OPEN LETTER TO HCEG Administration

[knotty]

They want kids on their forum. Even though most forums would love to see the back of them.

[peskypesky]

 

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knotty wrote:

 

They want kids on their forum. Even though most forums would love to see the back of them.

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ahh, i see. well, hello, childrenz!!!

[Elias Graves]

Well it only comes out your ass after you eat them.

It's a one time deal.

[Tidal Rhythm]

Instead of worrying about attracting newer and younger forumites, it might be good to start listening to the feedback of those who made this place a successful forum in the first place. The number one mistake any business can make is to completely disregard customer feedback and make changes in a management bubble. (Sadly, that is apparently what has been going on here now for quite some time.) If anyone in management really wants to know what would make these boards more appealing, it really isn't difficult to find out. Just tack up some polls or even a few open-ended question posts and then look for general trends in the responses.

[Bosrocker511]

It pisses me off that I can't access my old account here.... At all

[knotty]

So we are looking for polite, non argumentative, non swearing, literate 13 year old electric guitar players who's school allows access to forums?

I don't think HCEG will attract both of them.

[Dougy]

I used to be able to say ****, now the cunts won't let me.

 

{censored}E, ARSE and BOLLOCKS still seems to be OK though.

 

Seriously though, back in 2006/2007 I wasted so many many many hours at work posting on HC, whether that was serious discussions about guitars and modding in HCEG, or random bollocks over in Guitar Jam. Unfortunately, the people who made the place so interesting just aren't here any more.

I don't know what will bring them back, but I really don't think more corporate advertising and telling (mostly) adults not to **** swear is going to **** bastard help. The **** swearing filter isn't even pissing consistent! {censored}E NOB FANNYFLAPS PISSARSE{censored}CUNTDICKDICKDICKWILLYPOOPOO.

Daft Cunts.

 

 

PS: the new smilies are {censored}e as well.  

[Tidal Rhythm]

An alternative for anyone who misses the old place:

 http://www.guitarampboard.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3

[irishstu]

I am so, so sad about what has happened to this place.

 

Great thread, BTW. Thanks for starting it, DA.

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

This thread needs more b

[Ratae Corieltauvorum]

......and Dendy sounds like the kind of **** I may wank off I his chilli if he ever came round to my place and then I'd kick him down to driveway

[Ancient Mariner]

A little late to the party, but I'd like to contribute.

 

I first discovered HC in the late 90s, looking for tab online & finding OLGA. For various reasons my user ID got lost & I re-registered in 2004.

 

Like so many of the guys have said, it's the people that have made this forum the great place it was and brought the traffic in that made it useful for advertising. I'm not sure if there's any way you can un-myspace this site now - the one thing I will say is that the forum has been falling for several years with increasingly intrusive moderation, but all that's happened recently has really added fuel to the fire and fanned the flames.

 

I'd love to see the old forum back - the one that built a guitar for a poor Romanian girl, that had raffles for guys that had been made homeless and were out of work, that wept with parents who'd lost children and wives their husbands, that supported guys suffering with cancer. Many here have contributed hundred of hours, not just feeding their mutual admiration, but providing advice for other musicians who were actively buying tons of new gear from your bosses stores. Those of us that have tried to give back for using the site also have some ownership - sure it's not our servers or bandwidth, but without us there would never have been advertising revenue, few click-throughs, little of commercial value. We were the petrol that ran your car.

 

If you want the forum traffic back then you need to allow the forum to re-build, but it will be messy if it happens at all. If you would prefer to keep your servers idle and bandwidth costs down then keep right on this particular path.

[DaveAronow]

Vickie Valencourt showed me her boobies.

And I like dem too.

[buckethead99]

Well done to the OP. Will they listen?

[Skyforger]

What on God's green earth did I miss?

[ugameus]

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Skyforger wrote:

What on God's green earth did I miss?

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Click here: http://www.harmonycentral.com/t5/Dendy-Jarrett/Important-Announcement-About-Harmony-Central/ba-p/35464945

 

That on top of all the other bull {censored}e has pushed some over the edge.  I still find it funny that they are trying to get more young people and their site does not function properly on iOS.

[DaveAronow]

Yes and if you read that, he uses the phrase "worlds largest community of musicians" to refer to harmony central and the changes he is proposing for us as if it is currently a strong healthy thriving community, and then out of the other side of his mouth starts talking about trying to recruit children in school s, during school hours, to try to bring in the masses that will get the numbers back in, all while lecturing us and threatening to just sta rt arbitrarily deleting threads that he determines to "juvenile", too juvenile for whom, I can't figure out unless he means too juvenile for all the masses of thirteen year olds that will be signing up any moment now amd will be saving the forum, because we know they won't be acting like juvies themselves, with whatever cockamamie logic he used to deduce that little gem of wisdom.

 

Fu-ck me.

 

We are doomed.

[DaveAronow]

No. Nobody has responded.

[Lonnie99]

Like many others I initially came here for the old gear reviews, then found the forums and proceeded to waste countless hours posting generally useless stuff. I did spend a lot of time here but since the site doesn't support my iPad I've actually been playing the rack full of guitars over there by the wall. Yeah, those ones right there. Thanks.

[Hoddy]

Frets...can you sticky this thread?

[Elias Graves]

Tell your kids to join up and you can retire to the old rocker's home, ya geezer.

[GuitarNoobie]

this place blows now !!!

 

i don't come here often, but there was a time when this place was the BOMB !!!  Best music site on the web hands down.

 

**** guitar center, **** musicians friend and **** harmony central.  they've lost me, all of them !!! 

 

payback is a motherf ucker !!!

[Anderton]

 

Ratae Coritanorum wrote:

 

 

the so called uber mods like Chappell and Anderton etc have never done anything of any significance to help the regulars on here

 

Well, it may not be my place to comment as the former Editor in Chief, but I guess you haven't figured out yet that I didn't own this forum. And neither do Phil, Jon, Dendy, or Chris.

I was in a hotel room in Germany sending emails begging them not to switch over to HC 2.0. I was ignored.

I told them we shouldn't launch ANYTHING until the mods had a chance to check it out and changes had been made so they would dig it. I said that with both 2.0 and 3.0. It didn't happen.

I was left twisting in the wind after 2.0 because I'm not the kind of person to throw people under the bus. And again with 3.0. No one took the responsibility to point out that input from the editors and the mods had not been solicited, and any input that was given unilaterally had been ignored.

If it wasn't for me and Jon going to HQ and begging to return to vBulletin, the forums would still be running Jive. If they still existed.

If you'd actually read my forum posts, you'd know I've helped a lot of people in a lot of ways.

If it wasn't for me, Open Jam and the Political forum would have been killed years ago.

Before the switchover to Lithium, I was filing reports on an almost daily basis of problems with the forum (that never got fixed).

I personally restored a ton of user names when the switchover happened.

I defended the mods against lawsuits and bitching manufacturers.

And to top it all off, I had to deal with comments like yours that have no basis in fact. I could go on, but that's enough.

In interviews, I ALWAYS said it was the community that made HC what it was, not HC. The analogy I used was "you don't credit the wine glass for the wine it contains."

And to the people who said HC tried to fix something that wasn't broken, remember that the forum performance became progressively worse starting in September 2011 to the point where it became unusable.

People act like no one cares about the missing user reviews. They've been found. They're in a different format. They'll come back. Many already have. If anyone would like to volunteer their time for free fixing the code on hundreds of thousands of incompatible reviews, PM the mods. Otherwise, you'll just have to wait. But I can guarantee you that the current administration agrees completely with the community on the importance of those reviews. They don't want to see the user reviews die. The previous administration said it wasn't technically possible to restore the reviews. The people in charge now say "screw what's technically impossible, we'll make it happen." In a week? A month? A year?  I don't know, but they will, even if they have to hire an army of trained monkeys to re-enter the reviews by hand.

True facts: There's now a platform that doesn't crash, hang, or move at a snail's pace. The people in charge of many of the disastrous decisions that were made at launch are no longer with the company. The Poli forum, Guitar Jam, and Open Jam are still here. You can post anything you want, except you can't use the kind of language that most other forums are even stricter about.

I thought this was a great comment:

"I'd love to see the old forum back - the one that built a guitar for a poor Romanian girl, that had raffles for guys that had been made homeless and were out of work, that wept with parents who'd lost children and wives their husbands, that supported guys suffering with cancer."

Nothing prevents any of that. That's what the community does, it's not what HC does. If you choose not to build a guitar for a poor Romanian girl, or do raffles for homeless guys, or weep with parents who'd lost children, or support guys suffering with cancer...that's your choice, not the administration's. All the administration wants is for you not to call people mother-youknowwhat in the process. I can cope with that. If you can't, fine, I understand. But I suspect the majority of people will, over time, find being able to support guys with cancer a better use of their time than calling someone else language they'd never use to that person's face, and are using only because they can hide behind their anonymity.

Yes, I left HC largely because of many of the same frustrations voiced in this forum. I couldn't bear to see what was happening. But I've kept in touch with everyone and I know what's going on, and I'm still helping out where I can. And here's the deal.

Scott sold HC because if he hadn't sold HC, this discussion wouldn't be happening because HC wouldn't be here. EVERYONE INVOLVED IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF THIS SITE WANTS HC TO EXIST AND GROW. The question of what kind of community it will continue to have, or not have, will be answered in the future. But the question won't even be asked if HC ceases to exist, and it's a delicate balancing act between art and commerce (like pretty much everything else these days).

If you haven't noticed, there's a lot of cracking down going on with the internet, from a business standpoint (attempts to implement sales taxes), legal standpoint (lawsuits about bullying and privacy), government control standpoint (internet kill switches and government filtering) and yes, language standpoint (HC is not alone). The internet is simply not the wild west it was 15 years ago. Do I miss it? In some ways, yes. Am I a realist? Yes. HC alone cannot buck this trend, and it's only a matter of time before you won't be able to either, regardless of where you go. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the politicians who make the laws as they, not HC, determine the fate of the internet.

True, the previous management(s) made some seriously bone-headed moves, despite what were by and large good intentions (I'd make a few exceptions, but that's in the past). Those people aren't here any more, but the "wine glass" I alluded to earlier still is (even if it does have a chip or two), and it can be filled with wine or whine - that's up to the community. Yes, there are some loose ends with navigation, yes, all the user reviews aren't back yet, yes, there are incompatibility issues with iOS devices. And I could go on (and so could you). But a lot of the original problems have indeed been fixed (remember the stupid crowd background and unreadable forum lists?), and more fixes are in the works. The difference between today's HC and the one a year ago is that people want to fix the problems, not just ignore them because HC's a hassle.

Will HC return to exactly the way it was? No...it's true that you can't go home anymore. Will it become better than it was, or worse than it was? Really, that's up to the community and the administration working together. If not being able to use words other sites don't allow is a deal-breaker, okay. If it isn't, then keep posting about the things that you've always been posting about.

Ultimately, each post starts out blank. Now, whether you're happy with the way that post appears, or what you need to do to navigate to it, or whatever, well, at the moment "it is what it is" but I think the past couple months have shown that the administration is willing, and in some cases downright eager, to make the changes the community and the mods want. The only one so far that's not negotiable is cleaning up the language.

Anyone who has truly followed me on this site since 2005 knows that as far as I'm concerned, the community is everything. Ask Phil and he'll tell you the same thing. And Dendy knows that, too, and he's feeling his way around a daunting task - rebuilding the site from a technical/UI standpoint after it had been totally messed up long before he got here, while trying to make sure no one is excluded. He'll make mistakes, he'll have successes, he'll piss you off, and he'll get cheers as he makes fixes happen that we've all been desperate to see. He already has quite a few of those under his belt.

But ultimately, each forum post starts off blank.

(And yes, I know some people will figure out a way to interpret this overly long post in such a way that they can give me crap. But some will think "hmmm, maybe he has a point." And I suspect they're the ones who built a guitar for a poor Romanian girl, had raffles for guys that had been made homeless and were out of work, wept with parents who'd lost children and wives their husbands, and supported guys suffering with cancer. They are the soul of Harmony Central...and the posts are still blank when you click on "Reply.")

 

[mistersully]

for the record, i've found phil to be a very helpful guy. i've asked many questions over a period of time in his recording forum, and he's always taken the time to offer advice.... eg. i remember when i was first looking to get acoustic absorption in my home studio, he went into great detail regarding the specifics of what i needed to look for in the materials that i needed.... quite a few decisions i've made regarding my studio have been influenced by his input, and i appreciate it

 

i've made reference on quite a few occasions to "the incompetence of the people that run this place"... this was simply based on how things have gone down over the last few years... it was obvious that poor decisions have been made, and i've been frustrated to see so many cool people leave because of it

i'm not surprised to hear that the poor judgement was coming from higher up than craig

 

i said it in another thread though... to me, the single biggest problem with this place now is that people keep leaving... it kills what was great about the forum, and as more people leave, people get frustrated with the lack of traffic and leave too

 

i'm determined to hang... if not being able to say **** on a forum is my biggest problem, i'm doing ok

i hope they get the ios stuff sorted asap though... it's ridiculous in this day and age

and i think dendy needs to work on his delivery... he needs to realise the people that are still here are the ones that have stuck by the place... we don't need to be spoken to like children..... if one person is being a dick, then deal with that person (that's the nature of forums), don't make sweeping generalisations, as it just alienates everybody

[kayd_mon]

@anderton

 

Sincerely, thank you for that post. It's good to know that people "higher up" do care.