Thursday, August 21, 2014

Embarcadero's forums are down. Communities are the future.

Embarcadero's forums have been down for a while now, they are working on bringing them back up.

Update Aug 25, 3PM EST:  The forums appear to be back now!
Update Aug 26, 9PM EST: They're back down again.  ... and at 9:30 PM EST: Back again!

Update Aug 27: It seems that the new Community link is going to become the main forums sooner rather than later, as there is something that just keeps breaking, crashing, or corrupting itself, in the old forum site. I'm sure Embarcadero would love your feedback on any way that they could bring forward sub-forums that you really want to still see as separate sub-forums, it seems that the new site has much fewer sub-forums than the old ones.  I'm sure that this will need a bit of time to settle, and get re-organized.  The Development forum list seems pretty "generic" at this point. There is an installation help forum, and a few general forum areas, but I get the idea that one should really use "Tags" carefully in the new forums. Remember to tag your post as Delphi or C++ and then you can view all Delphi or C++ posts easily, using the Tags feature, across all the groups.


Update Sept 3: They are down again, and still down several days later.  (TV Medical drama voice on.) Ok folks, I am going to call this one.  Time of death: Sept 3, 2014, 5:01 AM. (TV Medical drama voice off.)   The forum software has some kind of bug that keeps corrupting the database that the forum data is stored in.   If it ever comes back online, I'm guessing it will be done in a read-only fashion so that the 10,000 web-URLs that link to conversations there can be kept around for reference.   The new Community site is really rough but I am sure that they'll get it fixed up and usable soon.

Update Sept 8:  They are back UP again, but for how long? Nick Hodges discusses the idea that we need to move on.