Final shutdown and removal of Astaro.org

Sorry I am late to the party, but I would like to add my voice to the chorus regarding the change from astaro.org to community.sophos.com.

Simply put, the new forums:

* Make it much harder to find what I am searching for.
* Make it much harder to find threads of interest to me, and to follow their progress when I find them.
* Make it harder to see what is new and what has changed in the various forum categories.
* Are formatted with a much lower density of useful, usable information on the screen. The result is that I miss a lot.

Overall, the changes have resulted in a significant degradation of the overall quality and utility of the forums. From my point of view, it seems that all of the work has been applied to migrating the information and closing down the old astaro.org forums.

In my humble opinion, these forum changes have done incalculable damage to Sophos. The full impact of that damage will not be felt immediately. As sales decline and Sophos management struggles to grasp the reasons behind the decline, I doubt that they will recognize how much impact these forum changes have had on that decline.

The messages to me are:

* Sophos does not listen to its customers.
* Sophos does not value those highly experienced customers who do so much to contribute to Sophos' bottom line. Those experienced customers are uncompensated and operate behind the scenes, providing a valued service that helps bootstrap new customers from apprentices to experienced users. It is a multiplicative factor that drives sales. Lose them, and you lose a lot more than just the value of their Sophos product and service purchases.
* Someone at Sophos has convinced Sophos' executives and management that the forums changes are essential to Sophos future. That person or persons are proceeding full steam ahead without adequate supervision and proper ongoing assessment. Nobody at Sophos is willing to admit that they erred, and commit to changing the plan. I have no data to back it up, but I suspect that the budget for this activity is mostly spent, and there are not enough resources available to fix the serious issues that have arisen.

Since it is clear that Sophos is determined to follow through with these changes, I strongly urge Sophos to budget twice the time and money that they budgeted to migration, and apply it to implementing improvements that result in real world improvements in usability, quality, and utility for its users, who are Sophos' most valued customers.

Sorry I am late to the party, but I would like to add my voice to the chorus regarding the change from astaro.org to community.sophos.com.

Simply put, the new forums:

* Make it much harder to find what I am searching for.
* Make it much harder to find threads of interest to me, and to follow their progress when I find them.
* Make it harder to see what is new and what has changed in the various forum categories.
* Are formatted with a much lower density of useful, usable information on the screen. The result is that I miss a lot.

Overall, the changes have resulted in a significant degradation of the overall quality and utility of the forums. From my point of view, it seems that all of the work has been applied to migrating the information and closing down the old astaro.org forums.

In my humble opinion, these forum changes have done incalculable damage to Sophos. The full impact of that damage will not be felt immediately. As sales decline and Sophos management struggles to grasp the reasons behind the decline, I doubt that they will recognize how much impact these forum changes have had on that decline.

The messages to me are:

* Sophos does not listen to its customers.
* Sophos does not value those highly experienced customers who do so much to contribute to Sophos' bottom line. Those experienced customers are uncompensated and operate behind the scenes, providing a valued service that helps bootstrap new customers from apprentices to experienced users. It is a multiplicative factor that drives sales. Lose them, and you lose a lot more than just the value of their Sophos product and service purchases.
* Someone at Sophos has convinced Sophos' executives and management that the forums changes are essential to Sophos future. That person or persons are proceeding full steam ahead without adequate supervision and proper ongoing assessment. Nobody at Sophos is willing to admit that they erred, and commit to changing the plan. I have no data to back it up, but I suspect that the budget for this activity is mostly spent, and there are not enough resources available to fix the serious issues that have arisen.

Since it is clear that Sophos is determined to follow through with these changes, I strongly urge Sophos to budget twice the time and money that they budgeted to migration, and apply it to implementing improvements that result in real world improvements in usability, quality, and utility for its users, who are Sophos' most valued customers.