Talk:EPrompter

Deletion of links to same site

Most of the links in the LINKS section are links to the eprompter.com website but just different pages within that site. Surely most of them should be deleted and leave the single eprompter.com link as the only link back to the products site. --Whoredom 20:33, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Some Background

In its heyday in the 2000s, there were millions of downloads of this program. It is a great pity to see what has happened since then.

I came across the program in 2009 and installed version 2.0 SR 120. I had nothing but trouble with it and soon switched to a different product. The only advice on the forum was “uninstall and reinstall”. A new version, 3.0, was promised and people on the forum were basically treading water and swallowing the constantly-repeated promise that the new program was coming soon. One of the groups in the forum was even called the Party Faithful, with group members praising the existing program and speculating about the new version.

Over the next four years, forum activity dwindled as it dawned on members that no software was going to be forthcoming. It became a case of checking the forum once a year just to see when the site would finally die. The volunteer administrator, user Ximinez who, with the moderators, had done a valiant job fending off all the queries, gave up in 2014 or thereabouts.

The forum was shut down in summer 2016, by which time there was just a handful of posts for that final year and it was probably too embarrassing to leave a moribund forum open. Nevertheless, on 22 June 2016, editor sdcraigo, claiming to be the CEO of Tiburon Technology Inc. in California, (Craig McAllister?) updated the second paragraph of the article with the promotional statement that the release of version 3.0 was anticipated in 2017.

I hate to say it but by then a statement like that was beginning to sound very strange. The world had moved on. By 2016, how could a program possibly have been in development for eight years, including beta testing for four years and yet throughout that time there were no reports on the forum from testers? How could this program be beset by years of problems when other e-mail notification programs could apparently cope with the same difficulties?

As of today, the ePrompter site still maintains a ghostly presence on the web with the same 500-word message headed “Important Update Info” that has been up, with minor modifications, since 2009. (The opening of the fifth paragraph: "For the past three years..." is years out of date.) It would be interesting to know the full story behind what looks from the outside like a slow-motion train crash.

It is probably time to redraft the article to reflect the current reality. I will do so in a few days. Freeman501 (talk) 18:05, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

I have redrafted the article. Again, what happened to ePrompter was a pity. The developers should probably have reassessed the program’s prospects around 2011 and quietly announced its demise, but there must have been a heavy emotional commitment to its continuation, especially after maintaining the program successfully for over a decade previously. Freeman501 (talk) 11:22, 30 July 2021 (UTC)