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.
It was not public knowledge (here on CF, at least) that the communities were going to merge.
This merger has been being talked about for a (very) long time, to put things into perspective a couple of (us mods) said in October last year that we were finding ourselves less and less active, that there was fewer reasons to login and that the forum was dying and that the forum needed new content, new features, new sections, new reasons to login, that would hopefully pull in new members. (that's 8 months ago that discussions first started.)
I've probably said this before and I'll say it again. I don't know if I speak for everyone but I've had no knowledge of this up until now. I don't think its a job for a member who is new to our community to say we two community's are merging, Its for the Owners/Admins here to come out and say.
but I can't help but feel that our own community should have been made aware.
It has come out in the worst possible way, I don't think that there was any conspiricy to keep members in the dark on purpose, but there was very little point in telling people what would happen, especially whilst there were no time lines many months before anything would be happening whilst waiting for search engines to index forum content on an as yet unrelated site. -it would just make people impatient.
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.
That's almost exactly what was said in the mods section. - nearly word for word!
We might all be a bit nervous about this, but there must be a good reason.
Long story short, - as Andy said our community is dying, people don't really care for the sort of content that we offer as much as they once did.
Most of the (really) old members here will remember the days when this forum was huge, the hardware/software sections got huge amounts of posts, some days it was so busy, there would be so many threads created that some threads could be knocked unanswered onto page 2 after only an hour or so. - today the hardware forum has posts from December still on page 1.
It is not like that, nor has it been like that for a very long time.
Yes, it does sound dramatic, but "we" as a community, are dying.
I'd be happy to provide further details upon request, but I'm a full-stack developer.
One thing I notice there is that there seems to be a lot more "professional" IT people, much more than there is here. - and there are a few guys who seem to actively develop stuff over there.
