Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

Spring is a time of flowers, rain, tornadoes, and spring cleaning.  For me, the last item is quite often forgotten, but overall I do try to get a little more organized around this time of year.

One thing about organization-once you have a system in place, it’s hard to break away to start a new habit.  I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve set up a new database for managing my todo items (all in HanDBase of course!), but after a few months I find myself returning to my tried and true methods.

Many users will say our use of Yahoo groups as our forums is an example of our old habits.  We have actually had a Yahoo group before they were called Yahoo groups- they were called eGroups.  And that company was bought out many years ago and merged into Yahoo’s offering.  At the time we set it up because they were all the rage, and offered things that a forum based site couldn’t.  They also didn’t tax the site you were running, which was a major concern as our site was almost always running slow at the time.

Fast forward 9 or so years, and we’re probably one of the few Yahoo groups that are still active, with over 6000 members, and a good number joining and leaving every day.  But many customers have asked us why it’s so difficult for them to join the Yahoo group, and why we don’t just get a forum on our site.

Well that time has finally come- we have set up a new forum based on PHPBB3 for providing customer support and discussion of topics:

http://www.ddhsoftware.com/forum

I hope that the many users on our Yahoo group follow us over to this as we phase out the use of a Yahoo group.  It’s served us well in the past, but time to take advantage of the advantages a forum system provides, like camping on to subjects of interest, dividing posts into sub-forums based on platform, etc.

That last part is the one that gives me a teary eye.  In almost every other area of the internet, you won’t find a group of people using different devices and platforms all engaging on a similar topic without the ‘religious’ flame wars and such over which is better.  HanDBase has been common ground for Mac and Windows users, and common ground for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone and more.  And I can’t recall one conversation that became a ‘mine is better than yours’ type of conversation.  The fact that we’ve made it so long without one is a testament to our customer base- these are intelligent people proving that there is still hope for the human race on the interwebs!

I hope you all enjoy using the new forums, and don’t hesitate to let me know if there are any issues or suggestions.