this thread’ button which increments a number for that thread. After some time – I’m thinking 2 months rather than 10 days – only prune those threads that didn’t get any votes, or didn’t make a given threshold.

This is far more likely to get more visibility in the community, plus the action needed to send feedback is easier and more accessible.

Instead, I propose a different approach, if you need to prune the forums again. Why not display a message (similar to the Thread Closed one) at each thread that is scheduled for pruning. Along with this, add a ‘Keep this thread’ button which increments a number for that thread. After some time – I’m thinking 2 months rather than 10 days – only prune those threads that didn’t get any votes, or didn’t make a given threshold. This is far more likely to get more visibility in the community, plus the action needed to send feedback is easier and more accessible.

That’s not a bad FR for the forum module itself, Low.