I found and joined the FileMaker Cafe right around the time I was finally getting over my pique at FileMaker Inc for the relationship diagram and for sticking the stupid script name in the tab order in the ScriptMaker. I was one of the luddites who said they'd ruined it and basically boycotted FileMaker 7, but then FileMaker 8 had Set Variable (!) and lured me back in. By that time I was behind the curve and defensive and worried, and being in a place where I could answer other people's questions and treat all the "how do I?" questions as a proficiency test did me good.
For a long time it was a forum-space where good essays on how to do this or why not to do that could be bookmarked and collected as a repository of wisdom.
But the guy runnning the place was a bit more focused on trying to make the place turn a profit than in maintaining a community. In my opinion (and admittedly limited perspective) the mortal blow was when the community was migrated to a different message board platform that made all the old links fail. And a few years later he up and did it again.
For the last... I dunno, four years maybe? It's been a space where 98% of the the posts were sponsored infoblogs from various plug-in and developer corporations. No one was going there any more to ask for help or commentary on how to do things.
Well, looks like the plug has been pulled. Ain't up there no more.
2 Likes
Someone else created a thread on this subject What happened to FileMakerToday forum?
If you go here Home - Business Solutions Developers (filemakertoday.com) you will be surprised... nothing to do with FileMaker. I wonder if the site has been hacked.
The Wayback Machine archive on March 3rd is the last time it seemed to be FileMaker related.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220303011352/https://filemakertoday.com/
1 Like
Looks like the site owner is starting to populate the new website template with FM content.
1 Like
For me it looks more like someone took over the domain and now populates it with links to content, which drives people there to watch the ads.
2 Likes
I too used to post there frequently back in the day but left after a couple of heated disputes with site owner Ross Maclane. Essentially he lied about site readership in order to get Digital Fusion to pay a couple thousand $ of advertising for Reactor plugin. At the time he claimed the site had like 20 thousand active daily members, and 50k + views per day - absolute BS.
Anyways that was a souring note - the final blow for me came when I chose to move my weetbicks blog from its original home there to the Digital Fusion site. He got very angry even though I was under no obligation to keep it there. Later, he just plagarized all my content and put it on his own site again, so that was another big bustup. Not only did he do that with my blog but many others without consent.
As a side note - all the sponsorship deals, advertising and companies that had ads running on that site were most likely completely unaware, none of them actually paid any of the advertising plans to be on there, it was all a ruse.
--
Good riddance to the site I say. The forum itself and the people on it were great, but the owner completely destroyed any community it may once have had. He was never a part of the community and was only out to profit off it which likely was his downfall.
3 Likes