Original Bottlehead Forum Archive

[Doc B.]

Here is a link to the old forum. It is now read only. If you wish to post please read the rules for this forum, register, and post on this new forum -

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/bottlehead/bbs.html

[Doc B.]

Eileen and I have decided to let the old forum go, as we don't feel that there has been any discussion of material that might be covered on the old forum that hasn't been very comprehensively addressed by the current Bottlehead brain trust on this new forum in the past few months. I'm sure some folks will want to whine about this. If you want to pay for the old forum in order to keep it live let me know and I can give you the account # so you can take over the monthly automatic deposit to AAs bank account. Otherwise, be forewarned that complaints will pretty much be ignored by the management.

[JC]

Looks like it hasn't been available for most of the day, again, anyway.  I'm still rather baffled that you couldn't acquire the contents for a nominal fee, since you paid for it all these years, what do I know?

As sad as this may be, I tend to agree with you and Eileen: The information seems to be flowing freely here, and I don't recall many references to something in the archive.

Too bad there isn't an electronic equivalent to a mortgage-burning!

[Grainger49]

Doc, what is the shut down date?  Those posts that might be of use to me I'm going to transfer to a word document.

[Len]

I'm sure some folks will want to whine about this. If you want to pay for the old forum in order to keep it live let me know and I can give you the account # so you can take over the monthly automatic deposit to AAs bank account. Otherwise, be forewarned that complaints will pretty much be ignored by the management.

Well, so much for a friendly forum!

That is the most arrogant post I have read in a long time, completely dismissive and ungrateful to the customer base that made you successful. You didn't even have the gumption to offer a group to continue the forum. Instead you turn it into a choice for one person to take it over.

Just the fact that "you" decided that it isn't needed shows you don't care that many customers feel just the opposite. But the tone is unbelievable. I can't believe I purchased so many products from a company run by such a pompous individual.

How does one remove oneself from the forum database?

[Grainger49]

IIRC, back when the discussion of shutting down the old forum started there were posters who volunteered to pay for its continuation.

[Len]

IIRC, back when the discussion of shutting down the old forum started there were posters who volunteered to pay for its continuation.

Yes, but it seems that Dan did not want to pursue that plan's administration (or delegation of the administration) for the sake of his customers who felt that the support agreement (forum and its archives) should not be unilaterally severable by him alone.

The main reason I hung around here was that I was waiting for the DAC. But it seems that Dan is only interested in satisfying customers who are buying NOW. I don't trust that support will be around when I need it if I buy that DAC.

I already had a bad support experience with my Paraglow II's. This attitude shows me that I would just be asking for a repeat if I purchased that DAC. No thanks.

FWIW, I think Dan was a prince in years gone by. I guess success went to his head.

[Doc B.]

Len, I'm sorry that you took this so personally. When we started this new forum I suggested that folks mine the old forum for nuggets of info so we don't all have to continue to suffer through it's terrible search engine. But we have not seen anyone post something from the old forum over here in some time. Not that they could lately, as I seem to be spending money on an old forum that has seldom been functional the past week anyway.

On the other hand  I do see quite a few posts here about legacy products that indicate the desire to have "live" tech support here rather than having to dig in the old forum archive for answers. And that support is clearly available here, from folks like you, PJ, Grainger and others who have been working hard to field all those questions about 15 year old third hand preamps and such. I think that it is important to remember that the real knowledge base is here with the community and not necessarily in an old archive.

Rod did not offer to sell the database to me. When I asked about keeping it up as read only for a reduced rate he said no, I would continue to pay the same rate I have paid for the past ten years. Yes, some folks suggested the community chipping in to pay for the forum, but that didn't seem to develop into any plan. If I am wrong and there is some sort of plan developing, someone please contact me and let me know that they wish to administer that plan.

I apologize if my wording turned you off. If that one post has negated anything positive I have done for you, perhaps we were both having a bad day yesterday. 

[Len]

Thank you. I'll stop throwing things.

Yes, I did take it personally as a forum member and it was due to the wording. To have it implied that a forum member who complains that he is losing something valuable is a whiner is not respectful. To say complaints will be ignored by the management is heavy handed. I do believe that. I did not take it personally as an individual, since nobody ever called me a whiner that I can remember.

The end of the old archives will not be a life changing event for me. This is just a hobby, there's not much there that I need, and one needs an advanced research degree to find stuff there. Had the post been worded differently ("sorry if it causes you inconvenience, but keeping that thing going is just too darn frustrating" or something like that), I probably would have just poured myself a Don Julio and taken it as another sign that the Pleistocene era is about to end. I think it will put an extra load on your support staff, since people like me won't be able to point others to old posts, but I'm sure you factored that into your decision. (BTW, I appreciate the flattery implied by your mentioning me in the same phrase as PJ, but I am fully aware that I don't have a clue when it comes to this hobby. It made me laugh.)

Sorry I yelled. Since I left my sales career almost twenty years ago, I discovered the luxury of what was referred to in the Lower East Side of NYC as living off the top of your head. I say what I mean at the time. It has its consequences, but I haven't had an ulcer since.

[Grainger49]

Doc,

Is it gone or will it be there till the end of the month?

[JC]

Just noticed that AA is back up.  Anyone that wants anything off the old Bottlehead Forum, I'm thinking I wouldn't waste any time getting it!



http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/bottlehead/bbs.html

[Wardsweb]

If I may, I would just like to say Kudos to Len and Doc for taking a thread that could have easily gone bad and keeping it in perspective. I run several boards and it is so easy to put up a defensive wall and not keep an open mind, so real communication can't take place. Being able to speak your mind and be given the chance to hear both sides through is a breath of fresh air. Thank you gentlemen for raising the bar and remembering we all have our own take on things.

With better information, come better decisions

[Steve Geiger]

Quite eloquently and extremely well worded Wardsweb!!

I sure do miss the lone Star Bottleheads!

Much Aloha to you and all the Bottleheads in the world!!!

Steve
 

[Rod M]

Dan,

I just want to clear up what seems to be a miscommunication. Keeping the old archive online is not a problem. What seems clear to me is that email can be a lousy way to discuss business.

If you want a copy of the forum, I don't care in the least. As I recall the dialogoue, the issue was that importing the old forum into your new database structure would not be trivial and would have other issues because it would lack the user database which also would be a lot of work to try to import and presents other ethical issues on giving user data to a third party. Even if you just put up the html archive, the search function wouldn't be there unless all the data got imported into your current system.

Given all of that, my impression was that you didn't really have the technical resources to take on a project like that and it was just simpler and eaiser to just leave the old archive on AA. I'm not going to just delete the old forum as quite frankly, that takes a fair amount of time, so I hope 20 guys won't over load our servers madly downloading the whole forum. And just to reinterate, I have no problem providing you a copy of it, Dan. I thought you didn't want it.

[Doc B.]

Hey Rod,

Thanks for posting. Sorry if it seems like a miscommunication. You are right that I personally don't have the will power, technical chops or the time to import the old database into the new one, or even to copy the database and archive it on our server. Cripes, I could barely get our new shopping cart running and I have been totally outsmarted by a Linux server I am trying to get working. When you and I were talking about it last year I hadn't really decided what to do about the old forum and thus I simply asked that it be made read only for a while while I sorted that out. When I said you hadn't offered to sell it I should have pointed out that I hadn't asked to buy it either, I just asked about a monthly rate to maintain it. I do appreciate your generous offer to let it be copied!

I've spent time going back through it myself and my sense was that the ten years of data really holds an awful lot of repetition in terms of the subject matter that might be better cherry picked by the community than copied wholesale. As usually happens there was some activity in this direction that only seemed to have momentum for the first month or so after the new forum was launched. And as I suspected would happen, the same questions are just being asked again over here - witness the new "Foreplay I hum" thread. I don't imagine there are more than ten zillion inquiries about that on the old forum and yet we have a nice new clean thread here that deals with it without anyone seeming to complain about reiterating the old topic.

The concept of searching a forum is a great one for some fraction of the population (I use it myself on lots of technical forums), but my impression is that a larger fraction come to any forum and simply ask for help rather than searching. And my dear old bud, you have done an amazing job of operating AA for years, but the sheer mass of the AA database is going to make any search engine quaver under the load, I'm sure.

I had no intention of asking you to keep the archive up for free, I feel you deserve income for maintaining the beast. And of course at the same time I had to consider the expense of maintaining two forums. I think it was after we discussed keeping the forum read only that the community offered the notion of copying the database. That hadn't really crossed my mind. However if there is someone with the grit to want to take that on and figure out a way to incorporate a search function I am open to discussing it, as well as the alternative idea of members of the community who want the old forum to stay up on AA chipping in for its maintenance.

While we sort this out it might be worth taking one more shot at doing what Grainger and others have been doing, digging up the nuggets from the old forum and posting them here. Maybe the best bet is for me to now open the floor to the community to see what the general sense of involvement is.