Regarding the move from the old forum and censorship in the new.

Forum History General Discussion
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I just recieved this reply from Jim Sherhart at DRI, I hope that this is something that is allowed to share here:

Hello Markus,

I’m sorry to hear that the DroboSpace transition has caused you some concern. As much as we would have liked to preserve the site during the migration, all contents of the site prior to August 1 are the exclusive property of Capable Networks.

Regarding notification, Data Robotics did provide Capable Networks with a full 30 day notice. Unfortunately, all user contact information prior to August 1 is also the exclusive property of Capable, so we had no legal means to pro-actively notify users. We were just as disappointed as you that Capable chose not to provide users with some sort of notification prior to the transition.

As you can hopefully see due to the arrangement with Capable Networks, it was becoming very difficult for Data Robotics to maintain direct contact with our user community.

Our goal for DroboSpace continues to be the same: provide users a community to ask questions, share ideas, provide feedback, and get support. Constructive criticism will always be welcome at DroboSpace. I hope you will continue to work with us to make DroboSpace a valuable tool for all users.

Warm Regards,

Jim Sherhart
Sr. Director of Marketing

Jim,

I totally understand that the content on the old forum was the property of Capable Networks, and in either way, it’s not allways a simple thing to migrate old information into a new forum software.
And since I don’t know the details in the agreement between DRI and Capable Networks I won’t comment on the “interresting” solution of having one owner of the data and another for the domain.

But, no, Capable Networks where not the only one that had a legal method of informing the users. DRI had just as much legal opportunity to inform the users as I or any other user of the forum had. You even had a number of “official” users active on the forum.

Why didn’t you make any statement on the forum to inform us about the switch?

Did you inquire with Capable Networks if they could send out any information to the users?

And I do understand that DRI want to own the content on the forum, but one thing that have upset some of us are your official statement claiming that you couldn’t "Provide direct information to our community without third-party lag time " and now you add “maintain direct contact with our user community”.
How could that be when we all had the possibility to have direct contact with the user community without any lag time?

And you state that “Constructive criticism will always be welcome at DroboSpace.”, how do that comply with the removal of just this type of threads on this forum?

A lot of the threads removed did not breach your policy, except for the part where you reserve your right to remove postings at your sole discression.
Now you have also started to censor posts linking to outside sources of information, that in no way breaches your policy.

Is there some lack of communication between the marketing department and the moderators in this forum? Would you care to resolve this quickly if this is the case to avoid creating any worse climate here than it’s allready is?

Jim, I hope that you, or any other DRI official will respond to the questions in this post.

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Markus,

I’m happy to respond to your questions and further clarifying my statement in the hope that we can get back to productive, product-related posts.

  1. Regarding our opportunity to inform users, you are correct that we could have posted a message on the forum and I apologize on Data Robotics behalf for not posting prior to the transition. Having said that, there are thousands of registered users and only a handful of active posters. I was referring to our ability to notify all users, which we did not have a legal means to do.

  2. I was not in direct communication with the folks at Capable, so I cannot comment on what was or was not discussed. As you can see from their email a full two plus weeks after the transition, they had the capability to reach out to users. You will need to ask them why they chose to do this post-haste as opposed to a more pro-active manner.

  3. Regarding our original comments about not being able to “provide direct information to our community without third-party lag time” and our ability to "“maintain direct contact with our user community”, I think the lack of pro-active notification by Capable to all registered users is a perfect example of what we will be able to avoid with the new community.

  4. Regarding threads that were removed, I will review with the support staff and notify the community if we feel a modification of our internal policies is justified.

Thanks again Markus.

Regards,

Jim