Despite our early issues with implementing
the
new forum software (the
switchover was -- and I'm using my typical British
understatement here --
not
optimal), things have settled down.
I'll be the first to admit that the transfer was not the best of
experiences, either for you, our customers, or us. We woefully
underestimated the hardware needed, we didn't properly test the NNTP
access, and we pulled the switch without any warning (even to some of
our own teams). Many of you have properly complained and justifiably so. Let me just say that we certainly won't be doing that
again any time soon. In fact, ever. We have better things to do with our support team.
There are still a few minor issues — if I never see "<" or ">"
in a post subject again it will be too soon — but for the majority of
our customers, whether they use the web or NNTP to access the forums,
it all works pretty well. Of course, if you are suffering from one of
these minor issues, it's going to be anything but minor, but we are
committed to working on solving these remaining problems. And hence we've officially made
the decision not to switch back to the "old" newsgroups.
Nonetheless, we're still not 100% happy, especially with NNTP access.
I don't know whether it's the breadth of newsgroup readers that our
customers are using or their sophistication in using those readers,
but we're finding some interesting bugs in the NNTP server add-in for
Community Server. We're submitting bug reports and waiting for the bug
fixes and, although Telligent is responsive, it all takes time. So
we're planning on continuing some work we were doing earlier on
writing our own NNTP add-in for Community Server. No timeframe — duh!
— but I can guarantee this: if we get as far as deployment, we'll be
doing some in-depth testing by running the add-ins in parallel.
And that's a promise.