Has Community Server lost its hearing or its bearings? Or both.

It will soon be two years since we put what was a huge amount of effort into selecting community software which would meet the needs of our website users.

Admittedly there was an element of boring "can we support it (ie is it .NET)" kind of questions which effectively auto-created a short-list but we have been more than happy with outcome - Community Server 2007.

Its functionality - forums, blogs, photo galleries and file downloads, plus a sprinkling of friends & favourites elements (although users haven't found much use for the latter) - generally outweighed the downsides - paucity of documentation, patchiness of support.

So we purchased two enterprise licenses, rolled our sleeves up and got down to rolling it out. The users have loved it and three of our titles- Flight Global, Community Care and Farmers Weekly now have thriving and active communities.

Since then Telligent (which owns the product) has shifted its focus towards the more commercial uses of its product (Personal and Business licenses are no longer available, for example). Community Server now powers the MySpace forums and can now be integrated with Microsoft's Sharepoint. Big league stuff.

That should be good news for us.

But somewhere along the way Telligent seems to have stopped listening to its existing customers.

To be fair it has always been quite difficult to get their ears: at one stage I resorted to emailing individuals only to receive auto-generated replies saying "You do not have permission to send to this recipient". Wonderful customer service.

But their most recent release - Community Server 2008 - suggests that they either haven't listened to their existing customers at all or possibly aren't interested in continuing to meet their needs.

Although it has some great new features (groups, widgetization of sidebars, a new focus on friendships), they seem not to have taken into account the way the implementations are being used.

One of the major bone of contentions is that the Photos and Documents sections have been combined into "media galleries" and in some ways that's quite attractive - media neutral, extensible and so on.

But for sites such as Flight Global which have a large user base uploading photographs to their Flickr-type personal galleries it is looking like a disaster - Telligent have removed some of the things our users really liked about it - having a personal, highly visible image gallery in which to show off their own photography, being able to watermark their pictures so that they don't get ripped off.

We are not the only ones to be concerned; there's considerable disquiet on the CS forums about the new media galleries.

I was struck by some recent blog posts from long-term supporter of Community Server - Ben Bosacker. In one he reports:

The project that I will be working on is using CS2007 and the customer has made a firm decision to not move to CS2008. The major reason that I and others are considering this is because upgrading to CS2008 is a major undertaking and it is also a major change from the original direction of CS.

And in a subsequent post he is clearly aghast at the architectural changes which Telligent has applied in Community Server 2008:

So, the bottom line here is that until CS2008 supports database storage for all objects, I cannot recommend its use to anyone. Stick with CS2007 if you have it and do not upgrade. If you upgrade, there is a very good chance that you will lose quite a few objects just like my client did. Also, the URLs for all objects have changed, which means any existing links to CS2007 or ealier objects would be broken after the upgrade. That in itself could cost you hundreds of hours of lost time to correct on large systems.

Did Telligent talk to any of their customers before doing this? Why have they not been clear about these implications of the CS2008 upgrade?

As holders of two enterprise licences (20 sites), I'm sure we aren't their largest client, but nor I imagine are we the smallest. Now that they have groups functionality on their website, perhaps they could set one up for their customers so that we can engage in a dialogue with them? Or just moan.

Actually, I think the sensible thing for me to do would be to set up a "Disgruntled Telligent Customers" community on Ning and see how we get on.

In the meantime, if you know of a great piece of community software that is based on .net do let me know. I have a feeling that there is a lot of work (again) for me on the horizon.