[OT] So...the Forum about the Forum is gone

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

So even if the German part is not Garmin, interestingly the German group decided to keep their own older forums and classified them as legacy at the very same time when Garmin deleted everything which could have become as part of legacy.

Let me try again…

It seems the forums are a side project of a group in Germany.

It seems that Garmin is letting that group “do whatever they want” as long as it’s not a problem for the parent company.

It seems likely the choice is between what we have and no forums at all.

There was a post saying the old (English) content would be moved over. It wasn’t. We can only speculate about the reason.

dpawlyk said:

flowstate said:

To me all it means is that Garmin noticed there are problems.

I think Garmin the company has limited interest/involvement in the forums.

It looks like they are a side-project of a group in Germany.

EDIT: this quote is not from the answer to me, but from the prvious one which was the answer to flowstate, so I enlargened the quote not to mislead you, because you used  "are a side project of a group in Germany" twice, once in the answer  to flowstate, and once in the answer to me.

Aha, I guess, only now I understood what you had meant in your first reaction wit "German group". 

You meant that not just the German forum is run by German Group (and is semi official), but you meant that everything here is a side-project of s group in Germany???

Just because flowstate had not referred to the German forum, only me, before you posted twice about "German group".

So it is why I got confused.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

You meant that not just the German forum is run by German Group (and is semi official), but you meant that everything here is a side-project of s group in Germany???

Yes.

It seems the forums (overall) are a side project of a group in Germany.

It seems that Garmin is letting that group “do whatever they want” as long as it’s not a problem for the parent company.

It seems likely the choice is between what we have and no forums at all.

There was a post saying the old (English) content would be moved over. It wasn’t. We can only speculate about the reason.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

Just because flowstate had not referred to the German forum, only me, before you posted twice about "German group".

I think most people barely notice the existence of the German forums. It’s a bit odd that they are the only non-English language supported. 

dpawlyk said:

There was a post saying the old (English) content would be moved over. It wasn’t. We can only speculate about the reason.

Yes, I remember that.

The only thing which got me confused was the querstion what the German group is managing, only the German forum, or everything here.

EDIT

If everything here has nothing to do with the parent company and its support, it is quite funny that how many usernames starting with "Garmin" pop here. This German group provides too many usernames (even if behind there si just few people) in order to easily accept that they are just let's say a subsidiary of Garmin, or an outsources activity.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

The only thing which got me confused was the querstion what the German group is managing, only the German forum, or everything here.

It shouldn’t have been confusing.

If I was only talking about the German forums, I would have said “German forums”.

Given that the subject here was about the forums overall, you should have figured “forums” was referencing the forums overall too.

Tisztul_A_Visztula said:

If everything here has nothing to do with the parent company and its support, it is quite funny that how many usernames starting with "Garmin" pop here.

I didn’t say they “had nothing to do with the parent company”.

Clearly, that’s not the case.

It’s on Garmin’s domain (which means Garmin “owns” them). You sign into them using your Garmin account. Garmin makes official announcements on them.

I suspect the forums are a side project of German Garmin employees.

A few Garmin employees (those with “Garmin” in their names) post here “officially”, once in a while. But that involvement is spotty/unreliable. As far as I can tell, their involvement (as little as it is) has increased “recently”.

The Garmin employees posting here are not (necessarily) the people managing the forums.

=============

The BaseCamp sub-forums are actively moderated by SUSSAMB, who is not a Garmin employee. (No other sub-forums have clear moderators, as far as I know. Though, the forums are clearly being moderated.)

flowstate said:

(ironically, at the time, most companies seemed to feel that FB communities would serve the same purpose, but ofc FB is dead now too).

Using facebook for this would be terrible.

It would be a cheap and lazy option. And a big problem privacy-wise.

flowstate said:

Guess that means there's zero interest from Garmin in documenting and addressing forum issues.

There could be other reasons.

It’s another place to have to scan for spam and trash posts.

If a sub-forum isn’t really being used much, it might reduce maintenance effort to drop it.

dpawlyk said:

flowstate said:

(ironically, at the time, most companies seemed to feel that FB communities would serve the same purpose, but ofc FB is dead now too).

Using facebook for this would be terrible.

It would be a cheap and lazy option. And a big problem privacy-wise.

To be clear, I did not mean to suggest that I think FB is or was a good replacement for forums, or that it should be used to replace these forums. [****]

I only stated the reality that ~10-15 years ago, many forums for corporate sites were replaced with FB groups. And I stated the irony that FB is dead now (except for certain demographics and niches like FB marketplace), which means that those communities are dead too. 

Indeed, I think a major reason was to save money. One example is the runnersworld forums, which used to have a lot of interesting [*] threads from interesting [*] people that would last for months or years (which one of the ways way that forums are superior to reddit imo **).

[*] interesting to me anyway

[**] indeed a lot of elder millennials (and some slightly younger ppl) who post on reddit express that they miss forums, as forums fostered a very different kind of conversation than any of the modern replacements, like reddit (which is super old at this point), discord, etc. The other irony is that forums are being recreated in discord, but without some of the old advantages (like being publicly accessible and searchable ***)

[***] but even some formerly public forums have gone private, due to LLM scraping and spam

[****] In fact I stated multiple times that I think this forum should have been migrated to a modern platform like nodebb or discourse (similar to what's used in any of the other few remaining forums which weren't launched 20 years ago). Just before Garmin migrated to this platform (about 8 year ago), I *begged* them to migrate to nodebb or discourse, but they chose this terrible, outdated platform that even members of the Connect IQ team have publicly complained about.

[https://www.runnersworld.com/about/a20861844/forums-moved/]

The big problem with forums today is that even with the more user-friendly and mobile-friendly platforms (like nodebb), people under a certain age don't understand them at all and won't use them. (Ofc none of those people would use FB groups either, except maybe for some niche cases.)

dpawlyk said:

Let me try again…

It seems the forums are a side project of a group in Germany.

It seems that Garmin is letting that group “do whatever they want” as long as it’s not a problem for the parent company.

It seems likely the choice is between what we have and no forums at all.

There was a post saying the old (English) content would be moved over. It wasn’t. We can only speculate about the reason.

Very interesting. I had no idea.

Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if Garmin wasn't too interested on spending any money or time at all on the forums.

dpawlyk said:

flowstate said:

They lost a ton of content in the changeover, like images, code, attachments, and links.

They said the old content would be moved over. 

(I wasn’t too happy it wasn’t because I lost a lot of work. I don’t put as much work posting in the new forums because I don’t want more work wasted.)

They did say that the old content would be moved over, and technically, it was. But only the text content.

Unfortunately, images, code, attachments and links were lost.

One exacerbating factor with links is that - just like this iteration of the forums - any links whose text was the same as their URL would usually have the text shortened (e.g. "www.garmin.com/.../foo"), so that when links were replaced with their text in the changeover, the url was almost always lost.

And ofc all the forum topic links were changed, which means that even links to the forum from Garmin's own official dev blogs were broken.

It's just like how a bunch of FirstBeat content hosted on a certain domain has all been removed (for whatever reason), so that even links to that content from Garmin support topics have been broken.

It seems to me that Garmin doesn't even really care about breaking their own links.

This is why I always take steps to try to prevent URLs as link text from being abbreviated when I post, even though it's kind of futile and pointless.