Come join us over at GRFX.co
Just a couple of items worth mentioning

� Legacy site owners can still receive support and technical assistance for their current sites on the grfx.co forums. Leo has committed to supporting the legacy theme so if you don't wish to change, your sites will continue to run.

� Our forums and community support features are for anyone with a self hosted site. We hope to make this the go to place for solving any self hosting issues and making all our our sites better.

� Here are some of the topics under discussion this week
     When does a photo stop becoming a photo and become an illustration?
     Popular themes and plugins that grfx site owners are using.
     Site to site networking feature - should it be continued,how would you like to see it changed, or modified?
     and of course the obvious one..."How your site is like a chainsaw"

Come over and join the discussions, give your two cents, ask questions and make your site a better selling tool.
http://community.grfx.co/forums/forum/grfx-community-forums/

Hi Everyone, I think it might be a good idea to move to a different part of the forum from now on.
Please direct your questions about grfx and the sys-stock legacy theme here.
I will do my best to answer your questions.

Hi Ron, to a certain degree you are right. But abandoned might be a bit of a strong word. Once the theme became stable it really didn't require a whole lot of care. I think how you are defining "abandoned" might be more correctly categorized as a lack of improvements. And there were a lot of improvement requests. At one point just before Leo finally "broke" I believe there were close to 20 in one day. Every one of those suggestions would have been nice to have for one or two site owners but really wouldn't have benefited 95% of the community. On top of that there was an expectation that these improvements should be free. It just didn't work and Leo in his unique way of communicating expressed his frustration. Once development was stable and the improvements stopped there was very little to talk about other than how the theme doesn't work and the most interesting threads were us site owners bickering among ourselves. I have been guilty of that myself, not my finest hour and I regret some of my comments as well.

But we are moving forward. We have learned some of what caused progress to stall and result in the community becoming less active. I am trying to address these issues and keep it from happening again.

Good Morning.
Regarding some of the above comments I would like to weigh in to the discussion for a bit.
1) As of Sunday night there is only 1 developer of Symbiostock. That would be Robin.
2) Furthermore, as of right now there is only one person offering support on Leo's Legacy Theme. That would be Leo. He will continue to make sure your sites are working and stable. In keeping with the open-source concept and symbiotic values that the original theme was based on, Leo has posted specific instructions as to how another developer can offer their own updates and support. As far as I know neither Robin nor anyone else other than Leo has shown any interest in supporting legacy sites. I understand that there are legacy site owners uncomfortable with Leo handling their updates and keeping their legacy site operating. These site owners should lobby another capable person to offer their own branch of the legacy theme which they would be responsible for. From what I understand this is very basic coding and should not be very difficult to accomplish.

Regarding the networking feature of the legacy theme. The premise was strong. That is why it was built as a theme instead of a plugin in the first place. And yes it was probably oversold, mostly because we all wanted it to work so badly that we put our complete faith in the concept. Ultimately anyone who was expecting the networking feature to be the perfect solution was doomed to be disappointed. However, the contention that it is continuing to be promoted by Leo and I is simply not true. We know it doesn't work and I've been saying so for over a year now. The networking feature in a perfect world probably would have worked but in reality it turned into a network grab with people clamoring for "the best" partners. It also resulted in disappointment when "so and so" wouldn't link back or a private group was created and others couldn't get in. This was one of the key failures Leo and I identified when we started discussing a better way.
There are many other failures with the original concept but we learned from them. Starting over with grfx.co we have made adjustments based on what we have learned over the last couple of years. The primary lesson was that it is the community that drives success. Sharing ideas and helping each other. In these ways the legacy program was a huge success. At least until the community aspect died. Once that happened stagnation followed and ultimately the project stalled.
I intend to rebuild that community. Visit us over at http://community.grfx.co/ or start the discussion here again. Either way lets rebuild what made the original legacy theme so unique and potentially powerful.

FWIW the grfx.co community is open to all image producers regardless of your media.