I still miss it. I’m unhappy that it was axed.
Ben Bock
AHA Member since 1993 or so
Welcome to the forum! I think you’ll find it meets your needs.
Hows the testing of TT2 coming along? Last I heard they were testing and never heard another word about it…
Sure be nice to get some kind of status.
Still testing…it’s not easy to find a way to make it as good as it was but still stay within the budget/manpower requirements.
As said above, I also think that if you give it a chance, the forum will meet your needs. Just for kicks, I took a look at the last 10 TT emails, and they can be summed up as follows:
50 posts about TT and the transition
17 announcements about competitions or requests for GABF tickets
51 beer related posts
That means, on average, about 5 beer related posts that I might be interested in. Unfortunately, a lot of those posts said the same thing because responders didn’t necessarily know that the question had been answered until the next day.
Ironically, I probably wouldn’t have signed up for the forum if there hadn’t been such a firestorm on TT, but I’m glad I did.
Yup, TT2 is in progress and mostly held up by real life.
So you’re sayin’ you’ve got one Drew? 
Drew with a life???
Now that’s a joke!
These type of summations continue to irk me.
Take a look at the RSS feed for the forum.
Milk, BBQ, Hockey, Aruba, Beer in the Bible. I could go on and on.
There’s far more noise and much less of a tight focus on the forum.
For the record, I am not saying that there are not quality beer focused discussions on the forum.
Oops - I guess I shouldn’t have listed the number of off-topic posts since my point was that there were only about 5 beer related posts per day. Even that is a little misleading since on TT, if somebody would ask a simple question, they could get several replies saying the same thing. The repetition is less likely on the forum. I mostly ignore the off-topic stuff on the forum so it really doesn’t bother me.
One thing that’s missing from the forums that we had on TT was David Houseman. I knew that with every post I made I could count on getting a reply from him and subsequently had some very good discussions with him.
In grad school they told us that the most important thing in the classroom was the students. The ability to share different experiences and insights significantly increased the value of the classroom.
I wonder how many other folks we lost in the transition…
Agreed.
Note: The forum has Gordon Strong, Denny Conn and Fred Bonjour just to name a few.
I’d rather have several answers from the semi-educated masses, than one from an “expert”. Experts seem to have canned answers for everything.
Oh, no knocks against any folks, it was just an example. I’ve picked up some really good information on mashing over the past couple of weeks. Houseman was just an example of one person who was a regular contributor, and I haven’t seen any recent forum posts by him.
Also, the header of TT usually had an AHA or industry-related post by Charlie P., Gary Glass or some other folks. If there are announcements like that on this forums, I think I lose them in the RSS feed. There’s no way to prioritize certain sections of the forums so they are listed at the top of the RSS feed other than subscribing to a particular thread. So although it was manually done, there was some value to the organization of the posts. My RSS reader might be archaic in that regard, but it was one thing that we had in TT that we might not be able to implement with RSS.
Even with all the change, I am embracing the forums more than TT.
I am very pleased to hear this.
Is that anything like this subcategory?
Wow, I completely missed those. I think the subcategory needs to be broken out a bit. It has AHA announcements, FAQs and the rules lumped together. I would have put the announcements in another thread since they’ll be more dynamic than Rules and FAQs.
That was considered, but we decided no to add another subforum.
The thing about tech talk was that I had a daily reminder that I was a member of a national organization. I have time to check email once or twice a day, never minded that reminder, and usually read it. For all the benefits of the forum, I have to remind myself to go and log in, and then browse to see if there’s something of interest.
From a pure solidarity point of view, I felt like more of a member, and valued my membership a little more with the daily reminders. Now the only emails I get from the AHA are trying to sell me something or ask me to renew.
This is a great point. Well stated.
I have been using the Forum; and while I like it, I find it is more of a time sink than TechTalk. I login & check the Unread posts… either reading all or just those I find of interest, depending on how much time I have. I like the Forum, & will continue to use it, but I really look forward to TT2.