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Final shutdown and removal of Astaro.org

ruckus

Hi All,

The time has come to shutdown the https://astaro.org site.  With the migration of the forums and threads to the Sophos Community complete and the Astaro site in a static read-only mode I wanted to post and let you know what's happening next.

Having initially posted to the moderator's board (hidden to most) about the plan and to get feedback I don't see anything that blocks shutting down the site.  Therefore we plan to take the Astaro.org site offline on January 20th (one week from today as of writing) and redirect forum links on that site to the corresponding forum here.

I'd like to thank all members of the UTM group for their patience while waiting for the migration to complete - moving several hundred thousand posts was no small task. 

If you have any comments or questions please post below.



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  • in reply to BAlfson
    Thanks for the clear explanation. I was having a hard time expressing the exact same thing. We end up at google not because we don't know where the search functionality is, it seems a lot easier saying [ email tld balfson astaro.org ] in google to get the result much faster than any other method.

    Regards
  • I am in with the others on this...so sad you are shutting down astaro.org, when you could have upgraded the vBulletin to the newest version and preserved everything.
    Zimbra Collaboration, as you use now for Sophos Community, is NO WAY near vBulletin.
    I'm not just a guy who can't deal with new systems, I love them...if they are better! But I am so lost with this new community, lack of navigation, big fonts and most of all, I feel that I drown in information, lacking the visibility to see the light :-(

    Please Sophos - remember how the former ASG and now UTM product got so popular - it WAS because of the community! - And not just a community, but THE BEST community, that has ever existed for such a product.

    Don't destroy it by "killing" faithfull contributers, who will stop doing what they do, and leave the community to the more "light" users, who has no where else to go. - maybe they will start a community of their own someday...
  • in reply to vilic
    Hi Ruckus and Sophos Community..,

    i fully agree with the guru´s Bob, Scott and others.
    I don´t know what the real reasons are, but it seems Sophos want to shot all UTM things to the moon and forget it.
    1) Released "BETA" Versions 9.3 and 9.5
    2) Shutted down astaro.org
    3) Praises XG appliances as "the solution"

    But this strategy will fail, cause one thing will be lost during these steps: THE USERS.
    And at least THE CUSTOMERS!!!

    Regards
    Thomas
  • in reply to IanMorehouse
    >the new forum format is not user friendly at all. Finding information is very difficult.

    Agreed. I spent a much longer than should be normal to find that the latest firmware is a dud. I would have skipped it altogether back int he astaro days.

    Newer != Better
  • 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.