I've been coming to this forum for years, although only recently have I comeback and started posting again.
But I'm having ONE problem, when I enter the URL ... hardwarecentral.com it redirects me to hardware.earthweb.com which appears to be an Internet.com website but I can't find a link to this forum there.
If the link is there, it's buried so deep under the overly JAVA-ized menues as to be unfindable.
I read a couple of back post about this site not getting much traffic anymore. Could it be because no one can find it?
The only was that I found the genuine Hardware Central forum is that I had a bookmark directly to the discussion groups.
When I access this site on a shared computer at work (no bookmark) I'm unable to go directly to the forums. I've tried "discussion.hardwarecentral.com" after looking at the URL bar, but nothing has worked. I have to type hardwarecentral.com which then reconfigures as hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral and opens the news page.
Is there actually anything worth reading on the "front page"? My bookmark takes me straight into the "General" forum so I never see much else of the site. The spirit of HWC has always been within the discussion fora, so I don't think it really matters what other content is on the "front page".
Thanks to everyone who replied. For some reason, it's working now. I can't get it to work the wrong way.
To mackayc:
The problem isn't whether the front page has any good information or not. The problem is that the hardware.earthweb.net doesn't give you any way to get to the discussion forums. I send a lot of people to this site and to VirtualDr for help with their computer problems. Usually, I just say Hardware Central and VirtualDr and assume they will find it. Unfortunately, they can't.
On the HardwareCentral/earthweb page under 'Harware & Systems' is a drop down menu with Harware Central, Virtual DR, and Sysopt, however, unlike the other links the Hardware Central link takes you right back to the earthweb page.
We you go to Virtual Dr, it looks just like Hardware Central, but has a large grey menu on the left that takes you to the various discussion forums.
Personally, it think it is the curse of the dreaded JAVA. Too many websites with too much JAVA and other scripting languages for their own good. You can tell I'm not a big fan of JAVA.
The problem is that the Discussions menu is missing from the front page.
That doesn't make it very easy for new people to find us.
i'm currently accessing hwc from a different comp, one i'd not previosly done so from and typing www.hardwarecentral.com takes me to the usual front portal with the discussions tag on the left.
strange...
trout are freshwater fish and have underwater weapons
trout are very valuable and immensely powerful
keep away from the trout
From what I can see, the earthweb.net version of HWC is a new portal, possibly still in development. It will probably eventually replace the current HWC front page. VirtualDR appears to have suffered that fate already and now has a horrible clunky new interface with nasty navigation systems.
There's obviously a bug somewhere either in your system or with your ISP's DNS cache. Did you try MuFu's suggestion earlier?
And a small point, the menu you refer to as being JAVA is in fact a Macromedia Flash object. And while I'm on the subject, don't confuse Java the programming language with Javascript, the client side scripting language commonly used on websites.
Hardware Central is both a reviews/articles site and a discussion forum. Both get healthy traffic, though the content site gets considerably more overall -- forum members are quite active and make lots of visits and posts, but they're far outnumbered by article readers. Some people like to visit only one or the other. Many like to visit both.
hardware.earthweb.com is a mirror of the content site (I like to call them Hardware Central Blue and Hardware Central Classic, respectively) that's part of the EarthWeb family of sites, another internet.com property ... EarthWeb is aimed at a slightly different audience, more for business IT managers (it includes sites like Datamation and Enterprise Storage); it does not include/point to these HwC Classic forums, focusing its forum efforts on VirtualDr and SysOpt.
None of the above is new; it's been the case at least as long as I've been here since April '01; HwC Blue and the other EarthWeb sites are getting a design makeover soon but there are no plans to merge or absorb the two Hardware Centrals. I admit I'm stumped as to why correctly typing the Classic URL would take you to Blue; I can't duplicate it. Can anyone else?
Just for the record, I've tried this with both Internet Explorer 5.x and Mozilla 1.2 , and the discussion groups menu doesn't show up in either browser.
Thanks, mackayc. I did use discussions with an "s" but no go. I think it was because I typed in www. My later tries were without www. but dropping the "s."
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