I left eng-tips.com in September over being told that my input to the climate change forum was not welcome. I haven’t been back since then. Now this “alternative” pops up in my e-mail with a lot of the same names that I’ve been talking to for years. Is this a movement away from eng-tips.com or a flash in the pan?
@zdas04 Hi David. Welcome aboard. It really is good to see you here. Time will tell, but right now it’s current, open source, evergreen forum software and a place for engineers to communicate.
I’ve been missing you David. Not sure about this, but willing to give it a try.
@Latexman - I’m interested to learn more about how this is different from eng-tips.com.
@TGS4 The list is long, but for a few, you can get someone’s attention with the ampersand/user id function. It’s current, open source, evergreen forum software. It will be run by experienced Engineers. It’s fairly new to me, so I’ll be learning more as we go along. Thanks for your interest.
The invite came out of the blue for me too. It was completely unexpected. To be honest, I am not sure what I make of this yet. I have been using ET for a long time. Will just how the ride goes…
Yeah, it’s a bit new for all of us. I’ve been on Eng-Tips almost 20 years and still participate, but hopefully this will highlight the good of E-T and overcome some of the shortcomings that we lived with there.
As for E-T, if current management decides to migrate E-T into its ProjectBoard format, I will not participate in it any longer. It would obviously be their decision, just not for me!
Good to see familiar “faces” here again! Come on, David! Surely you’ve been kicked out of worse places! LOL!
Hell, I threw myself out of eng-tips.com. Anywhere that refuses to allow someone to say that “solutions to global warming” are not needed because global warming is a political device to transfer wealth from developed countries to politicians private bank accounts is not a place where I am willing to donate my time.
@zdas04 (David),
You are very welcome here! As you may know, I was the developer for Eng-Tips from the beginning (1998) up til a couple years ago. It is my understanding that there has been no development on Eng-Tips and there isn’t any planned going forward. I was approached to put together a new platform for the community as there were other members who were unhappy with the direction it has.
Marketing is needed to an extent to pay for expenses - but the year that I was there, the discussions with management were solely focused on marketing/monetizing the forums, and I believe that focus made Eng-Tips lose a bit of it’s sense of community. It is my hope that we are able to use newer features/technology that people have come to expect from other social media outlets and create the same sense of community that made Eng-Tips popular in the first place. And I have some ideas that I believe will strengthen that sense of community. Community moderation, private messaging, and more detailed personal pages are a start, and more is coming.
Thanks for joining us! This new forum set up will take some getting used to. It would have taken me years to start from scratch, so we started with open source software. This gives us a head start on feature set but also the way things are arranged is a bit different. There’s no Threadminder for example - but you can “watch” different categories, and the tagging system allows for less categories so I’m thinking it will end up being a fair trade off.
For everyone - feel free to shoot me a personal message if there’s any questions on how to use the site. It may be a good idea to write a post on how to migrate from Eng-Tips at some point, so I’ll be collecting comments. 
I don’t know what happened… I just seem to have lost interest and needed a break. It was missing something that I couldn’t put my finger on.
Dik
I was demoralized some with a feeling of being sold out. Something I liked was being dismantled by those who did not want to listen to what was needed. A real loss in my opinion. I just hope others bail so the original intent of helping other engineers can continue.
Nice to see you here, Mike.
Dik
You too Dik.
What do we do now?
If you build it, they will come.
Shoeless Joe Jackson would love you…
Me. It was missing me. 
Welcome SLTA!!! 