This morning a tweet from Vlad got my attention:
The AHA ideas for connections was "locked down" so that nothing was readable anymore. You have to login or register to the idea platform and then you get access again to the ideas already posted. I instantly tried to open the Domino ideas page - and it also didn't show anything. Both platforms were put behind a curtain. I never registered to the Connections ideas so I immediately did. I heard that certain email addresses are not allowed to use such as GMail. I think I am lucky that I once registered to the Domino ideas with my GMail account, so I was able to repeat that for Connections, too. And viola, the ideas are there again. It took a while but thankfully the Domino ideas are publicly available again.
I think hiding the ideas from the public is not a good choice. This will force people, who are just interested in following the progress, to register and - even worse - to use an email address that HCL would accept. I am not sure what's behind all this hassle, but please, HCL, do not make the mistake and lock people out from the great progress and the processes behind the new approach for the DS products. I have several customers from whom I know they would never register to platforms like this. They are just interested in the products and what other contributors provide as ideas and comments. If they want to participate in commenting and/or voting, it's absolutely adequate to force them to register to avoid spam.
However, I would like to know, if this was only a mistake or if this was intended. If so, the next question would be: why? Others like Microsoft, Salesforce or Oracle also host their ideas with public access - so that one could find them via the search engines. If you lock our platform down, this would be a big loss.
A small list of public idea communities:
Update Feb 24
The Domino ideation forum is closed again - WTF?
Update Feb 26
Both are public again thanks to a, let's say, intense discussion in the HCL Master chat that resulted in a long plead containing a large amount of arguments for getting in public back again. Thanks for listening, HCL!