Corel Launched Coreldraw.com in May 2007. Many new faces and names showed up, excited by the new resource for CorelDRAW users. New… relative to what? The Cnews Newsgroups.
Corel’s Cnews Newsgroup Server has been in existence for perhaps 10-15 years. However, unless someone was at least at an intermediate computer user level, they probably wouldn’t have known about these newsgroups or how to access this older resource.
Recently a question was asked at CorelDRAW.com about why there are 2 very different places to post questions and read answers. Gerard Metrailler is the Director of Product Management for the Graphics Division at Corel Corporation. Fortunately he wrote that Corel plans to keep the Cnews server, as he rightfully recognizes that there are lots of great posts there which still hold great value.
The hard-core Corelians are likely viewing both places, so if you have a question, post anywhere you feel comfortable. One thing that’s not mentioned as a CorelDRAW selling feature is the excellent and mature support from professional users. They seem to be on the edge of their seats waiting to help others in their time of need, for free! If you’re a CorelDRAW user at any level, there is someone, somewhere that can help you!
You can read posts at CorelDRAW.com on a web page, but I love the speed of NNTP. The other key thing of NNTP is the ability to hide posts you’ve read with a newsreader program. This allows to you to focus on and reply to new items only. There’s no clutter of posts you’ve already seen before. Outlook Express and Thunderbird can be set up for this. You can view both the Cnews Newsgroups and CorelDRAW.com this way. They are working on hiding read posts for web viewing of Coreldraw.com, but this is a technical challenge.
I’ve had trouble posting to CorelDRAW.com with Thunderbird. I simply click the link in the bottom of the message to go to the CorelDRAW.com web page that the message is on and reply that way.
One advantage of CorelDRAW.com is that you can view the posts from any computer connected to the ‘net with greater ease. Especially for those who use public computers, or who have some time on their lunch break to check things out using an office computer. All you need is your login and password.
There are a variety of other places to read and learn about CorelDRAW, such as unleash.com. The overall benefit is that there seems to be great interest in our favorite software.
Jeff, just to clarify… I cannot speak for my colleagues at Corel and cannot confirm the plan to keep the cnews forums, all I can say is that both are currently running in parallel. I know that we added X4 forums on cnews for example, which is a good sign normally. But I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression or message in my answer in the forums.
Gérard
hi Gérard,
Thanks for the clarification. hopefully Cnews is kept around, I can’t imagine that there is major overhead to do so.
I have not heard anything about Cnews going away… I was only asked to confirm that we should have X4 forums there because there is already CorelDRAW.com and my answer was “absolutely” 🙂