as its been discussed in another thread, the news page needs someone on it full time and since this is a volunteer site, you can't expect to find someone willing to keep it updated for free. we have had people say they will do it but they fall off after a while.
the site owner, convergent, is busy with his many other projects. he just recently moved and was selling his photography business, all while taking care of his family. not making excuses but we ALL have lives outside of this cyberworld and those REAL lives comes first.
the economy has tightened up a lot of pocket books so you see less members posting up. we still get tons of spam on a daily basis though so someone is still out there coming to our site!
mrailing is here and hanging at the PRO forum. he also has a busy life and that comes first. he had some changes in his life (good ones!) so that took him away.
i have always been around and wont go anywhere. i was here when the last brick was put down and will be here... there are a lot of other staple posters who are here, but with the other sites out there and blogs, competition is up and members now have more places to go for information.
so, no, no one has given up on the site. some leave, some stay....
I think what you are seeing is the cyclical lull between big new devices. We are all here and very much alive. The biggest thing that isn't going on is the news being updated. That unfortunately falls 100% on my back as I've never been successful at getting any interest in helping to update it from the community. The moderators are definitely around and moderating the forums. The sites traffic is right were its always been in terms of number of visitors here. I participate in the iPhone forum more than the rest because that's what I'm using at present.
As Marc said, I've had a very busy and stressful year that is finally... I hope... finally getting behind me. To add to the stress, the company I work for is going through a major layoff cycle as we try to plan for the coming year's work... so a little hectic.
I can only apologize for the news not being updated regularly, but it hasn't slowed down our forum activity in the slightest. I will renew my request if anyone else is reading this and wants to volunteer to help with the news... let me know. Many hands can make light work of this, but when one person tries to do it, then it gets to be too much. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist and end up not doing it at all, rather than doing it on a smaller scale. It is on my list and I will eventually get it solved... just hang in there and enjoy the forums.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by links to stories. I do have the ability to gather RSS news feeds in an automated fashion to seed the news process, but someone still has to write the content based on researching the stories in the links. I could, of course, just publish the RSS feeds straight to our news... but there are many reasons why this is not a good approach. One of the biggest, is that our site would take a hit on the search engines for duplicate content. I may re-evaluate that decision at some point, but I'm hesitant to do something that would help the site "appear" to be more current, that might actually cause our traffic to be hurt.
What I had tried to do in the past was find a group of folks to contribute in areas they were interested in, but each time its been tried the individuals involved quickly lost interest and it fell about. If anyone reading this has an interest in doing some writing in a blog style, and having an immediate audience of a half million people each month, then send me a private message and we can discuss.
I will eventually get back to updating the news more frequently.
I know that sometimes finding the news, keeping updates with news sites RRS feeds, can sometime be more time consuming than actually writing. So I was wondering if sending links to the more important mobile stories to you or whomever, would be helpful and time saving. Then you (or whomever) would just have to take 10-15 minutes to read and summarize or write a bit about it.
Its helpful to have people send links, but generally its already coming in on our news feeds if its coming from a major news source. The issue is that for one person to do it, that 10-15 minutes per story quickly turns into 2-3 hours a day if you sift through potential stories several times a day, and then hone in on ones that fit the overall set of news being reported and are then written and published.
That's true....but even just something would be better. I mean the last update was back in mid-november, and was about a beanbag chair. Even if just the biggest news story from the week or a small recap of the week would be better than what is happening right now.
I'm glad this site is still here, have been so busy for the past 6 months or so i havent been on. Glad its still here, glad we still have posts so people can get help getting their issues on the devices resolved. I dont realy come here for the news and dont think too many people do. Here more for the help (and laughs) and to help others
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