A bit of gossip about TC...

[Proinsias]

Thanks for that Chip.

Always appreciated all the time and effort you put into TeaChat, sad to see it end the way it did.

[doomslayer]

Hello! So this is a bit random and I don't want to create a separate topic for this but I am a bit shocked. I used to be an active TC user a decade ago and learnt so much about teas. Long story short, a lot of "life" happened during these years (primarily good stuff!) and I kind of abandoned my tea hobby. I decided to get back to it and went back to TC today to ask a question about water. I created the thread and...noticed that the place is literally dead.

A few hours of frantic googling later I found this forum and thread. And I even recognize some old names, like Chip! No idea how I still remember this a decade later. Is this the new TC and where most people went to? I've browsed around and it doesn't look super active, but certainly not dead like TC. I really hope things work out because I don't know where else to get good quality info about teas. The closest one that comes to mind is reddit but their r/tea hasn't been working terribly well for me so far.

[Victoria]

Hello! So this is a bit random and I don't want to create a separate topic for this but I am a bit shocked. I used to be an active TC user a decade ago and learnt so much about teas. Long story short, a lot of "life" happened during these years (primarily good stuff!) and I kind of abandoned my tea hobby. I decided to get back to it and went back to TC today to ask a question about water. I created the thread and...noticed that the place is literally dead.

A few hours of frantic googling later I found this forum and thread. And I even recognize some old names, like Chip! No idea how I still remember this a decade later. Is this the new TC and where most people went to? I've browsed around and it doesn't look super active, but certainly not dead like TC. I really hope things work out because I don't know where else to get good quality info about teas. The closest one that comes to mind is reddit but their r/tea hasn't been working terribly well for me so far.

Yes we are ex-TChat’ers, flew the coup when they started deleting our threads and topics randomly. Literally thousands of posts and member participation hours down the tubes. Chip describes some of it here. Glad you found us!

[doomslayer]

Just curious - what were they deleting, did they go after those long threads with various vendors?

I don't know, it's just pure speculation on my end and maybe it did improve their financials in the end but for me personally - back in the day I found out about Adagio only because I was hanging out on TC; I know people were discussing a whole bunch of random vendors there but I still was occasionally purchasing random things from Adagio, like a kettle or a pack of random teas as a present for someone new to teas, in part because I had an extremely positive perception of their brand due to the community they let grow. Naturally I'll avoid them like fire now; it was a very "interesting" business decision on their end.

[Bok]

I've browsed around and it doesn't look super active, but certainly not dead like TC.

Forums are pretty dead in general, but for now I think we're doing a good job in keeping it alive and interesting enough.
Any forum will only be as good as its members and their participation. In that sense I am hopeful

[mbanu]

r/tea hasn't been working terribly well for me so far.

They have a similar set of problems to the ones being complained about here. The rules on the sidebar are only the public rules, different folks are under their own set of private rules under threat of banning. I received my own private rules when I started warning new people about the adulteration and counterfeiting problems that you need to watch out for with Chinese teas that people who are used to tea from other countries are not used to looking for.

[lUKAV28]

They have a similar set of problems to the ones being complained about here. The rules on the sidebar are only the public rules, different folks are under their own set of private rules under threat of banning. I received my own private rules when I started warning new people about the adulteration and counterfeiting problems that you need to watch out for with Chinese teas that people who are used to tea from other countries are not used to looking for.

I am interested in hearing the the adulteration part.

[Baisao]

They have a similar set of problems to the ones being complained about here. The rules on the sidebar are only the public rules, different folks are under their own set of private rules under threat of banning. I received my own private rules when I started warning new people about the adulteration and counterfeiting problems that you need to watch out for with Chinese teas that people who are used to tea from other countries are not used to looking for.

I am interested in hearing the the adulteration part.

It’s an open secret. If your dancong tastes remarkably like allspice, rose, or Febreeze, there’s a reason.

[doomslayer]

This is actually the topic that I am very interested in exploring and have been thinking about it for years. It’s very off topic here so I’ll create a new thread for this once I am back from work.

[swordofmytriumph]

I've browsed around and it doesn't look super active, but certainly not dead like TC.

Forums are pretty dead in general, but for now I think we're doing a good job in keeping it alive and interesting enough.
Any forum will only be as good as its members and their participation. In that sense I am hopeful

This is such a great forum. Everyone is so welcoming here. I always try to point people this direction from r/tea. Lol, I even pointed someone to Victoria’s pot cleaning post from r/fermentation when they asked for info on how clean their unglazed fermentation crock.

[teabooksart]

I was actually pointed here from r/tea by a mod! At first I thought they meant TC and was surprised as I thought it was dying a painful death. I can see I was right about that. I was so confused and sad about what had happened to TC so thank you OP for making this thread! That being said, I am excited to see that the community seems really solid here.

[hopeofdawn]

I was on Teachat when the whole thing went down, and watched the new Adagio people (web devs? mods? who knew?) at first try to claim they were 'improving' the forum, then 'updating' the forum, then go from soliciting feedback, to promising fixes that never arrived, to actively ignoring any user complaints/feedback. And then they got rid of Chip and began deleting 'old' threads en masse, and it seemed like the whole forum just turned into a ghost town ... not quite overnight, but within a couple of months.

I wasn't a very prolific poster, but it was very sad to see. I stopped checking Teachat, and never realized that there was a new forum to migrate to until I stumbled on this one a couple years ago. Still not sure how I found it ... knowing me, it was probably a random Google search for tea-related things when I was bored. Regardless, I'm very grateful to everyone who stepped up to give real tea discussion a new home, even if it's a lot quieter than our old one!

[swordofmytriumph]

it was probably a random Google search for tea-related things when I was bored.

That's how I found this place. I had been getting back into tea after drifting away from it for a few years, so I went to join TC because whenever I googled the answers to questions I had, TC results would come up. I joined but within an hour realized it was a ghost town. Was pretty bummed. Decided I needed to join a forum for tea lovers. So I googled "tea forum" to see if there were any other forums around, and since this place is conveniently named Tea Forum, it was the first result. Then I realized that a lot of the usernames here looked really familiar.

[pedant]

i'm not trying to be disrespectful towards TC, but i was browsing their site and saw some funny changes.

they put "Oldest and Largest Tea Forum Online" on every page in the title.
this seems to be an attempt at targeting the "tea forum" keyword.
what if we put "Come join us for Tea Chat" in our title?

but their staff also makes a daily thread featuring an adagio tea.
e.g. "May 5th Discussion"
each is just an ad for their tea.

so if you look in their active topics, basically half of them are adagio spam.

[Bok]

i'm not trying to be disrespectful towards TC, but i was browsing their site and saw some funny changes.

they put "Oldest and Largest Tea Forum Online" on every page in the title.
this seems to be an attempt at targeting the "tea forum" keyword.
what if we put "Come join us for Tea Chat" in our title?

but their staff also makes a daily thread featuring an adagio tea.
e.g. "May 5th Discussion"
each is just an ad for their tea.

so if you look in their active topics, basically half of them are adagio spam.

Yes it is quite hilarious, I’ve watched it from early on when all those “people” commenting on their tea of the day discussions popped up in a matter of days. Even with obvious similar images to the Adagio admin )))

Your idea of Come for a teachat is good! I’m all in for it