What happened to the ideas? #dominoforever

Saturday, February 22, 2020 at 2:27 PM UTC

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!






Latest comments to this post

Oliver wrote on 04.03.2020, 19:14

David, the fact that they listened and made it public again speaks another language. HCL is able to admit mistakes which is good.

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David Leedy wrote on 27.02.2020, 02:20

The fact that it took an intense discussion for them to do the right thing is an interesting and concerning look into their mindset. 

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Ben Langhinrichs wrote on 22.02.2020, 20:43

Sorry, my mistake. The Domino ideas can be accessed that way. The Connections ideas are locked down the way you say. That does tend to suggest it is an error, though, rather than an intention.

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Ben Langhinrichs wrote on 22.02.2020, 20:39

It might have been a temporary glitch. I can see the idea without being logged in, and only when I tried to vote on one did it prompt me for an email address.

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