Great. Back to square one. 0 points.

Maybe this time, rep points won't reset to zero every time you hit 502 🙂 - appears they've adopted the public forum software, w/levels. I'd settle for having that level system automatically work here, but oh well. Forums will always be hard to migrate, etc., I guess.

"... hard to migrate."

I have a login and points.

How hard can it be to transfer an integer?

Really? Clients do that all the time. "How hard can it be to just add X"?

Apple is a user, just like us, when it comes to their contractor supplied forum software, which is typically from JIVE Software (Portland). JIVE tends to supply for Windows and open source, so when it comes to migrating anything, that's another checkbox on the option li$t. Witness the old forums now archived and locked. That option is carries the least overhead and co$t, after all.

Migrating comments with intact threads from one format to another is rarely trivial/pretty, especially when the source is old and the new format is yet again proprietary. Migrating users is same only different.

And since the old rep counter was broken...good riddance, I say. I've lost track of how many times I've seen counters restart for various Apple forums, so it's just another day online for me.

The drivers for new forum software never included much value from old threads which primarily dealt with outdated code, tools, diluted/duplicate threads, etc. I suspect emphasis was placed on search, where users are nudged to do that first, in an effort to both reduce the time it takes to get a solution and the overhead from endlessly duplicated threads.

Having a rep system is just a way to recognize participants, even if it can be rather cold, but without such a system today, the owners would be seen as colder still, so there you have it. I'd like to think participants come here for other things and not just a star on their homework.

As usual, and I think you know the drill - feel free to file bugs against the forums for features/changes you'd like to see, etc.

I don't participate for points but I feel like an app user who has just had features taken away after having paid for the app. (Payment in this case is the time and effort I've put into the forums).

I'm not losing any sleep over it.

Do you just help with what you know, or do you stretch goal and solve issues that might help you learn something new and save you time should you encounter them in the future...

Huh?

I'm not going to help with issues I have no expertise on.

Collaborative learning, a.k.a. "I think I know the answer to that, let me quick check to see if I'm right", can be a really effective self-training scheme.

And the amount of basic questions that can be answered by figuratively patiently walking someone over to the reference section, pulling out the reference material, and showing them the answer they were looking for, is pretty large.

Just sayin' that the criteria for "I have enough expertise to answer this question" isn't always particularly high. 😉

And, like KMT alluded to, the real mark of prestige on the previous forum wasn't "How many points do you have?" but "How many times have your points reset?" 👿

The answer to this question is always "wayyyyyy harder than it needs to be"