Your message was passed onto me by Pete Wootton who asked me to reply in person.

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to write to the board at Dennis. I would like to apologise for the lack of notice we gave you about the changes we are making on our forums. The reasons behind the decision were both technical and strategic.

For some time now, Dennis Publishing’s strategy has been to build on the strengths of each core brand within its portfolio. Rather than merge content together across our core brands, we want to provide our readers with sites that have different personalities that you can pick/choose from. Each site is unique in its content and appeal to the reader and, subsequently, each site will host content and forums that are unique to that brand. In a media environment that is becoming increasingly fragmented we believe this strategy will sustain us through what are very challenging market conditions.


That’s the strategy part of why we took the decision to change the way our forums operate. More importantly, as a direct consequence of Dennis recently moving hosting supplier and upgrading our entire registration infrastructure, we had a week’s notice to inform our editors, and subsequently our readers, about the planned changes – the main impact being that the new registration system doesn’t allow shared forums.

However, this does not mean you’ll need to go through the full registration process on every Dennis site you visit. Once you’ve registered on one site, all you need do is pick a new forum screen-name for each additional site you want to access. This means you can have different screen-names on each site, allowing you to have a different persona on, say, Maxim and PC Pro. If you wish to keep the same screen-name on every site, that’s fine too (as long as it hasn’t been taken already by another user).

By moving to our new registration system we will also be able to introduce new features ourselves without being reliant on a third party or supplier as we were formerly. This has stifled our ability to evolve this platform in the past and we are confident that you will appreciate how we evolve/improve our sites and associated forums moving forward.

This has been a major undertaking for this company and mistakes have been made. Apologies again for the short notice that shared forums will no longer be available, but let me assure you that it was never our intention to hide anything from the community. This mistake was an oversight in a very large and complex project.


We will have the forums back up and running shortly and we will continue to offer what we believe to be the best editorial content on the web, and the forums we had before (now brand-specific).

I hope you will continue to enjoy our sites and will be joining us when the forums are back live.

Kind Regards,

Barry

Well, just checked my e-mails, guess what's in the spam folder?

That's really strange. You won't imagine how similar the email I received was

Peter.

Maybe I'll send one back, or we all should that says exactly the same thing!

Dear Mr Wootton,

I recently emailed you personally to complain about the changes to the Dennis Interactive forums and am completely disatisfied with the response received.

Not only was I hoping for a personal response from yourself, I was also hoping any response I did receive would answer the points in my original email. Barry's copy-and-paste reply has simply made this matter worse.

I have telephoned today and cancelled my two subscriptions and shall not be using your forums when they return later this week. You have lost yourselves a lot of loyal subscribers and users over this issue.

thank you for your reply to my email, which appears to have been sent to a few other people who have contacted you with similar concerns to mine.

I understand a few of your points, and I do accept that there is a case for keeping some magazine forums apart. To take your example, keeping Maxim and PCPro separate makes sense. However, what doesn’t make sense is breaking apart a number of publications which share a common theme - in this case IT. As I stated previously, the shared forums for magazines such as PCPro and MacUser (to name but a few) were very helpful, and I would add beneficial to your brands. I am primarily a MacUser, but it really helps to know that on the forum there are Windows and Linux users who can help me out of scrapes when it comes to my fumblings in those areas. And the Dennis forums were the first place I’d think of going to ask a question.

Breaking the forums up adds a level of complication which is wholly artificial, and an unnecessary obstacle. What happens if you want to comment on the same news story on MacUser and PCPro to get a better perspective of opinion? Post on both? Check both? Reply on both? I hope you can see the redundancy in having to check in more than one place.

As the die is cast on this, I suspect that it’s not worth commenting much further. I’ll be spending a lot more time on the x404 forum, where I will be able to mix with the usual folk regardless of platform or magazine brand. I really think you have broken something rather precious with this move, and from what you say, it appears that it’s not going to be fixed. The new forums will just not be the same, however much you try to talk it up.

Just sent this off:

Well, just checked my e-mails, guess what's in the spam folder? This:


*sigh*

This concerns me. So unless I rush and make sure I get the username of choice, someone else can take that username and simply assume my presence on the forums?

I'd be willing to bet it says in Dennis' T&Cs that everything you post is there's to use as they see fit. I can't quite remember back 5 years to what I signed up to...

I would also assume that all of our PMs and user data will be lost?

As far as the MacUser side of things go, we were told in a posting that if you remember the original edress you signed up with, and you know your password then you will be able to login using your old account, meaning no posts/PMs/other data will be lost.
If you can't remember your original edress then you'll have to re-register all over again.

I don't know if this is applicable to any other forums outside the MacUser ones.

Mark

PcPro had exactly the same message about 2 weeks before the forums were stopped.

I also had a post / PM saying that you would still be able to use teh same logon on all forums which suggests that they will still be linked