Hi folks—
For those of you who may not have stopped to read these messages from PTC/USER, or who may not have caught the implications, here is the summary:
PTC/USER is shutting down the server that runs the Adepters email list.
Their idea is to migrate all the PTC/USER discussion groups to the PTC-hosted PTC communities system. For those who haven’t used that system before, it’s kind of like Facebook for PTC users. They do have a dedicated area there for discussions of Arbortext related questions and issues, and that area does see a decent amount of traffic.
Since PTC/USER are shutting down their system, keeping Adepters running as-is will very soon not be an option. Going forward, some of us have talked about a few alternatives:
1) Follow PTC/USER’s suggestion and migrate to the PTC Community Arbortext board for Arbortext related discussions. The upside to this is that we get to integrate our community with the Arbortext user community over there (which has some overlap, but also some other users who have never belonged to Adepters. The downside is that it doesn’t offer the familiar listserv interface for reading and replying to messages.
2) Migrate to LinkedIn discussion groups. If we want to maintain more independence from PTC, there is a LinkedIn group for Arbortext users. LinkedIn has pretty good infrastructure for discussions, though again it wouldn’t have quite the same feel as an email server like we’ve been using for Adepters.
3) Migrate to another email discussion group service. We’ve looked at a few options, including Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, and they would have a more similar flavor to the current system, but there are also some quirks about them (for example, you can’t create a Yahoo! Account without giving them a mobile number, and apparently some numbers like mine aren’t recognized so they won’t work).
From my perspective, the easiest approach is to go ahead and switch over to PTC Community. But I’m interested in what other people think, and I wanted to open up a discussion, in the hopes that we can come to something like a consensus in order to best preserve the sense of community and mutual support that has made Adepters such a wonderful virtual space for so many years.
I hope that wherever we end up, we’ll see most of you there as well!
--Clay
For those of you who may not have stopped to read these messages from PTC/USER, or who may not have caught the implications, here is the summary:
PTC/USER is shutting down the server that runs the Adepters email list.
Their idea is to migrate all the PTC/USER discussion groups to the PTC-hosted PTC communities system. For those who haven’t used that system before, it’s kind of like Facebook for PTC users. They do have a dedicated area there for discussions of Arbortext related questions and issues, and that area does see a decent amount of traffic.
Since PTC/USER are shutting down their system, keeping Adepters running as-is will very soon not be an option. Going forward, some of us have talked about a few alternatives:
1) Follow PTC/USER’s suggestion and migrate to the PTC Community Arbortext board for Arbortext related discussions. The upside to this is that we get to integrate our community with the Arbortext user community over there (which has some overlap, but also some other users who have never belonged to Adepters. The downside is that it doesn’t offer the familiar listserv interface for reading and replying to messages.
2) Migrate to LinkedIn discussion groups. If we want to maintain more independence from PTC, there is a LinkedIn group for Arbortext users. LinkedIn has pretty good infrastructure for discussions, though again it wouldn’t have quite the same feel as an email server like we’ve been using for Adepters.
3) Migrate to another email discussion group service. We’ve looked at a few options, including Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, and they would have a more similar flavor to the current system, but there are also some quirks about them (for example, you can’t create a Yahoo! Account without giving them a mobile number, and apparently some numbers like mine aren’t recognized so they won’t work).
From my perspective, the easiest approach is to go ahead and switch over to PTC Community. But I’m interested in what other people think, and I wanted to open up a discussion, in the hopes that we can come to something like a consensus in order to best preserve the sense of community and mutual support that has made Adepters such a wonderful virtual space for so many years.
I hope that wherever we end up, we’ll see most of you there as well!
--Clay