I really hope this decision succeeds as LM intends, but more importantly, I hope it succeeds for the active developers who have invested so much time and energy into your product and community.
I would be surprised if this move does not lose a lot of the innovation and community focused developers, as it was difficult enough in the old forums. As much as this system may solve even a lot of those old concerns (ex. not seeing subscribed threads, no clear way to get a hold of LM attention, no private messaging, etc.) LM does not show a solution to what we have invested in the old forum and how to transition in a reasonable fashion. I believe LM is making moves to address developers with existing Apps, or known to be in mature stages of a final App, yet the rest of the developers, possibly the most important to mature the product, do not seem to be included in the LM's values. My emotions wish to rant like crazy and shake somebody at LM, but I am going to try to make a few simple requests:
Could you PLEASE not "wipe out" all the information trails of the innovation and community focused developers stored in the old forums? At least until you provide some other reasonable means for us to archive our participation there!!!!
Could you quickly, or grant one of us access to update the developer profiles so us developers can see "ALL" the threads we subscribed to, allowing us to back them up, or give us a quick backup tool to download those threads?!?!?
Could you please employ an support/issue/bug tracking system????????? ... so there would be some clarity on status of problems, concerns, and requests. Currently, there is no clarity between developers and LM about what has been heard, and what is going on as a result if one has been heard.
Do you really expect us to run through all our participated threads and copy the whole thread to this system? What value is in copying one post? There has never been a way to see the threads we have subscribed to, so the amount of work to find threads that we were interested in and thought had good information and ideas is already very difficult, but now you simply wish to remove it all so we can never find it? Do you really think it is fair to wipe out all this information just by telling us to find posts of interest and copy them over?
I really respect LM's initiative to get units out to the developers, but in every other way there seems to be little relation to a healthy developer community.
That said, I am very pleased that moving forward we have a discussion technology that has a proper set of features, unlike the old forum! Thanks!