sasCommunity.org is winding down from January 2018

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I’ve been posting on sasCommunity.org every now and then for nearly 10 years, including hosting VIEWS News and my SAS Author pages there, but a decision has now been made by the sasCommunity Advisory Team to set the site to Read-Only from 01Jan2018. Chris Hemedinger has added a blog post on The SAS Dummy giving a little more information on where the sasCommunity.org content could be relocated.

Note that the VIEWS News issues can now be accessed on this blog site in the VIEWS UK forum, which is a free resource for all registered blog members, but an access request is required after you have registered.

The wiki site was the first to be SAS-related and user-maintained, so that every registered SAS user could add and update their own content. This was long before GitHub appeared, and when LinkedIn and the SAS Communities had barely started.

I think I will leave the last words to the sasCommunity Advisory Team, who posted this announcement on the sasCommunity.org site on 07Dec2017:

sasCommunity.org to be Decommissioned

December 7, 2017
Notice from the sasCommunity Advisory Team

Today, SAS practitioners have unprecedented access to expertise from their fellow SAS users around the world. Using modern community forums and code sharing platforms, SAS users are learning from each other more than ever before.

Although there is a demonstrated increased interest in SAS topics in general, we’ve seen the traffic and contributions on sasCommunity.org remain flat (and even decline) over the past few years. The team has taken the decision to help users to focus on the newer, well-supported platforms — and decommission this wiki-based site.

Before we cover some logistics, we want to recognize the important role that sasCommunity.org – and all of its volunteers and contributors – has served over the past 10 years. The site pioneered peer-to-peer collaboration around SAS during an era when there were fewer alternatives. We are grateful to those who devoted countless hours to building and nurturing the site. Thank you!

Now…on to the future. Our first step will be to put the site into ‘Read Only Mode’ on January 1, 2018. This will allow the relocation of important and popular content responsibly, while eliminating the overhead of accepting new pages. We plan to support, as best we can, the owners of existing content to make sure they can find a new home for content and articles they want to preserve before the final decommissioning (that date is TBD).

Examples of content that we know that probably should be relocated:

  • Author Pages
  • User Groups pages
  • Historical Conference Proceedings
  • sasCommunity.org Planet (blogs aggregator)
  • Several unique and very popular articles

Some of this content may be relocated to the SAS Support Communities (communities.sas.com) with the help of SAS Institute. Historical proceedings might find a home alongside the other proceedings we have for more recent SAS conferences. Code-based projects may be a better fit on GitHub, a site designed specifically for sharing code related to any technology. All ideas are under discussion, and we welcome your input.

Thanks for your valuable support over the years, and we look forward to continued collaboration!