Adobe to Launch New User to User Forums
The Adobe User to User forums are about to get a complete overhaul. One big step forward will the combination of the former Macromedia forums with the long time Adobe product and discussion forums.
If this sounds familiar to long time forum regulars it’s because it’s been tried before. The most recent effort was October of 2007 and was nothing short of a total disaster. Previous efforts were nothing to write home about either. Only time will tell whether this will effort will be successful.
About 18 months of recent history will be brought forward when the new forums launch and Adobe is offering an opportunity to test drive the new forums here. You can post questions and answers but all posts during the test drive period will be removed when the new forums officially go live.
If you’re registered to use the current forums you’ll need to associate that registration with a new Adobe ID. If you’ve purchased anything from the Adobe Store or used other features such as Acrobat.com, you’ve already got one and the association will only take a moment or two.
This won’t be possible after the new forums launch so you must login to the current forums and follow the posted instructions for doing so. If you don’t have an Adobe ID, you’ll need to register to use the new forums.
For InDesign users, one change, besides the interface, that will be noticed is that the Mac and Windows forums will be combined. Since most questions are platform independent and most of the regulars post in both this shouldn’t cause any problems.
If you’d like to comment on the new forums you can do so by visiting the new forums comments page.
Why people always feel the need to fix things that are not broken is one of life’s great mysteries. The preview of the new forums sucks. Can’t even reply, so what is it showing us? Nothing. I see another disaster in the making. They did the same thing with Studio Exchange.
Adobe seems to make what they do online more complicated than necessary. Adobe TV has great material, but video podcasts like the Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast are more effective, since they come to us rather than forcing us to go to them.
The same has been true of the user forums and script collections. Adobe seems to want to do things their own way, which makes them needlessly confusing for casual users. They need to model what they do on blog forums and VersionTracker? Who’d want to drive a car whose controls are different from every other car on the road?
That said, what’s at the trial link did seem much better than what I have seen in the past and must use some existing cookie , since it didn’t prompt me for a log-in. Adobe is like Google. I’ve got so many Google and Adobe IDs and passwords, I never know which to use.
Maybe Bill Gates took over Adobe when we weren’t looking. Clearly the issues raised in previous posts remind me of how Microsoft operates.
Given that I can’t log in, it does look like things are living up to past standards, lol…
Is it true that you will longer be able to use a newsreader to access the forums?
@Fred: Sadly, yes.
I just had a quick look, and to me it’s 10000000 times better.
The old forums were hard to navigate and to quickly find what you were looking for, especially to see the entire thread.
I used to avoid the Adobe forums like the plague, but now because it looks like a proper forum…
Finally…
the new forums are a disaster!
They also have recently got rid of Bridge Home, and easy place to find information. Now they think that Adobe.tv will replace Bridge Home, which is so wrong.
I agree the forums were working fine. They suffered a little from the days of Macromedia integration, and now no RSS.
Soon they will be telling us that print is dead, and everything is going on line!
Can you imagine where they are coming from?
Save the drama for your momma… the new forums are a thousand-times better than the old text-based, impossible to navigate, useless to search, and horribly feature-starved ones were. They might actually get used by more people now.
So far looks like another weak attempt. Both list and message views are significantly slower to load and redraw than the old ones. List views show number of views for posts, a vanity stat of no interest, but does not show the number of messages. It is not clear how or if you will be able to tell what threads have new messages since your last visit, unlike the easy to see flags. Messages are much slower to open and display, and a simple grab of the corner and resize of the browser window makes the entire window go blank, then redraw. Sloppy invalid HTML… uhm, what is supposed to be positive about this mess? Avatars?
I really like it, and the forums are definitely not slow. Perhaps it’s your browser, but here on Vista using Firefox it’s as fast as any other site, and I’m even on a slow (1Mbit) connection.
For those having the “can’t reply” problem, are you actually logged in? You do need to log in if you want to actively participate, just as you always have.
If you are having trouble logging in, and I know users of FireFox 2 may have issues, log into your Adobe Account first, then return to the forums. You should be good to go.
I’m non-committal on the new forums at the moment — will have to check them out a little more closely. I will say that I’ve always wondered why the forums were so plain and feature-less, given that the products discussed are used for graphic design. I’ve seen psychology forums that were much more attractive and had many more features (especially the ability to upload files for other folks to see). It always struck me as strange. I find it particularly confusing when a lot of the replies in the middle of a thread collapse and I have to remember to expand the whole thread. I hope the new forums will be an improvement.
Thanks, Phyllis