ATF Postings

Is it really necessary to have 2.5 pages of notifications at the top every-time I click "What's New"?

Only if you choose to read the forum via the "What's New" button. Click them once and they're gone.

There were a LOT of ATF forums to close and then we put an announcement on each one too. So two items in the What's New per brand forum. Got mine cleared.

Could be worse and they drop support for the forum entirely. A well read woodworking magazine publisher did that with a popular forum as a cost cutting measure. Lost a lot of long time subscribers, including me. Much like here, forum members posted projects, ideas and help to anyone who needed it. There was only minimal activity on it by the magazine editors.


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JohnDar said:

Could be worse and they drop support for the forum entirely. A well read woodworking magazine publisher did that with a popular forum as a cost cutting measure. Lost a lot of long time subscribers, including me. Much like here, forum members posted projects, ideas and help to anyone who needed it. There was only minimal activity on it by the magazine editors.

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You make good points. Operating forums isn't free but isn't tons of money either. That is, unless you'd done a bunch of customizations and then move servers a few times. Then is becomes a lot of work and money. Heartland just moved web hosts for the factory sites and I had to move to the same new server. It's cost about $2k in fees so far. When you move servers, things just break.

That all said, I continue to count my blessings that Heartland still sees the Heartland Owners Forum as a net positive asset to the brand and as such, they continue to approve my budgets to operate it, operate the Club (big bucks for that) and pay me to pull the strings.

JohnDar - thank you for recognizing the value of what HL is providing us here and pointing it out here.

Much delayed is our move to a new forum platform. It's still on my list. Hoping to rebudget for that this summer and move into a new platforum this fall/winter. Here again, another several $k to stand that up, program it, test it, migrate users and threads over, more testing, more tweaking, but it will set us up nicely for the next decade.

It would be a tragic loss to the owners (and prospective ones) if this forum was discontinued for any reason. Eliminating the ATF's isn't a big deal to me. And most of the questions on them were answered by other owners. That there are a lot of short posts in the What's New section about each one being closed only means. for a time, you have to use your scroll key to get past them.


And kudos, Jim, for the work you do.

I went thru and viewed the ATF posts and they are now gone. Since I normally view all the What's New posts I didn't realize I had to look at them to make them go away.