I used to be a diehard Forrst user. It was an awesome community--a core site that I contributed to and drew from everyday. Then, last March, they sold to Colourlovers...and everything went to hell. The quality of the posts went way down. Feedback went down. Comments became vehicles for spam. Community standards were no longer enforced. Forrst right now is a wasteland compared to what it was a year ago.
What ZURB is buying is not what Colourlovers bought.
Not to belittle to the work of Kyle, but the community was headed down-hill before Forrst sold for the first time. It's evidenced by the number of rules they had to bring into effect to counter-act the things you mentioned.
WARNING - Opinions! Feedback on Forrst was generally meaningless, the community was immature and the quality of work and questions was really, really low.
I couldn't agree more. Also, sometime around when CL bought it, Forrst made some weird changes with sorting. Like if I'm on "Popular Posts" and scroll to the point where it loads in new posts, all of the posts are dated over a year ago. It's very buggy now-a-days, it seems.
Forrst has been a wasteland (like you mentioned) for quite awhile now. I feel like it's going to take a lot to get the original steam back.
> Kyle, do you still have any day to day involvement since selling to CL? I am grateful for the community you built up and hope that ZURB can bring it back up to snuff.
I left mid-summer, so not presently, no. Appreciate that, and I'm hopeful that it's in good hands with Zurb.
Kyle, do you still have any day to day involvement since selling to CL? I am grateful for the community you built up and hope that ZURB can help bring it back up to snuff.
Have you at all considered relaunching it under a different name? There must be things that you would've done differently now, with all the experience you got from running Forrst.
I can't really think of any cases where some web service was loved, and then hated and then managed to restore its reputation. Watching a formerly great service crash and burn leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of users resulting in a situation that I believe is much harder to undo than it would be to just create a "spiritual successor" follow-up with a different brand name.
I used to be a diehard Forrst user. It was an awesome community--a core site that I contributed to and drew from everyday. Then, last March, they sold to Colourlovers...and everything went to hell. The quality of the posts went way down. Feedback went down. Comments became vehicles for spam. Community standards were no longer enforced. Forrst right now is a wasteland compared to what it was a year ago.
What ZURB is buying is not what Colourlovers bought.