Hi, Rich:

I'm sorry to hear that you're unhappy with the newest release. I assure you that we are not making changes just to make changes. We are constantly working to improve Crowdstack, and to make it the best software possible. I know we can't make everyone happy: whether or not a change is an improvement is a matter of perspective.

If you read the post in which Ted announced that we were removing the Activity Stream, you'll see that it's one of our most underutilized features, and complicates the code, making it harder for us to make other improvements.You may be interested in voting for this suggestion. Sounds like it might solve the issue that your members have.

Lori

I've got to concur with @Rich Melvin. The last couple of updates haven't made sense to me - instead they've made a lot of unscheduled work for me in reversing the changes or explaining away their irrationality to my members. I realize Crowdstack lives may have been made easier by many of the recent changes, but when communities and other businesses have been built on your platform and its existing functionality, it's thoughtless, IMO, to pull out the rug from underneath us (some of your longer standing members, I would posit) without more discussion. Just looking at utilization rates does not make for a full story. And while I appreciate you pointing out my suggestion so that Rich can vote it up, I have to add that the fact that I had to write it up (and spend more time doing that) was particularly enervating. I had already written a complaint about the change - why rub salt in the wound and make me take more time to translate it into a separate suggestion?! I think you ought to slow down the rate at which you're putting out changes to allow time to properly vet changes with customers and for us to recover from the last set.

Julie, all I can say is

AMEN!

I agree with everything you said in your post.

Lori, I'm sorry, but just because something is "...one of our most underutilized features, and complicates the code..." is not justification for taking away what we considered a very important feature from our members! That fact is that our members utilized the Activity Stream literally every day. If it complicated your code, that's not my problem. That's your problem, and it is not sufficient justification for throwing away a perfectly good and useful feature that our members need in order to stay up with what's going on in our forums.

I completely agree with Julie in that these last series of so-called "updates" were not updates at all. They were just changes that made your lives easier at the expense of making things more difficult for your customers! That is not good business.

As Julie said, you should be talking to your customers - especially your OLD customers - to ask us how proposed changes will affect our communities. We are not all the same out here in the real world. Your various customers use your platform in different ways, and not all of us attempt to mimic Facebook. In Ted's post he said that deprecating the Activity Stream would "...allow for faster development of new features in the future..."  Yessir, that's just what we need, more useless new features rolled out even faster. Wonderful.

I spent four hours today answering emails and complaints about where the Activity Stream went! More importantly, this is going to throttle down the exchange of ideas on our forums now because this important organizational feature is now gone. I implore you to put it back.

@Rich Melvin, Amen back at you!