Power to the Programmers!

As was said in the now locked 'email lists' thread (the only hot topic on the site :D) - WE are all programmers - why don't WE come up with a solution to fill the void that has been left by Wrox? I know I would be happy to be involved! As has been expressed by others, using the web based forums are just too time consuming, I certainly won't be using them as it seems nor will a load of others, it would be a shame to lose the community surely there's something we could come up with something?
Alternatively maybe some of Wiley's competitors would be interested in the void, it seems sales were influenced by the forums, maybe we should see if they would like to be involved? Maybe then Wiley would realise the impact the forums had? Wiley have made the decision not to go the email list route for Business and technical reasons, maybe when they see the business suffers as a result they will try to address the issues, hey but by then it may be too late! It's no skin off my nose if this new forum closes, after all someone will address the niche. What really gets me is they failed to consult any users, surely they realise one of the first steps of a programming process is to understand the users needs - maybe they should read some of the Wrox books!!!

Sorry for the c*** prose, I'm a programmer not a writer! I just felt so strongly about this!

[jbergman]

Hi,
I've been watching all of the postings with great interest - commenting mostly in the book feedback section for people looking for a particular book. I just want to let you know that we at Wiley/Wrox are looking into the options created by yesterday and today's feedback. Before launching P2P, we had many conversations with both authors and users of the site to see what would be preferred and feasible. We did not simply just take Wiley's business reasons into consideration. If that were the case, we may not have taken on the challenge of revitalizing P2P.

I, for one, am dedicated to working to make the P2P site efficient, usable and effective for your needs. None of this happens in one day, but we are looking into various options.

I'm sure that this is opening me up to further postings, but that is fine. I just thought it worthwhile to chime in how I've spent my last few weeks :)

P.S. If Jan is the same Wrox person from last year's Tech Ed in New Orleans, how are you???

Jennifer Bergman
Marketing Manager
Wiley Publishing/Wrox Press

[KenSchaefer]

Hi Jennifer,

I'm curious to know which users you surveyed. There are a handful of people at the old p2p.wrox.com forums who pretty much answered 75% of the questions that came through on particular lists (Imar Spaanjaars, Jeff Mason etc). I did a quick search through my Sent-Items folder, and I put through 2731 messages (all answers) since the beginning of 2002 alone.

Whilst you may attract plenty of posters using this web-based system, the people who answer lots of questions are probably not willing to spend a lot of time on a web-based forum. I know that I'm not willing visit multiple websites every day to check to see who might need help.

With an list-server based solution, I can get all my ASPAdvice.com, 15seconds.com, P2P, Evolt, Developmentor, MS Newsgroups etc mail/news in the one client, and can quickly scan (using the one program) all the incoming queries, and reply.

I realise that you have various concerns about email-address harvesting, spam etc, but most commercial list-server products address these problems (Lyris, Listserv etc). I realise, of course, that they aren't cheap either. :-) The email-address harvesting problem, in particular, was something that was a product of the old P2P team's custom-built archiving system, rather than a problem with Lyris (which has its own, rather clunky, archive).

To end, I realise that you have any number of competing priorities (time-to-market, cost, usability, return-on-investment), however as one of the original subscribers who's been with P2P all the way since it started, I'd really urge the new P2P team to consider returning the previous format.

Cheers
Ken

http://www.adOpenStatic.com/

PS: And to consider giving/donating books to frequent posters. I received a fair few in the early days before Wrox started having problems. It helps breed loyalty to P2P, and it also helps answer questions where the poster refers to some code on a page in a book that I'd never consider buying. :-)

[JSample]

Ken:

While your concerns have been echoed many times over a couple of different topics, I still fail to see where the system we are working on with Jeff and Hal falls short of what you were just describing.

http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=60

You can receive all the posts into your mail client and then with one click respond to the ones you are interested in. The only valid arguments against this so far have been you have to be online, and that the post page is not as robust as some e-mail clients (i.e. spell checker). Those 2 items simply require more complex solutions that we have not been able to fully explore in the 4 days the site has been running.

If there are other issues with the system other than what I have stated above I am more than ready to hear them and see what we can do to solve them. However, we will not be going to another system as we have already proven that the Snitz web forum can be modified easily to address the issues that arise without ignoring the issues that Wiley has with Discussion list software.

Thank you all,


James Sample
Director, IT-Infrastructure
Wiley Publishing, Inc.

[jbergman]

Hi Ken,
To use the word survey is probably not correct as that implies an actual polling. Our team had several informal email conversations with people that contacted us via wrox.com over the last month to discuss their concerns for the future of P2P, as well as email and phone conversations with authors we contacted regarding their books. Our hope in all of this was to gather as much information as possible to present to our IT team.

Thanks,
Jennifer

[jminatel]

Ken:
To expand a little on Jen's comment, we didn't have a way to correlate user email addresses to posting frequency from the old database. While we had all the old user email addresses, we were reluctant to send a survey to the list regarding the changes because we did know if the policy you signed up under allowed a survey. So, we unscientifically corresponded with P2P users who contacted us, and also with some former Wrox employees and authors we were already in touch with.
We don't want to imply that the folks we did discuss this said "remove the ability to post by email." At the same time, what we heard led us to belive that an updated Web-based system would bring more benefits that drawbacks.

Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press

[Jeff Mason]

Judging from the responses you've heard from this community so far, it would seem that your conclusion that an "...updated Web-based system would bring more benefits that [sic] drawbacks..." was arrived at in error. So far the only reponse I've seen in support of this conclusion (not coming from Wiley) was a half hearted "I tell you what- I could even live with this hybrid..." comment from Hal in another thread. And that was only if you added a spell checker!

So where are the benefits?

I seems to me that Wiley made a decision almost in a vacuum, invested not insignificant resources in its implementation, and now is digging in its heels because the decision was made and by God, we're going to live with it.

I was an active participant in the P2P community, and I will try very hard to remain one, but Wiley is not making it easy for me. I do appreciate all the efforts that the Wiley folks have made to improve things, and things have improved, but I just can't shake this vision in my head of a bumch of Wiley folks furiously piling sandbags up against a rising river, as they try to salvage a workable system from a bad decision...



Jeff Mason
Custom Apps, Inc.
www.custom-apps.com

[Hal Levy]

Jeff,

I agree- I don't like the click to reply format- and I have faith that they are going to change it so we can use email as we did before..

I can tolerate this reading in email and replying with a click- but I don't like it. It's better than having to read and reply online, that's for sure.

I'd suspect that those people they spoke to about the web interface never thought for a moment that they would drop the email interface- so they never mentioned it.

I know I never contacted Wiley, I trusted that I would be provided with information when it was appropriate-- I didn't want to be a pain by emailing them while they were trying to get work done. I regret not contacting them earlier in the proccess.


Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC

[Dan Jallits]

Is it me, or does it seem as though the forum structure could be greatly improved. For instance, why are Linux and PHP slapped together in the same folder. I would understand if it was all things LAMP, but then the Perl and Python guys would be all over it too. Linux is an OS kernal and PHP is a server side scripting language, just because they are open source does not mean that they should be grouped together.

Just a thought!

Best Regards,

Dan

[jminatel]

Dan:
I created the new structure, loosely based on the old. My goal was to keep the number of top level categories to a minimum to allow them all to fit on one screen in the browser. So, a handful of topics that didn’t quite have enough list activity in the old system did get lumped together.
I’m open to changes here, but I’ll run them by James, Bruce, and the community to make sure any org changes don’t break people’s email filtering rules.
What is your specific suggestion?


Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press