Original DPR has migrated to XenForo

Not the only one, Stan :-)

This forum acts as a good example of the difficulties that are being experienced over on DPR. Lightly used threads are perfectly ok to navigate. But if there are pages and and pages of replies, especially if there are sub threads going on it becomes a nightmare. How do I find my post in a little sub thread half way through a 20 page thread when I return to it a couple of days later? How do I know if someone replied to my last post without doomscrolling for hours? It becomes a real struggle and I would need to be highly motivated to press on.

I find it baffling that DPR management didn't figure this out when they went looking for a platform. I also find it baffling that they pretended to consult the readership about new forums, and when loads of people complained about the loss of threaded view, they just said "Ah, yes, we understand this is important to some of you. Something we need to consider...except we can't because we opened this "consultation" after we had done most of the work and we are committed now. Tough."

I just noticed that Thom Hogan has an article about DPR on his site. Makes for painful reading to DPR management, I would think - if they care.

I'm really glad that DPR was rescued, it is an iconic site in the digital photography field but I feel that as time passes, the site will seem less and less important partly because of the direction they are headed.

I totally agree with Hogans article.

Yes, he's got some good points. In addition to the problem the new flat system poses for any multi-layered in-depth discussion (like some people on the C&C thread here are missing as well, compared to the earlier days at dpreview...) it's also the amount of users and stuff being posted (even if a discussion isn't particularly complex to follow) which makes the new system vastly inferior. You need to do A LOT of quoting, in order to make sure everyone understands what you're responding to and so threads are going to get incredibly long and cumbersome to look through.

The latter problem is likely going to sort itself out in some places (by fed-up people leaving or posting less), the former will perhaps take a while, depending on the patience of the people mainly responsible for any in-depth discussion (their number is relatively small to begin with). In some subs it might be possible to just create a lot more single threads for diverging conversations (even though in this case you'd have to make sure people understand where and how the conversation started, to make sure they know enough to follow it...), but in any busy place this is going to be nearly impossible and also a hassle for the moderators.

I don't want to claim there were bad intentions behind all of it, but lot of stuff was either not considered before the transition or (if users mentioned these things) willfully ignored. I'm kinda speechless about some stuff...

I found it quite weird that they would make the decision and then ask for comments later.
I took their comments about needing to move onto some newer platform in good faith but I am wondering now.
I am seeing two possibilities:
One, they have key people in decision making who are younger and of the "who cares about established norms - we know better" variety.
Or two, if you look at Gear Patrol and their website they are not a company that necessarily wants a lot of debate. I imagine their client base is much more cashed up younger crew who are influenced by glossy pictures and articles designed to make people buy. I am really starting to wonder if they specifically want to steer the forums in the direction of ooh aahing consumerists and are possibly even happy to see the established camera / photography knowledge and discussion disappear.

Hi,

My apologies. There are at least two of us DPR MF forum members left here. :)

They had already made their move. The consultation of the forum community was just a smoke screen. "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". The gist I came away with is they were surprised by the number of folks who used Threaded View.

However, they figure that count still isn't enough to matter when it comes to their main purpose. Which is to review gear and have folks follow links to the buy that gear. I strongly suspect they do not see the forums as being a part of that. Especially when the chatter is to buy from some other source than what they link to. That is taking money out of their pockets.

Their real reason for the change is they no longer want to pay for someone to maintain the original forum code. They wish to spend the least they can, so they went elsewhere. And if that proves to still cost too much, they will kill the forums entirely. This is just business for Gear Patrol.

Ah, well. I am down to following only four forums. No more following stuff I don't happen to own just keeping up with what is going on. The forums which cover what I do have are all fairly slow traffic ones, so wading thru a sea of posts full of chatter I am not interested in to find a few which I am (interested in) isn't all that bad.

Oh, and I won't be reading their reviews now any more than I did then. I used the various forums to keep up with stuff, not their long winded reviews. I will go back to getting industry news from my friends at the local cameras shop once a month like I used to.

Stan

Couldn't find it - anyone got a link please?

About half way through this newsletter piece bythom.com/newsviews/weekly-digest-for-november.html

Thank you, David.

including one of the inventors of CMOS image sensors (he still posts in one forum [science and tech], but much more rarely).

Probably a reference to Eric Fossum ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Fossum

I think it was because all the other forums in their stable use this forum software. I think it was a done deal, and the consultation was just to manipulate users of the site before the switch. It was a decision decided outside of DPR.

It is pretty uninviting now.

Hi,

I was able to find Thom's article ok. Yep. He has it pretty much nailed.

Also, Yep. The choice was made by GP and not DPR. It fits what else they do. Ah, well. I had already written it off when it was shutting down. So then we had a reprieve for a while. Now I have simply pared it all down to fit only what I happen to have. Honestly, all this gear has matured to the point where the technology behind it really no longer needs any discussion. And I have a zero feedback path to R&D of anything like I did when I worked with Kodak somewhat (as IBM) and, later on, for the Sony Ericsson joint venture. I honestly haven't had such since 2009 when Sony fired the Ericsson half.

So, I shall rethink what it is I do from Professional Development Engineer to Amateur Photographer as I always had my signature for the past 25 years.

Say, was there a way to have a signature programmed here? I would like to add mine here.

It came about because the early discussion of Kodak, Nikon and Canon DSLRs took place in the Pro Talk Forum. As in it was for Pro equipment as much as for actually working as a Pro shooter. And, I wanted to be clear on what part or the meaning of Professional I was talking about. Later, we made new forums for the brands and types and much time was spent moving threads out of the Pro.Talk forum. But the signature remained.

Stan

I think the reason is that Xenforo is a totally managed solution. The Xenforo staff does all the "technical" stuff and DPR staff doesn't need to touch the backend. Hardly the frontend either. They probably don't have access to more than a web interface where they can make minor changes.

I assume the old forum software was patched so many times it it was unwieldy. I don't know what language it's written in, but making old, ancient even, scripts work nicely with updated interpreters on the server is no easy task. I imagine they would have needed to hire one or two programmers up to the job.Easier and likely cheaper to pay Xenforo. Rumor has it the guy that previously handled the forum quit recently. Hence the situation needed an urgent solution.

I think it's as simple as that. They didn't want to deal with the forum so they "outsourced" it.

I don't remember if I already said this here or if it was at dpr. Sorry if I repeat myself. But I think the worst thing is that they destroyed old threads. Longer threads are no longer readable, not even if you really try. Often there is no reference to the post people answered to and the individual subject lines are gone. It was common to change the subject line when a thread forked. I wish they had just archived the old forum. Then it would still be readable and useful. Because there are decades of information there that can still be useful and valuable. But it's all turned into mush now.

Yes, exactly! I created a thread there about this, specifically for the Adapted Lens Sub, where the main information (the lens used) was quite commonly only mentioned in the post-headlines... it's all gone. Information about hundreds of different old lenses and you can't even look up what the sample images were taken with. It's quite crazy. The community manager responded and said he'd ask around, if they kept the post titles somewhere and if it would be possible to restore them. He seems like a nice and helpful guy. But if I don't misremember anything he's completely new to the whole thing and so he probably doesn't know how and why the old way the forum worked was essential to its unique position.

So yes, I agree... in its current form the forum is almost completely useless as an archive and that's a real tragedy. There's a reason why many forums just keep an old version as an archive at some point. It's not an elegant solution, but it seems to work for the most part. The community can reference stuff from the old forum and bring part of it over and update it where possible and/or necessary. But I've never seen anyone just throw away decades of unique information like that. The more I think about it, the crazier it seems...

I and at least one other person also created threads asking for that in the subforum about the move over there. But that forum was only them playing to the galleries. Everything was already decided. Easiest way out, that what I think it's all about.

Maybe archive.org could have been interested too. They were when we thought the site was closing down.

It's a shame. A big shame.

I'm afraid to even read anything or reply on the current DPR forums, because it is marking posts as "read" which have not been exposed at all, because you exposed something past them. That's better than DPR's old forum flat view, which marked the rest of the page as read even if you only exposed the first post, but that is still not as good as DPRevived flat view where posts seem to be marked "read" only if you expose them. These forums can err, but usually in a non-destructive manner, when "the next unread" is sometimes something you've already read, which is superior to never reading a post at all because it was falsely marked "read".

When I open a thread there, I can't see where or how posts are marked as "read". Anyone?