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> Fog Creek forums (the Business of software) which had a great cast of characters and drama (tail of the g!) for a couple of years. If you know where to look,
by wvenable 3y ago
> Fog Creek forums (the Business of software) which had a great cast of characters and drama (tail of the g!) for a couple of years.
If you know where to look, some of that cast of characters is still going strong on a forum of a similar design to this day. It's a bit crazy.
Stack Overflow came right out of Joel's complaints about Experts Exchange and is probably the best example of being with the right people at the right time with the right idea.
- toyg 3y ago> If you know where to look, some of that cast of characters is still going strong on a forum of a similar design to this day. Uh, where...?
- mdemare 3y agoYou’re on it now.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI think they are referring to another forum, but I guess they have their reasons for not naming it.
- hermitcrab 3y agoAnd it doesn't look like forum exists anymore. I guess it also tapped out.
- wvenable 3y agoIt did have a redirect but at some point the domain name expired. It was kind of a fun domain to own though.
- marktangotango 3y agoI would guess this one, but I don't think any usernames carried over. Except maybe the one I can't recall right now (startup related to streaming video over .gif back in late 90s iirc).
- sfjailbird 3y agoI actually know which one he is talking about, but since he didn't call it out, I won't either (maybe they like it quiet). But what happened was that Joel freaked a bit out over some of the drama on the Business of Software forums and shuttered them, in spite of them being very popular and having a huge community - another one of those weird decisions. In an alternate timeline, they would have been HN.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI was one of the moderators on Business Of Software. IIRC (its a long time ago) it was finally shuttered because: -it was getting less and less popular -the software that ran it was getting creaky Also I suppose it was marketing for FogBugz. When Trello and StackOverflow took off, it wasn't really needed anymore. Joel was a brilliant writer. I miss his insight.
- wvenable 3y agoWhen Joel stopped publishing articles there wasn't any content to drive the conversation. However, it was still a pretty popular forum when it was closed by Joel. I think it's successor peaked in popularity way after that but started to drop off as there was no obvious way to get new users. The old method of people checking their HTTP logs for referrers to see who was linking to their content and then joining the conversation stopped being a thing.
- thom 3y agoNot to drag up dirt, but the drama was someone’s quite public suicide and I suspect Joel concluded the bad PR wasn’t worth the good will generated otherwise.