Totally agree

<rant>
As I recall, IBM withdrew the Lotus Redbooks, then told us "wait, we will have the same great information to you in a wiki." Meanwhile, months went by before we saw any hint of a wiki. Now, they remove the Sandbox. Whether they take your advice or not, months will go by before there is any apparent movement toward OpenNTF or whatever replaces it (or not). While not perfect, it was still a very useful resource. And what do we have now? Nothing.
</rant>

I want to make it clear that I am not throwing stones at OpenNTF. What I am ranting about is the removal of a resource without an immediate alternative. If you knew that in 2010 you were going to remove the Sandbox, then you should plan for an alternative.

And fix the TechNotes that refer to the Sandbox. Like this one, for example:

{ Link }

I would like to see the resource consolidated with OpenNTF so there is a single source for all the "free" code. There may be intellectual property issues with the content of SandBox, but probably no more than exists with all the old OpenNTF projects that continue to be hosted.

The sandbox is a great place to easily deploy simple solutions. Rather than keeping Sandbox totally separate, it could be viewed as sub-system of OpenNTF.

I make this relationship because Sandbox applications are very simple projects and to unify it under one location reduces the fragmentation of ideas through disparate sites. Another reason I think they are related is that Sandbox applications are OpenNTF projects before the become "projects". So you can get the app out there, and should more functionality be needed it can be converted into a project.

So, OpenNTF is really the Sandbox on steroids. But having the old sandbox provides a means to follow the natural progression of an application from an idea to a more serious implementation if required.

But the sandbox should not clutter OpenNTF projects. Some distinction will still need to be made between a Sandbox app, and a project, as I would think only a fraction of apps actually become projects. Otherwise it will get "noisy" and dilute the benefits of projects in OpenNTF.

It takes more wisdom than I have to see the benefit of taking this away.
That's the politically correct way of saying that taking the sandbox away makes absolutely no sense.

Although I don't code as much these days, even for admins the sand box proved to be a gem for utilities time and again. It is a treasure trove for developers. Reintroduce that gem of a place.

IBM needs to re-host the sandbox due to the fact that there are hundreds, no thousands of different postings on IBM's sites and many other public sites that reference links to the sandbox for code to fix or find problems etc. I am glad I have a local copy.