Hi Danny I absolutely appreciate the personal and direct response. And I agree that I have also seen you shut down or edit threads that become flame wars or piling on. The piling on is probably the thing that bothers me most about any forum, and this one seems to suffer from it a fair amount because of the passion people have for music and how Roon enhances it. I appreciate the passion. I’m not sure why some people struggle to differentiate between debate and insult.
This sounds like you’re determining for other people what to spend their time on. If I viewed it as a waste of my time I wouldn’t read or post to a thread. I think the mere fact of a thread being active (again, short of flame wars or piling on) indicates that users do not feel it is a waste of their time.
With due respect, I think the moderators part is a straw man argument. Don’t moderate it unless it breaks the forum rules then. When you close a thread that people are actively posting in, I think it is important that you understand that this feels literally like you are silencing someone - it is literally almost a physical feeling of restraint. As you have editorial control over the forum, maybe you just haven’t had that experience.
Consider that maybe the best way to keep the forum clean is not to close topics that people are currently posting in. Wait a month or two, it’s already buried, no one is trying to say something about it now, then close it. That way it doesn’t feel like you’re stifling discussion.
But why? If it were a material expense to Roon, I’d understand.
OK let’s look at how the forum works. Topics people are discussing rise to the top of the list and thus are visible when you open the forum. So either (1) perpetually popular, or (2) current, topics are visible immediately. If a topic is important to enough posters and it is at the top, to me it seems logical that if a potential Roon subscriber were to look at the community as a way to determine whether Roon might be for them, that they see a balanced presentation of what the community is saying, and that means not only that a topic is findable by search (but then you have to know what you are looking for) but also that it appears visibly as a current topic. By closing a thread, it will naturally fall below that line.
Specifically regarding folder browsing since that was the topic at hand, a new user may or may not immediately notice that omission. Roon is a lot of fun, for sure, and at the evaluation stage the user is probably clicking around, looking at what pops, playing with various features, etc. It is only when the user decides to integrate the whole collection into Roon and access something specific rather than happenstance that one might go to a folder access type of feature and then realize, nope, there is nothing you can do to access that way. Whatever your product design philosophy, the lack of folder access is a pretty big deal, given a users’ natural assumption it is there and they just haven’t needed to use it yet. So I believe that a topic like this shouldn’t be deliberately buried.
Me too. You should see how deeply I edit contracts my associates write for me. But it can be overdone - so I wanted to post this to just raise awareness that there can be side effects to housecleaning others’ communications.
Well, I hope you do at least to the point that we all want you to know that we appreciate Roon as a product and your efforts to design and build it. Desire for things like folder access (whatever, again my point is broader and not focused on that as a feature) is really a compliment, because we love Roon but see a gap that keeps us from being able to entirely use it for everything we’d like to, and we want our delicious Roon cake but also to eat it too. Passion can turn into frustration which turns into overly negative posts, but the emotion behind it is trying to hold onto using Roon because it’s great, but just some things we just, dammit, cannot yet do with it.
Anyway, thanks for your time and thoughtful response. I hope everyone here is well and safe in this scary time.