Maybe search engines help a little 
Seems Norman was right - asking if they have asked users why they left is unwanted.
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Ah instead of killing it right away they just waited until it scrolled down the list then nuked it !
It was at https://forum.xojo.com/t/has-anyone-ever-been-asked-why-they-left-xojo/56034
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Allegedly it was flagged by the âcommunityâ. Didnât say which community but I can guess ⌠
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Sure it was
the MVPolice in action I suspect
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In Xojo parlance that is the MVP and/or Xojo MgmtâŚ
In a way Iâm more sad that indeed Xojo lived down to really low expectations and removed the post which really didnt ask anything nasty or proprietary
but âŚ
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The always said they did not like the NUG because they did not have enough control over itâŚ
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which is screwy since they could have censored it as much as anything
Because the NUG was an Email list they could not retro-moderate it. Once an Email was sent, of course there was no way to delete it from everyoneâs inbox⌠Best they could do was delete from their archive, but others were keeping public archives of it as well (which googling would turn up).
-Karen
The nug went through a mail server they controlled and they could have moderated the emails that came in and removed them or refused to send them to members
I think it used mailman or something similar where they could approve / reject everything that got sent
This would have been a LOT of work - which I doubt they wanted to undertake
If people emailed each other directly they had no control
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That was my point⌠It would have been a lot harder to moderate a mailing list than a forum. It was not practical for the NUG.
That said, I have to say I found the signal to noise ratio on the NUG to have been better than any iteration of the RB/RS/Xojo forum in itâs heyday IMO.
It feels like something has been lost over the years.
-Karen
Now my memory might be fuzzy, but wasnât the original forum a pet project by Aaron and IIRC it didnât go over very well initially? Somewhere along the lines the Xojo folks made it the preferred communication platform, maybe because of the control and moderation capabilities as mentioned above, and here we are.
Boy those were the days back when the NUG was around and everything was mostly email based. Iâm with you @Karen in that I feel like the signal to noise ratio was definitely better with the NUG with far less politics and turmoil. Of course it wasnât very easy to casually follow along unless if you kept digging into the web archives. But maybe this was just enough of a hurdle for only the very serious to join?
A ton of experienced users maybe ?
The list is depressingly long
Something like that yes
And by killing the nug they also lost a certain segment of âcomplainersâ who wouldnt switch to the forums
And they were trying to make it so all Xojo related stuff was in one place
I dont think moderation etc were the goals but that has proven to be useful for their purposes to try & control the message about the product (with varying degrees of success because of sites like this one)
Possibly as well
Forums also seem to cater to the âquick ask a question get a replyâ mentality as well in the same way twitter and other social media does
There seems to have been a lot more ask first & read the documentation later, if ever, kinds of questions since things moved to being all on the forums
And so many are already answered in a forum post or in the docs
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On the other side of the coin, someone set up a Facebook group for users of MY software. And I can tell you, the prospect is pretty scary. I do monitor it, and the number of ill-informed statements that show upâŚ
Luckily, the place is generally positive. Most people use terms like âI Love Thisâ rather than âgrrâ
But if I had full control of the page, the temptation to mute dissent would be greatâŚ
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Oh sure I get that just shutting that down seems like a thing to do
But wouldnât addressing the concerns that are expressed serve everyone better ?
Those critics might turn into advocates, or at least be less critical, maybe ?
My old marketing boss saw everything as an opportunity to move someone towards being a supporter and while not everyone gets there it certainly moved a lot of people
I dont think any company ever gets 100% of its users there; but the effort seems to me, in my experience, to be worthwhile.
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Xojo has a lot of experience doing the oposite 
Xojo had the oportunity to be huge, but their short sighted desitions have droved away many good advocates.
As Alain Bailleul said in his blog (Xojo â Alwaysbusy's Corner)
â⌠But because of Xojos decision a couple of years ago to start using a new syntax framework, most of these projects wonât work anymore without a major overhaul. So I feel it is time to let them go. I recently noticed Xojo had removed this blog from their resource list too, so they mustâve had the same feeling. Honestly, no hard feelings about that! I would too when a blog doesnât write anything on me anymore.
But what is there currently to write about Xojo? The Web part hasnât changed in many years and still looks like it is 1995. iOS still feels like it is only partly finished and is missing to many out-of-the-box features to be useful (will the new upcoming android suffer from the same problem?). Should I write about the many bugs and workarounds one has to do? âŚâ
And here we are some years later, did Xojo learn from its mistakes that drove many away? NO, they did the same again, yet another languaje change with no significant improvements in functionality.
It is not necesary to be asked by Xojo, many have reached them, they just dont care about what people want.
Now API 2.0 dont even recognize the MsgBox keyword, for now that is true for Web2.0, maybe will be for android, the next iOS and one day, maybe even in the âdektop2.0â when they introduce the new Api2 only clases. If I have to learn a new laguaje, maybe it is time to do it with another tool 
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To confirm this simply read software reviews for example at MacUpdate.com. Dissatisfaction with an application arises when the application does not work as expected and the developer does not fix the problems.
When the developer of an application fixes reported bugs in timely manner and responds to user feedback fast and friendly the application gets very positive reviews.
Exceptional tech support turns users into advocates which also leads to new users: Prospective users decide which app to try/buy (if there are different options) based on those positive reviews.
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The number of fake 5star reviews on MacUpdate is mind-biggling.
And MacUpdate has been known to remove critical reviews (eg for Skype) when they were for advertisers.
Two disappeared UK persons:
Brian Jones (from the old NUG, internet) and Oliver Scott-Brown (joined in 2014, a youngster).