Forums in Danger, but Not This One

Christian Williams

E381 - Los Angeles
Senior Moderator
Blogs Author
Ericsonyachts.org is stable and long-lived, thanks to Sean and a loyal membership. But we oughtn't take it for granted.

Yesterday I discovered that my movie editing software forum, Pinnacle Studio, has axed its famous discussion forum. Gone. No warning. All links now lead to the "customer service" site of Corel, who bought Pinnacle from Avid several years ago.

That forum had been around 20 years. I had 700 posts on it. It had duplicate forums in English, German and French. The moderators--I think they were paid--had 30,000 posts, and some members almost as many. Gone without warning. Zapped. Vanished.

Video editing is quite technical, and users helped each other solve typical problems that confounded even the experts. They also did remarkable special effects, sharing secrets and creating elements never before seen. It was all free, no ads. The knowledge base, like the knowledge base of Ericsonyachts.org , was superb and deep as an ocean, containing invaluable insights and workarounds over many years. No more. In the blink of an eye, history deleted.

Why? Corel says simply, "money." And old software that probably couldn't be easily updated or migrated.

Sean saved us from that fate a few years ago by going to Xenforo, at considerable personal time, misery and accomplishment. .

Take nothing here for granted.
 

Bolo

Contributing Partner
As a digital photographer I knew about Corel but never used any of their products. Photoshop by Adobe was my entry point, many years ago, into image processing and retouching so it was a natural for me to use Premiere Pro and along with that Premier Pro Beta for video editing. That software along with Photoshop, Photoshop Beta, Lightroom Classic and more along with some cloud storage comes with a monthly subscription fee where my software is also automatically updated. That also includes on line support and forums. I’m not saying that an Adobe subscription is for everyone unless you’re a professional photographer/videographer of course or an avid amateur. Photoshop and Premiere Pro both have rather steep learning curves so finding a different video editing software would be the way to go but that also depends on how sophisticated you want your videos to be on say, YouTube. The advantage with Adobe products, that you pay for each month, is that it probably won’t disappear overnight. It’s a shame that Corel decided to pull the plug on their customers without warning.
 

Sean Engle

Your Friendly Administrator
Administrator
Founder
Big thanks to Sean for all his time, effort, and expense as admin. And thanks to all who make this community so helpful!
I am more than happy to do it; and even more happier to have made the jump to Xenforo in 2020. Oddly enough, what happened to VBulletin (our old platform) was just about the same as what Christian is describing about Pinnacle (which I've also used).

VBulletin was purchased by Internet Brands which treated it like a cash cow and did not bother to put anything back into it as a product (development, support, on-going improvements to the software as it gets hacked/challenged on an on-going basis) and the problems resulting from that grew and grew and grew. When I heard about Xenforo, it was good and I was interested - BUT - when I heard that the owners of Xenforo were actually some of the original guys from Jelsoft, the company that developed VBulletin, I fell in love - again.

And -- just like the decision in 2000 to go with VBulletin (which at the time was a great decision as thousands followed and it became #1), so too has been the decision to jump over to Xenforo. I am seeing more and more and more sites using their software, and their owners have been very good about keeping it up, etc.

Which reminds me, I need to look into updating the site again....

//sse
 
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