I want to pick up on a few points people have made concerning my last post concerning certain changes being made on Neowin. I am not going to directly quote anyone because in all fairness I believe Neowin has already done a lot to express itself to the community we serve.
ConcernedDad was correct and has every right to feel betrayed in that Neowin failed to deliver on the promise of "Tech news for all". We have done our up most to keep Neowin clean and fun for everyone, but without the experience of handling such a major site like Neowin it was inevitable we were going to make mistakes.
Our host always supported us and let us makes our own decisions and we tried to give the community everything we could possibly give. We created a number of forums based on user request and feedback, one of these became the "Babes" forum that is now closed and deleted from the server.
We have seen a massive increase in the user base at Neowin, one that I never expected to see, it was also beyond my wildest dreams to be as big as or bigger than some sites that have been around for a few years. This told me that we were obviously doing something right. To keep Neowin fresh we have taken on many news reporters and enlisted a lot of forum moderators who really do a good job of removing potential warez or pornographic material. I believe that many people including the admin at Neowin have had a difficult time accepting that Neowin is no longer the tight-knit community it was, we attract people from all walks of life now, even ones that want to destroy us by simply disagreeing with everything we do or just plain spam the forums with useless information.
Although Neowin is not a source of income for anybody here (except spammers maybe) we have tried to deliver quality for over a year at the expense of strains on my personal life, at the expense of Hosttyme who have had the worst deal trying to keep us online through our "adolescence year"
I can apologize for allowing the babes forum to ever reach Neowin forums I can also apologize for allowing IRC (something we backed down from 4 times before we eventually did it) but at the end of the day we were just answering the requests of the community. The babe’s forum cost us a lot of time and energy to moderate, because it WAS moderated. I felt at the time that it was contained. Again I was wrong about this.
We started out as a tech site and plan to stay that way for as long as the community wants us here. We won't be backing down from our decision to remove "questionable" content and all of the forum moderators are now aware of our stance on what can and cannot be allowed onto the forums.
The main reasons for such drastic changes are (among others) advice from more experienced people and also to accommodate a more realistic hosting solution. We tried to do more than we could, for that I am truly sorry. I guess we will have learned from this like other mistakes we have made in the past.
I would like to close this open letter by announcing a vacation away from the site, on top of moving house this month I hope to be able to re-kindle what is left of my relationship to my girlfriend who has had less attention than this site has got these past months.
ConcernedDad was correct and has every right to feel betrayed in that Neowin failed to deliver on the promise of "Tech news for all". We have done our up most to keep Neowin clean and fun for everyone, but without the experience of handling such a major site like Neowin it was inevitable we were going to make mistakes.
Our host always supported us and let us makes our own decisions and we tried to give the community everything we could possibly give. We created a number of forums based on user request and feedback, one of these became the "Babes" forum that is now closed and deleted from the server.
We have seen a massive increase in the user base at Neowin, one that I never expected to see, it was also beyond my wildest dreams to be as big as or bigger than some sites that have been around for a few years. This told me that we were obviously doing something right. To keep Neowin fresh we have taken on many news reporters and enlisted a lot of forum moderators who really do a good job of removing potential warez or pornographic material. I believe that many people including the admin at Neowin have had a difficult time accepting that Neowin is no longer the tight-knit community it was, we attract people from all walks of life now, even ones that want to destroy us by simply disagreeing with everything we do or just plain spam the forums with useless information.
Although Neowin is not a source of income for anybody here (except spammers maybe) we have tried to deliver quality for over a year at the expense of strains on my personal life, at the expense of Hosttyme who have had the worst deal trying to keep us online through our "adolescence year"
I can apologize for allowing the babes forum to ever reach Neowin forums I can also apologize for allowing IRC (something we backed down from 4 times before we eventually did it) but at the end of the day we were just answering the requests of the community. The babe’s forum cost us a lot of time and energy to moderate, because it WAS moderated. I felt at the time that it was contained. Again I was wrong about this.
We started out as a tech site and plan to stay that way for as long as the community wants us here. We won't be backing down from our decision to remove "questionable" content and all of the forum moderators are now aware of our stance on what can and cannot be allowed onto the forums.
The main reasons for such drastic changes are (among others) advice from more experienced people and also to accommodate a more realistic hosting solution. We tried to do more than we could, for that I am truly sorry. I guess we will have learned from this like other mistakes we have made in the past.
I would like to close this open letter by announcing a vacation away from the site, on top of moving house this month I hope to be able to re-kindle what is left of my relationship to my girlfriend who has had less attention than this site has got these past months.
[UNICODE]
* Non-latin characters in the page names" now storing doc title as UTF8
* optimized javascript execution, same fix as in the build 1010 Jon sent out.
* changed distributioncode from Win_600 to Win_601
* 62424 - PathSeparatorChar was added to wrong string.
* bug #55188 revisited, now fixed the proper way
* Fixed file download resume
* fixed bug # 59526, crash on certain printer drivers
* Automatic Proxy configuration fixes, especially for large configuration scripts.
* Authentication, especially Proxy and Digest authentication. Please test on all kinds of authenticating server. I hope the repeated proxy-authentication problem is now fixed.
* HTTPS proxy fixed.
* Proxy fixes: Please check that the problems on Proxomitron about half-loaded images has disappeared.
* Authenticated URLs no longer inserted in global history.
* #56164 fixed gunzip problem with Save As and Load to file (transfer). Moved datadescriptor construction into cache storage. Download cache now strips content-encoding (gzip) before storage Made download cache URL unique and inaccessible to links (Like POST forms)
* Updated opera.jar, with the sync-fixes
[ui]
* Update show window size, scrollbars, progress bar after clicking OK or Apply in prefs.
* Bugfix, when reuse windows is off, search field used to open results in a new window, even when the search was performed in a selected window.
* fix for 60377 and friends
* 57195 fixed.. sort of.. if a panel view is active and you press F8, then try to activate topmost browser window again and put focus to addressbar...
* fix for 59866 and friends
* fix for 61521
* fix for 61204 and friends
* OnMouseLeftDown was also called for dbl click events.. this is wrong.. caused too many gesture click history jumps etc. Fixed.
* doc context menu correctly aligned when clicking over forms that do not have their own context menu (non edit forms) also avoid showing context menu for forms if inside a back/forward clicking sequence
* Force url's opened from plugins to be opened in new windows when opened from the ad-banner window.
* Incremental search (inline find field) now works almost like it should again in documents.
* Hotlist now updates also when frame documents are loaded, not just the content frame (which you didn't bookmark..)
* Bugfix 60849 Ampersand in title displayed wrong in back/forw dropdown
* added support for new WM_APPMESSAGE commands. This should make special back- buttons on internet keyboard and mice work. Needs testing.
* reenabled some Win95 scrollwheel support. Needs testing.
* implemented simple "smooth scrolling" stuff. Default On. Needs testing. (option [User Prefs] Smooth Scrolling = 0/1
* Opera now respects the "number of lines" per notch setting for mouse wheels.
* cleanups and avoid catching some global keypresses aimed for plugin hwnds...
* Refresh document windows after change in document style preferences
* Fixing bug in statusbar: First ampersand in highlighted URLs was
* fixed bug 58763
* fixed bug 58720
* Fixed bug #58149:"[WIN95] [GPF] Using Ctrl-Tab causes GPF in Opera" Win95 is not happy about NULL pointer as second parameter, causes crash in GDI.EXE
* AltGr shortcuts shouldn't work in edit fields, they may mask important letters, like @ in Poland and Hungary. Same thing with Ctrl+Backspace that should erase last word in edit fields.
* 1,2,4 and 5 shortcuts now also available through numeric keypad. Gives single-key access with czech or french keyboard layouts.
* Open bookmarks in separate windows when opening the contents of a Hotlist folder (bug when reuse windows is on).
* Selecting Set as active folder in the bookmarks menu now also updates the hotlist window selected folder.
* changed default "Splash Text Position" value, fixes bug 63259
* Fixed bug #60517:"[IPF] Creating custom bookmarks file causes Invalid Page Fault" + fixed crasher when trying to show an empty bookmarks list on the personal bar
* Fixed bug#55188: "Opening blank windows, closing all of them and open new crashes Opera" The actual crash was in USER.EXE (win9x/ME). Removed a menu cleanup loop.
[mail]
* Fixed bug #61682: "Importing Outlook Express mail crashes on far eastern Windows"
[script]
* Avoid event loops on microsoft.com and many other sites.
[misc]
* upgraded ASPack to 2.12
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.