There’s been some bitching about the Flashcoders list recently, which made me think back over the different ways Flashers have gotten together and shared ideas and stuff over the years.
When I came in, around 1999, it was all FlashKit. I consider myself a n00b because I missed out on the FlashPad and Dreamless. Then school let out and FlashKit filled up with script kiddies, and most of us moved on to Were-Here or UltraShock, with a few going to ActionScript.org. There was the era of the WH/US wars, where nobody won. Last time I was at WH, there were tumbleweeds. I’m not sure what’s happening with US. AS.org seemed to weather the storm and come out on top. But largely, the days of the forums have died out.
The next age was the age of the mailing lists, Flashcoders being the king of the jungle. I remember going onto Flashcoders years ago, back in the Flash 5 days. It was a very small community with people were talking about prototypes and AsSetProp and horrible sounding things like ACK and FLEM. It sounded exciting but I had no idea what they were talking about. I looked around and backed out quietly. A while later I went back and it was a bit bigger, a bit more mainstream, and I was a bit more experienced, and it pretty much took over for me where the forums left off.
Then it got bigger. And bigger. And BIGGER. One of the things (for me anyway) that led to the demise of the forums was people loggin on, signing up, posting some simple question without even looking at the page they posted on. Half the time the same question would be a bit further down the same page. At worst, the next page. Stuff like that kills the sense of community and just pisses you off. And that’s what I saw happening to Flashcoders. Same questions, pretty much on a weekly or even daily cycle. God forbid you call someone out on it too. Then there was the off-topic stuff, and worse than the off-topic was the complaints about off-topic. Yeah, an OT post is bad, but the 35 posts complaining about it are unbearable. I found my finger getting tired from hitting DELETE, so I finally unsubscribed about a year ago. The above posts ensure me that this hasn’t gotten much better.
About the time the lists started getting unruly, the Flash blogosphere (I hate that word, but it fits) started solidifying. Everyone started getting a blog. I finally gave in and started this one. MXNA and FullAsAGoog started aggregating them. For me, this is how I stay in touch with the Flash community now. This IS the Flash community for me. I like it. If someone wants to post about their sick cat or their bad experience with Best Buy, they can. It’s off topic, yeah, but easier to ignore than 93 emails bombarding your inbox. The one thing that does get really annoying is when something happens in the community and everyone decides they need to blog about it. Yes, yes, for the love of God, I KNOW that Product X Beta N was released today!!!
I imagine that eventually MXNA will just have so many blogs that it gets unmanagable. Already they’ve added so many in the last year. Maybe they will add some more complex filtering, or something, Or you can always use your own aggregator and just add the ones you are interested in.
Or perhaps something new will come along to commune around. Any insight? Or maybe all the guys who started out on Flashkit are just too busy working at their high profile jobs or own startups and raking in huge gobs of money to have time for being part of the community.