Well, maybe the title is not strictly true, but for all intents and purposes, the user blogs over at Boonex Unity are now dead. Andrew Boon, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to remove the user blogs from displaying in the blog index, leaving this solely for Boonex team posts. Whilst there is (some) merit in this, from a commercial perspective, it leaves the user blogs with no index, and no way of knowing if there is a new post.

So whilst the blogs still exist, you now have to navigate to each blog individually, via each members user profile to view them. Needless to say, I cannot imagine anyone bothering to post any more.

It's ironic that the focus on the community at Boonex has always centered around their core philosophy of 'Unity', it seems that this is far from uniting people, in fact I woud go as far as to say that it has the opposite effect.

If I were to be blatantly honest, I think that it is Andrews way of dealing with opinions that do not agree with his. I am probably one of the contributing factors in this respect, as i have often made very pointed statements in the Blogs, but if you do not want people to have opinions, why have blogs in the first place? I guess that is what has now happened.

I think it's a bit of a cop out, after all, there have been many valid points raised in the blogs, many of these points have then gone on to be adopted by Boonex, or integrated into the code. The points that do not fit in, are easily ignored, or moderated. It seems that instead of driving opinions to be positive, by fixing the issues raised, the easy way out is simply to get rid of them.

The effect is that there will be less negativity, but in reality, it is still present, it's simply hidden from public view.

Overall, I think that it's a move in the wrong direction, and it would not surprise me if this was a precursor to some other event on the horizon, perhaps an event that Andrew knows will generate a lot of bad press for him.

I guess time will tell.

/DM