I get that you're trying to expand/shift the target market for GDNet services, but I think the reason people aren't recognizing these changes is that they see the core service offered by GDNet as being the forums with everything else being supplementary to that role. Looking at it from that perspective, it's easy to see why regressions in the usability of the forums are the major problem points for people migrating to the new software.
The problem, I think, with trying to move away from the forums as the primary focus, and the reason why people are slow to accept the changes, is that there are plenty of other well-established sites that take care of the other aspects you're trying to get into. LinkedIn handles networking, Facebook and Twitter handle communication, and there are plenty of sites out there that handle collaboration between developers. GDNet is the king of technical forums and discussions, with a high concentration of intelligent individuals willing to help and excellent control of the signal-to-noise ratio, both through active moderators as well as community policing via the rating system.
In the same vein, the emphasis so much on content when GDNet hasn't been a significant source of technical content for many years seems a bit silly and premature. Most new articles these days are either product reviews, interviews, or blatant advertising. There's nothing wrong with putting the architecture into place to support a higher volume of quality content, but until you actually start getting that content, it seems pointless to structure your business around it.
Essentially, I want GDNet to focus on developing the services where it excels, orienting the site around them, and then working on the additional features on the side when you get time and they become necessary. Doing it otherwise risks alienating your user base without any guarantees that you'll be able to deliver on the content necessary to make the new site work.
Ah.. I see our definition of content is at odds.
Content is more than articles. It's everything generated by an author, user, and visitor of the site - your forum posts, your blog posts, your comments on news, the articles themselves, product reviews, job postings, and so on - all of it is relevant information for game development and related technologies. We don't believe we're shifting focus away from the forums - if anything we're going to strengthen them and augment them with stronger references to other content areas of the site (news, comments, blogs, status updates, external sites, etc.) This software is geared towards tightening the community and giving people access to the information they are most interested in while having the ability to cross-reference all related content across the site - granted, it's not quite setup the way we want yet, but that is the intent and direction.
The service we excel at is providing an environment for the games industry community to flourish, and that is a key goal of this site upgrade. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised as more of our capabilities start to emerge and you start to see that we have a much wider view of what's possible in building a strong community of game developers. Jeromy Walsh reminds me every year at GDC of the loads of rich content in the forums that we need to better utilize. I agree with him, and this site upgrade is a step in the right direction to allow us to better utilize and organize the content generated by the community.
And I think you're onto something regarding the forums look and feel. Good point.
