

Zurb Acquires Forrst - ojr
http://www.zurb.com/article/1146/zurb-acquires-forrst

======
clappydingo
[Posting under a throwaway account]

I used to be a diehard Forrst user. It was an awesome community--a core site
that I contributed to and drew from everyday. Then, last March, they sold to
Colourlovers...and everything went to hell. The quality of the posts went way
down. Feedback went down. Comments became vehicles for spam. Community
standards were no longer enforced. Forrst right now is a wasteland compared to
what it was a year ago.

What ZURB is buying is not what Colourlovers bought.

~~~
codegeek
May be Zurb can get it back to what it was ?

~~~
kylebragger
That's my hope.

~~~
kylebragger
> Kyle, do you still have any day to day involvement since selling to CL? I am
> grateful for the community you built up and hope that ZURB can bring it back
> up to snuff.

I left mid-summer, so not presently, no. Appreciate that, and I'm hopeful that
it's in good hands with Zurb.

------
mnicole
ZURB is fantastic, and I really hope they follow through on their intentions
for the service as listed in the blog post.

Like other commenters here, I couldn't justify spending time on Forrst vs.
Dribbble + StackOverflow because the quality just wasn't there. While there's
definitely great content to be found, the current layout isn't conducive to
finding it quickly, and you run into enough bad design and code during that
process that you're turned off (although it does make you feel better about
your own work!). It's faster to just close the tab and look elsewhere than
hope you find the diamonds in the rough.

If they want to be a 'relaxed' platform for criticism (which I have been
looking for, and would even pay for if the community and incentives were top-
notch), I would highly recommend that the "like" button has an opposing
"dislike" ability and force the user to give feedback through highlighting
areas of the code or image like many existing tools, browser extensions and
services like LayerVault already offer. Why do people like it? Why do people
not like it? A "like", even on Dribbble, means nothing to me. I want to know
specifically what I can improve upon.

------
justhw
Anyone from zurb reading, please put a direct link to your home page. There is
no link to your home page in your blog. First time readers need to know what
you do without a hassle. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4146888>

------
faramarz
I have an overly simplified answer as to why Forrst is getting passed around
like this.

..and that is; It took me two long years to wait and finally earn an invite to
Dribbble. Signing up for Forrst was just a matter of clicking a link that was
submitted on HN.

Interpret that how you want, but that simple paragraph reveals _how_ and _why_
you should strive to build and foster a community, not just push out MVP's,
see if it bites, close shop and/or sell for cash. That's counter intuitive to
creating value.

~~~
mnicole
Dribbble suffers from this same problem too though, as evidenced by the
somewhat depressing "Everyone" feed. It's more about who you know (or follow)
rather than how talented you actually are. A lot of people just invite
friends, co-workers or random people that get picked from a hat. There are
"Get your invites!" contests every day that don't require anything but a
reply, a retweet, a link to the inviter's website.

There's no way to reprimand players who [consistently] invite poor designers
or people that don't post (likewise, there's no way for those of us who have
invited people who don't use their invite to revoke it), or compensate those
who have added valuable contributors.

I wish there was a feature like StackExchange's bounty where you receive
praise, a Pro account or additional invites for onboarding someone prolific in
their field or just someone that does fantastic work but hasn't really
surfaced in the community yet.

Personally I'd love to see more dev/designer hybrids and ways to find those
people (or use the bounty feature to promote people inviting the types of
users the site is lacking). Right now there's the ability to add skill tags,
but those have little to do with what my actual roles are within the
organizations I work for. Being able to search by "product" or "motion" or
"type" designers would help me find users to follow a lot more than just
hoping I come across them through other means. Then we get into their follow
cap, which.. I won't even go there.

------
bluetidepro
Wait, I thought Forrst was bought out by Colourlovers back in March[1]?

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/design-community-
colourlove...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/design-community-colourlovers-
acquires-forrst/)

~~~
kylebragger
It was. It was sold to Zurb by CL.

~~~
bluetidepro
Oh, okay. I guess it was just confusing to me since they didn't mention CL at
all in the post.

Any known reason why they didn't mention CL? Seems interesting that CL didn't
really seem to do much with Forrst since they acquired it in March.

------
codegeek
Cool. As an alternative to Bootstrap, I really like the foundation framework
(being a non-designer)

------
gourneau
I didn't realize ZURB had so much cash.

~~~
crisnoble
They have several tools for sale, <http://zurb.com/apps>, all of which seem to
be very mature and [presumably] quite profitable.

~~~
Kerrick
Not to mention, they are still a web shop with clients.

------
jpkeisala
Forrst used to have good Podcast I wonder what happen to that?

------
car54whereareu
Rrst! Could this spell the end of Forrst?

------
depoll
Ermagerd! Zurb aquers Ferrst!

