Remove Hosting from Deprecated

I have moved the forum back into services. Re-aliased it from /hosting-deprecated to /hosting-support.

I also changed the title and focus to helping users. I've disabled the advertising header block for now, but plan to add advertising soon.

sounds liek a way forward withthe refocus

I like the name change to "hosting support", I think it will help shift the tone of the forum in a positive direction. This could definitely work.

There are a couple things I'd like to see addressed in the guidelines:

1. Hosting companies starting promotion threads.

Will this be allowed? One of the problems with the old forum was companies making new threads every time they had a new package to promote. If every hosting company started their own thread, the forum would quickly be filled with ads. In general, I think these should probably be treated as spam.

2. Bumping old threads.

It's pretty common to see someone join Drupal.org, bump a bunch of old threads with generic answers in order to gain exposure for their company, and leave. I'd like to see this specifically mentioned as something that will be treated as spam. It pollutes the forum with dead threads, and pushes down fresh questions.

We are going to start aggressively unpromoting those new threads and locking old threads that are getting bumped if they are off-topic. If you've got some suggestions please let the maintainers know.

Thanks, updated the link. FYI I started locking old threads that contained a lot of talk about which companies were better. The hope is that the new posts will be more support oriented and we can clear out some of old style of bickering and spamming.

http://drupal.org/user/373050 has been warned.

I have locked 25 threads that spammers are using to bump to the top of the forum. They are either pure advertisements or going to continue to lead to back and forth fighting over which host is best.

John Forsythe suggested that we just lock all old threads in the forum. This is a good idea. It's almost scary how little traffic there is to a forum when you can't spam anymore.

Kieran