So when are the forums coming back? Q&A isn't working

Hi Sue,

We are improving the Q&A over the next 4-6 weeks based on user feedback like yours :) Unfortunately, we had to switch from the old CMCrossroads site to the new one prematurely because it was being labeled by Google as infected with malware. Look for improvements to come!!

Bob

The "General CM" forum was a good place for ongoing discussion 

The Tool/Product specific forums were great....... Obviosuly only if you had an interest in the specific tool.

This is where unfortunately things got mucky because there were (probably) too many of them.

There were forums for loads of tools that were never updated.... like ever!!

In the "good old days" (and that actually means before the previous upgrade).....

General was updated 10s-dozens of times per day....

Some "Products" were updated several times a day....

Groups/Friends and messaging were often useful.... I made contacts from CMX that I maintain to this day (outside CMX because there isn't/I can't find the functionality)

Gotta rush now or miss my train..... I'll try to add more comment tomorrow.

Cheers Drew

Hi everyone on this thread - (This reply is also posted on another Questions at: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/question/how-does-everyone-new-cm-crossroads...)

 Heather Buckman, who heads up our Communications group, asked me to join in the conversation.

Everyone here at SQE/TechWell has been working very hard for the past nine months to get the new CMCrossroads website developed and “out the door.” Unfortunately, due to serious issues with the old site, we were forced to go live sooner than we had wanted to.

Finally, now we are stable enough to start adding new functions and tweaking others. I hope that sometime soon the new website will be able meet your needs and expectations.

Q&A is one focus area where we want to improve the functionality and usability. The next release, which is planned to go live next week, will add commenting back for questions, improve the answering page, and make the Recently Asked Questions display much easier to digest. We are operating in 2–3 week sprints and should be able to make more updates over the next several months.

I’d like your input on where to go from here?

In the next sprint, we want to tackle Topics and Sub-Topics for Q&A. Our idea is to have one topic area dedicated to Tools and a second for General and Process discussions. Do we need any other “major” topics?

Within the fixed topic areas, the thinking is to include a limited (but expandable) set of sub-topics. We'll propose an initial list of these sub-topics based on the questions that were migrated from the old forums and ask for your input. 

I had a talk with Bob Aiello yesterday about how we can work together to reengage the CMCrossroads community. We’d appreciate getting your ideas, too.

Some good news for the website—our new platform supports multiple communities. So, we can spread the development costs and the content to multiple websites—now to both CMCrossroads.com and AgileConnection.com and soon to StickyMinds.com. Later, this year we may launch another community site for software leaders and project managers.

I know it has been a rough couple of years for CMCrossroads. With your help 2013 will be a much better year.

Wayne Middleton

Yes, this is covered in two different questions and the answer is always the same. Bring back the forums.

We want to see comments and questions listed in a way that they are easily scanned. I currently have CA and Serena products. I also use and have to interface with Maven , Nexus , CVS, Subversion. I could read the forums easily and look for things that might help me. The Q&A format is virtually useless in that sense. 

There have been talks of sprints and promises of listening to the members and we know that you want them back and we're working it. You are losing people by the droves. Everyone I talk to thinks this new site was a disaster. The CM community has lost one of its most treasured tools. 

Bring back the forums, PLEASE!!!!!

I'd volunteer to moderate a TFS forum.

David -

Thanks for the heads up on the website resonse time. We've been "fighting" unfriendly bots crawling the community sites.

Now that the new StickyMinds.com has launched, we are finally have the resources to look at adding new features to CMCrossroads.com.

Do you have some time this week (Jan 6-10) that we can discuss adding forums back to the site? 

Wayne

PS IF ANYONE ELSE IS WILLING TO MODERATE NEW FORUMS ON CMCROSSRODS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

I would also like to offer to moderate forums if they come back.  Tools in which I have experience include (and this might be good starting point for a forum structure)....

Source Control:  TFS, ClearCase, GiT, Mercurial

Build tools: Ant, GNU Make, TeamBuild (really this one is part of the larger TFS...but it would be useful to have a forum topic to focus on build portion of it)

Deployment Automation tools:

Custom Tools and Scripts, Vendor Tools (AnthillPro, ElectricCloud)

More general DevOps ideas for forums: 

Scripting tools (UNIX shell, Powershell, Python)

IT Service Management tools:  HP Service Manager, Remedy, other tools?  (maybe put each of these underneath a larger "ITIL" forum folder/area)

Can we have access to the old forums?