The Mac Lounge forum: Don't allow such changes to come to versiontracker.com

Hello, just a note to say that I was less than impressed with the changes that happened at MacFixIt.com and the forums. If versiontracker is merged into download.com or something of the sort, I will be furious and I will be down one more of my daily web sites that I visit.

So far, as I expected, I am less than impressed on what has happened with the versiontracker network of sites since the purchase. I wish you were purchased by someone that actually cares about these sites and not just wanting to catch the Mac bandwagon.

Sigh anyhow, MacFixIt is now off my list. As an Information Architect, I am totally put off by how much of a downgrade this move has been. Resources like this should be all about Findability, Usability, Accessibility and most importantly, Consistency.

When you have a site that is as established as MacFixIt, you want to provide pathways and a schema to make a site as familiar to your user base as possible. There was a reason why users preferred MacFixIt over the cnet Mac Forums. MacFixIt had something that the Mac Forums didn't. To suddenly drop the forums and expect your user base to accept what is considered an inferior site in organization, structure and design only serves to compound the other thing that cnet Mac Forums is missing that being the users and MacFixIt Forum's most powerful resource, the long-time contributors.

What should have happened was a slow migration with the active participation and feedback of your user base to make this into what was great about MacFixIt forums and to bring familiarity to those that used it regularly. Not an NDA and a sudden announcement.

Sad to say, but I hope versiontracker network got a good price for its sites, because this move really has really killed, fragmented and alienated the once united MacFixIt forum community with its resource power. Something that I don't thing will ever be able to be achieved again with this site because of how the transition was handled, a lot of people have been upset by this and from what I see their not migrating to here. Rather many feel lost and without their familiar home and as you are sure aware of now there has been a refugee camp set-up elsewhere on the Net.

Don't let it happen to the Versiontracker.com site. If anything, download.com should be dumped in favour of it.

Sincerely and with regards and luck to your community rebuilding,
Andrew.