Site Merger with Techist

What I mean why has Bahawolf had to tell us instead of the Admin/Owners and why do we have to find out this way. I don't if I speak for everyone but I have had no knowledge of this up until now. I rarely visit Techist but have briefly checked it out today.

It was not public knowledge (here on CF, at least) that the communities were going to merge. It was referenced by Trotter once or twice, and so I wanted to get a direct answer via this thread. Fortunately, I now know what is happening, but I can't help but feel that our own community should have been made aware.

I think that the leadership over here have been detached for some time, with the exception of some moderators. Not only are most suggestions unaddressed at all, but there has been a lack of involvement from the administration as a whole. I'm hoping that as the merger occurs, this improves.

Frankly, since David stepped away, I believe that the community has not been the same. This merger could be the saving grace that the community needs, or it may not be. At the very least, it seems that the leadership of Techist are more involved, and that is important. On this side of the fence, it seems that most ideas, suggestions, and concerns fall upon deaf ears.
 
It was not public knowledge (here on CF, at least) that the communities were going to merge. It was referenced by Trotter once or twice, and so I wanted to get a direct answer via this thread. Fortunately, I now know what is happening, but I can't help but feel that our own community should have been made aware.

I think that the leadership over here have been detached for some time, with the exception of some moderators. Not only are most suggestions unaddressed at all, but there has been a lack of involvement from the administration as a whole. I'm hoping that as the merger occurs, this improves.

Frankly, since David stepped away, I believe that the community has not been the same. This merger could be the saving grace that the community needs, or it may not be. At the very least, it seems that the leadership of Techist are more involved, and that is important. On this side of the fence, it seems that most ideas, suggestions, and concerns fall upon deaf ears.

I agree with all of this. It seems as though the Owners are more involved with Techist than CF and like you said our suggestions to help improve the community just go completely unnoticed. Also Andy has said that our posts and threads will be imported to Techist.

Andy R said:
As for the merger, no posts/threads on either site will be lost. All the content from Computer Forums will be imported into Techist.com. That includes, threads, posts, PMs, everything. This will not only increase the vibrancy of the forums (more posts) but also the organic search traffic we get. - http://www.techist.com/forums/f5/future-tech-forums-274780/index10.html#post2144142

Can't be a bad thing to embrace a little change, it'll be good to see things shaken up a bit.

Yeah I agree and CF has seen better days..
 
I didn't realize that our administrators have been there for years, and seem to be more active on that side of the fence. It seems like CF has always been the odd little brother, and none of us knew. :lol:
 
What I mean why Bahawolf has had to tell us instead of the Admin/Owners and why do we have to find out this way. I don't if I speak for everyone but I have had no knowledge of this up until now. I rarely visit Techist but have briefly checked it out today.

I agree, it would've been nice to hear some sort of official announcement :D
 
We might all be a bit nervous about this, but there must be a good reason. Besides, anything bad that comes out of this we just do what we always do. Deal with it in a reasonable way. (even if that means ignoring some people)

Lets hope that this goes well. :)
 
It is the case that the two communities will be merged and the goal is to have a more vibrant site with a wider range of topics as well as some new features. Tech Forums has historically been more hardware related than CF and so the two sites should be a good fit.

Over the years, site teams at both forums have been concerned about slowing activity. This is a general reflection, imo, of the change seen by most tech related forums. As landscape of computing has changed, forums often have not been nimble enough to adapt.
Combining forces should make a more robust site with a wider variety of discussions. We also hope to add a newsy home page that will feature member authored articles, industry updates and deep content.

Tech Forums was recently renamed to Techist and the site teams are getting to know one another. Renaming to Techist is the first step towards offering a wider scope for the site.

There will be lots of notice before any change here. The logistics of the merge should be fairly straight forward. All accounts and content will be moved. Usernames and logins will be retained, etc. We still have some work to do before a merge and the name change was the first step. Getting the url reranked in searches is important. Then we will work to develop a new topic layout that reflects current interests on both boards.

None of these changes is being taken lightly. Site teams at both sites have been considering various options for some time now and CF in particular stands to benefit. The name of this community is becoming a growth limiter. "computer" just doesn't cover a wide enough variety of topics and become more limiting each year.

I believe this will be a positive change but understand that change can be unsettling. Please try to keep an open mind. We all have the same ultimate goal; to have a vibrant community that is current, relevant and fun. :)
 
It is the case that the two communities will be merged and the goal is to have a more vibrant site with a wider range of topics as well as some new features. Tech Forums has historically been more hardware related than CF and so the two sites should be a good fit.

Over the years, site teams at both forums have been concerned about slowing activity. This is a general reflection, imo, of the change seen by most tech related forums. As landscape of computing has changed, forums often have not been nimble enough to adapt.
Combining forces should make a more robust site with a wider variety of discussions. We also hope to add a newsy home page that will feature member authored articles, industry updates and deep content.

Tech Forums was recently renamed to Techist and the site teams are getting to know one another. Renaming to Techist is the first step towards offering a wider scope for the site.

There will be lots of notice before any change here. The logistics of the merge should be fairly straight forward. All accounts and content will be moved. Usernames and logins will be retained, etc. We still have some work to do before a merge and the name change was the first step. Getting the url reranked in searches is important. Then we will work to develop a new topic layout that reflects current interests on both boards.

None of these changes is being taken lightly. Site teams at both sites have been considering various options for some time now and CF in particular stands to benefit. The name of this community is becoming a growth limiter. "computer" just doesn't cover a wide enough variety of topics and become more limiting each year.

I believe this will be a positive change but understand that change can be unsettling. Please try to keep an open mind. We all have the same ultimate goal; to have a vibrant community that is current, relevant and fun. :)

Thank you very much for providing your insight, Janet. - Are you guys currently looking for assistance on the development front? I've offered my assistance here before, in an effort to give back to the community, but at that time the community did not need anything developed.

I'd be happy to provide further details upon request, but I'm a full-stack developer. :)

Note: This is NOT spam or self-advertising, by the way. I'm interested in becoming part of the team, and performing the development as a way to give back to the community. I'm not offering to bid on a project, or to perform the work on an hourly fee.
 
@Bahawolf - PM sent. We will be able to get the sites merged using a forum admin who has done this many times. Once the two sites are merged then we are going to look at a new platform to run Techist and that's when we might need some help. I know there is also a developer on Technist who stepped forward too (it's very kind of you).

I am sorry you all heard about this change this way. We brought up the idea to the teams on both sites and after further discussions most agreed that it was worth the risk to join forces. Both sites have been suffering from reduced activity for many reasons including slowing computer sales (iPad Effect), less need to overclock as processor speeds and video cards are so darn fast now and less new members joining. The latter is a direct result of less organic search traffic finding our site so we have less people to convert into members. The reason we have had declining organic search traffic is because Google has increased the weight of it's "freshness" factors to give more weight to new discussions and less weight to old/dated ones. If you want to know which processor is best, the answer today will be very different than three years ago. The archives simply don't get listed in the search results like they used to.

We do have a plan that we are following and the announcement was just weeks away. Our first step was to convert tech-forums.net into Techist.com. Once the search engines picked up that change then our plan is to merge Computer Forum into Techist.com. At that point we wait again until the search engines properly pick up the changes. Then we will look at some other discussion platforms to see if we want to stay on vBulletin or switch. Changing to a new platform will once again introduce a change visible to the search engines so we want to make one change at a time, fix any issues before moving on to the next change.

The two communities do compliment each other and we are hoping that by having the active posters from each site will in itself stimulate things by having more interesting posts to chime in on.

The vision for Techist is to try and evolve along with technology. To provide a community that covers not only computers but smartphones, help with SaaS tools, etc. For example if you want to setup a geofence that will text your wife when you leave work, how do you do it. What if you want to pull a value from a webpage each day into a Google Spreadsheet to create chart that can be posted to your twitter account on a weekly basis? Another example might be backing up your NAS offsite to Amazon Glacier or Google Nearline.

There is so much stuff that can be hacked together these days that our computer support needs to include ways to solve problems using the various tools available (apps, computers, SaaS tools/cloud services,etc)
 
Well now that the full story has been explained its much better. I am all for joining forces. Do you guys a date or deadline is that you hope to have this done by?

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Computer Forums mobile app
 
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