Sun Java Forum

[Ahmed Bin S]

About 10 years ago I was using Java for a few months and as I had a few questions, I joined the Sun Java Forum.

What happened to that place? It used to be a vibrant community, now when I look at the Oracle Java Forum, it's all dead. Did people just leave when Oracle took over or did it die out before then?

(I know it's sad, but I'm always kinda interested in how communities die out).

[Paul Clapham]

When Oracle took over Sun, after a while they changed the forums around. The first thing they did was to make it harder to look over posts in several forums. Sun had never been responsive to feedback from forum users and Oracle wasn't any better. And then they decided to make it into a social networking site. I got tired of being deluged with friend requests from people I had never heard of, so I gave up on that forum and found this one. I know there were others who did the same. And now, as you say, it's pretty dead.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Over ten years ago they changed the procedure for complaints. I had been a member there for a few weeks and when lots of people came across here to what was then called JavaRanch I came too.

[Ahmed Bin S]

Paul Clapham wrote:And then they decided to make it into a social networking site. I got tired of being deluged with friend requests from people I had never heard of, so I gave up on that forum and found this one.

I am pretty shocked that no one thought that this would be a bad idea - in forums where people need help, the newbies will always try and "befriend" the most knowledgeable posters, surely someone should have realised this will happen.

Then again, Oracle do seem to have a track record of screwing up forums. I used to use the Oracle databases one, it was very nice, very user friendly, then they decided to change it, they completely screwed up the migration so users lost their names and now became identified by numbers, it became hard to navigate, and the last time I was there, the pages loaded too slow because they had added too much scripting.

Sometimes it's just best to keep it simple.