TSML Closing 2005-04-28 - By John Gaubatz
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Dave,
Your point is well taken. However, like Heath pointed out, if something is
not advertised, how will anyone know it exists? Many companies host
newsgroups, some of the bigger companies are Autodesk, Jasc and Rhinoceros.
If these companies offered forums, I am sure the numbers of users of the
newsgroups would dwindle as well. As far as taking resources away from
development, Roman said he would close the TSML in favor of improving and
redesigning the forums for TS7. So the resources would be moved to the
forums, not development. I am not sure how much effort is involved in
maintaining the TSML, but I would guess the forums require more time and
effort to maintain. I also assume there is the cost of maintaining the TSML
server hardware and software.
I personally would like to see the forums be incorporated with the TSML in a
way that the above mentioned companies have set up. In the forums, there
would be links that allowed the viewer to view the uploaded images in a
separate window. This is probably wishful thinking, but take a look at
Rhinoceros support page. They have both the newsgroup and web newsgroup
linked together, so it is possible.
Regards,
John
-- --Original Message-- --
From: TSML [mailto:truespace@(protected)] On Behalf Of David P. Angelini
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 5:17 PM
To: truespace@(protected)
Subject: Re: [TSML] TSML Closing
Dave, Heath
I agree with you on a number of levels, but let us remember that it is the
community and NOT Caligari which make the TSML what it is....and basically,
the community is going away from the TSML.
Sorry....but here are the numbers that prove my point.
Using the search function of the TSML archive, I ran a couple of queries. I
queried for the total number of posts for the first 4 months of each year
(January through April) for each year in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005.
The totals are as follows:
2001 - 7,326 posts were made between 1/1/2001 and 4/30/2001
2002 - 4,023 posts were made between 1/1/2002 and 4/30/2002
2003 - 2,521 posts were made between 1/1/2003 and 4/30/2003
2004 - 800 posts were made between 1/1/2004 and 4/30/2004
2005 - 354 posts were made between 1/1/2005 and 4/28/2005
And if you look at the last month (April, 2005), there were only 37 posts
made to the TSML of which 19 had "Test" as the subject and 13 were related
to the TSML closing. Only 5 were actually related to anything in support of
using tS! Now compare that to the 1,142 posts made in April of 2001 !!!
So accounting for seasonality, school, work, whatever....the fact remains
that the average number of posts drops by a factor of 2 (or cut in half)
each year. Basically, people are just not using it and the level of support
it provides to the tS community is only a shadow of what it once was. We
can all get nostalgic about the glory days of the TSML (tSx announcements,
flame wars, great WIPs from Terry Halliday, Opie Juan, Andrew Moffit, Dr.
Wall, etc.) but that community is just not there anymore. There is very
little to no plugin development going on anymore and a lot of the old timers
(self included) who relied on the TSML in those days have moved on.
We must face facts about the TSML as they are and not what we want them to
be. Even if Caligari were to keep the service going (taking resources away
from much needed development by the way), you are still not going to get the
same amount of benefit it once provided for the simple reason that the
number of people who use it keeps declining year after year.
Sorry...but it is what it is.
Thanks
Dave Angelini
> So, to me it's all about the amount of time it takes me to stay abreast
> of tS/community. This list has been dead for longer than what could
> reasonably be explained by "the holidays", or "school finals", or
> whatever... The bottom line seems to be that a lot of the elite tS
> userbase has gone or shifted. No one pushes the TSML anymore, in fact,
> if you were to do a poll of tS forum users, how many would even know
> that this list exists (even though it's listed on the navigation bar)?
>
> Cheers,
> Heath
>
> (Long live the TSML)
>
>
> Dave Gray wrote:
>
> >As a lurker of note, I still read every e-mail I get from the TSML and
> >hardly ever visit the forums.
> >
> >TSML has been with me ever since I bought tS 4.3 and I would also
> >honestly
> >be sorry to see it close down.
> >
> >Forums I would imagine do have their place but the same thing has
> >happened
> >to me as it did to Omar on a different forum. Disappointing to say the
> >least.
> >
> >A lot of the "posters" are not to be seen anymore (example Phil Emery)
> >but I
> >guess they may have moved on to the forum (or other software packages).
> >
> >My vote would be to keep TSML going.
> >
> >Cheers!
> >Dave
> >
>
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