Dendy Jarrett explaining HC.

Kerouac

Kerouac

weird musical dildo
SO for the first time in awhile, I stumbled across something that linked to HC and stopped by the forums. Noticed this post near the top of the Electric Guitar forum: http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum...-request-please-stop-auto-censoring-our-posts

Dendy was explaining the forum change to some member in this manner:

Harmony Central was this tremendous town. The town government lost focus so the streets didn't get cleaned, the water wasn't safe to drink and the infrastructure was tattered. The government finally realized that they didn't completely understand the town, so they stepped aside from making the core decisions regarding your experience here, and they late concerned and caring citizens take over the responsibility to restoring the town back to being a placed that was great to live in. We are working on it and slowly but surely if you have hung with us since the new launch in April 14' you've seen things get cleaned, painted, tidied-up and improved. Now, the citizens just need to start believing in the town again and start knowing that it is safe to come back in and participate.
Maybe a corny way of explaining it, but my best shot ...​

Thoughts?
 
Detroit has the Lions, Pistons, Red Wings, Tigers, plus Joe Louis.

What's HC got going, long after multitudes of long time members became refugees, seeking asylum in the warm confines of Weindom?
 
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I completely missed all of this – and I'm sure it's been spoken about a hundred times – but what went down with HC?
 
Abrasion said:
I completely missed all of this – and I'm sure it's been spoken about a hundred times – but what went down with HC?
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HOLY FUCK, IT'S ABRASION! :eek::Wave:

Basically HC was sold to Musician's Friend/Guitar Center. They made a bunch of stupid moves when trying to transition the site off vBulletin, and they also planned "upgrades" that alienated 95% of the users. Everyone more or less left.
 
Kerouac said:
HOLY FUCK, IT'S ABRASION! :eek::Wave:

Basically HC was sold to Musician's Friend/Guitar Center. They made a bunch of stupid moves when trying to transition the site off vBulletin, and they also planned "upgrades" that alienated 95% of the users. Everyone more or less left.
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Hi! :Wave:

Gotcha, think I remember rumblings in that direction when I was still active over there – shame that such a great community got broken up
 
When they made Guitar Jam a closed forum that you needed to ask permission to visit, that ended it for me. They had already sucked the soul out of it; that was just too much trouble for no return.
 
Dendy Jerrett and his whole "kindler, gentler HC" bullshit IS the problem over there...his policy changes drove away most of the old guard membership...

Hi @Abrasion good to see you...:Wave:
 
Hi Abrasion, good to see you again.

HC was doing fine, except for the total lack of maintenance and infrastructure investment in the site after MF bought it. They basically ignored it until it became critical, hired several firms to fix things and migrate to new 'interactive' software, which resulted in the loss of many posts, the reviews, and a lot of useful features, and these efforts made the forum less 'interactive'. Of course, the people who made the choices were unable to admit they made bad choices until the core members left, and the fix has been a homogenized and sanitized forum that is essentially a MF/GC marketing tool. The 'family friendly' reboot, in a software format that was slow and non-fucntional, pretty much killed off the core members. They have since (after a couple of different reboots with different crappy software packages) gone back to a v-bulletin format, but everyone was pretty much gone, so it takes three weeks to fill up the front page of Guitar Jam.

At this point, they could go back to a reboot of the OLD site, and no one is coming back. The heart of a forum isn't the software, or the ad space revenue, or the 'interactive social media experience', it is the membership and what they can provide. Once that has gone, you basically are starting over. Their point that the web has changed is true, and I don't think anyone could build a HC of old today, regardless of budget or effort. I know I am not going back to have discussions about pickups or guitar electronics for the benefit of MF. If you can't help people you 'know', or at least fool around about nonsense with a fun group of people, what is the point of going to a forum?

Look at this place as a good example of a forum, you can get civil engineering, other engineering, building, pickup making, guitar building, whiskey making, photograph taking, sciencing, rocket sciencing, marketing, administrating, general busninessing, teaching music and other topics, gigging, addiction counseling, guitar selling, music recording, stage directing, IT advising, horse raising, lawyering, car selling, car fixing, car racing, plane flying, beer making, star gazing, cooking, military servicing, DJ'ing, music journalism writing, writing, banking, federal government training, the crushing office cubicle experience living, wheel chair customizing, truck driving, studenting, goat sexing, bamboo sex toy selling, and a slew of other topics I can't recall...for free, from people you trust and respect. Ask a question on almost any topic, and someone here knows about it and will post to help you (and I apologize for any topics we cover that I missed). That is precisely what HC lost with their 'mainstreaming' and it is why most people don't go there. Even a small forum like this, with an active membership, provides a huge positive service to the members. I think the drive there to get 5 star reviews on MF products and strictly on topic sanitized content killed the collective intelligence of the place.

I edited this after a few people liked the original, so they may not agree with all of this.
 
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335clone said:
I sometimes wonder what Scott Lehman would think of what HC became.
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I messaged Scott a few years ago, I think to friend him on LinkedIn, and asked his opinion. He had heard about the direction HC had gone in and was a bit sad about it. But I got the impression he had washed his hands of it when he sold to MF all those years ago.
 
I'm not surprised he would be sad. He built something amazing, and it was really the first successful guitar/music forum. I get why he sold it, and I get why he doesn't get involved in it now, but I am grateful for what he made.

I was a member on the original site in the late 90's when it was the only guitar site on the web, so I have seen pretty much all the iterations of HC. I had a different user name and my credentials were lost when I changed email addresses when I went to grad school and the forum software changed, but I was there pretty much from the beginning. I know I was there when the place was a long version of the modern 'response' field on sites attached loosely to OLGA. I think the loss of the content there was a terrible setback for guitar players everywhere. So much knowledge was just flushed through mismanagement from the post Lehman owners.
 
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