Discourse and our reaction to it
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Tah dah! Easy [chuncking] solution.
Oh sorry, I didn't read your post before basking in the glow of my genius.
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Then you continue scrolling and reading, you end up re-reading a lot of the same posts
Then either don't open, or do close the Replies popout. Your call.
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I hate the keep-adding-new-stuff-to-the-bottom-of-the-page of infiniscrolling. I hate it on Google image search, I hate it on YouTube, and I hate it on Discourse.
I hate it on all of those, and on Tumblr archive pages too!
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I believe with this we can satisfy the Infiniscrollers and the Paginators in one fell thrust
As long as you also provide an option to load all the posts on the current page in one hit, and turn off loading posts above the top or below the bottom of the current page, so that the scroll bar and thumb work as expected: yes.
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provide an option to load all the posts on the current page in one hit
Could still work, and not require re-engineering the "pillar of Discourse"
i.e. Discourse's vast and infinitely scrolling cock.
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Definitely +1 on this. Anyone who is serious about trying to fix the horrors on this site really needs to be able to tell the difference between taking the piss and trying to improve the situation.
That isn't how this site works. And besides, why are you people trying to track bugs in TDWTF Forums? How in God's name do you think that would work? Surely they have a bug tracker..
*Googles it*
Hmm.. okay, they no longer have a bug tracker, but bugs still go on meta.discourse.org.
It's a little ludicrous to track bugs here, on a site that uses the software. Who's going to go through and find them? Who is going to keep track of the status?
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Are you... are you aware of how many bugs we've discovered here in like 48 hours? At least two dozen.
Are you aware of the commits I have made in the last 48 hours, many are directly related to my experience here.
Commits · discourse/discourse
A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple. - Commits · discourse/discourse
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You bastard.
Oh my god. I honestly only now noticed how the FFX icon was turned, and I had to really stretch my imagination for the Safari icon.
I get it now.
FOEOIST is still the most immediate reading, though.
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Who is going to keep track of the status?
Surely there is an actual bugtracker where developers insert bugs they collect from places like this?
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and I had to really stretch my imagination for the Safari icon.
Yeah, I know, there aren't any browsers with X-shaped icons. Believe me, I looked.
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FOEOIST! FOEOIST! FOEOIST!
b
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Are you aware of the commits I have made in the last 48 hours, many are directly related to my experience here.
You should know that blakeyrat isn't particularly interested in information that solves any particular problem or addresses his concerns. He's basically a ball of rage with no long term memory. He often has valid points, but he also can't control his temper and is resistant to new information if it involves anything that's open source.
He's his own meme: blakeyrants
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So basically the forums are achieving their intended purpose.
No. The intended purpose of the forum is to have us discuss TDWTF-related things. We've now wasted nearly two days finding bugs in your software and being called morons. You've managed to waste time we could have wasted on something fun, and the forum is still an ugly, buggy, no-paging piece of crap I don't want to use.
And the clip you posted is copyrighted material. You don't own performance rights to it. You have violated the terms of your own damn FAQ. (though nothing in there is frequently asked, nor a question, so it's right on par with the overall discountability of the forum).
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Why isn't post count in the user widget?
Because.
Fuck that. I want the post count. I'm the fucking user of the system, not @codinghorror or his fucking ideas.
Again, @apapadimoulis, deal-breaker type stuff there. The users of the system-- y'know, us who are generating the content and ad-revenue-- want post count. Serious question time, Alex. Someone comes to you and wants to buy BuildMaster. During requirements gathering and discovery, you come across a set of features that are critical to the business. They're central to how the business operates, and is part of every employee's workflow. You know ahead of time that these features are not part of BuildMaster. You already know this is going to be a hard sell; many of the stakeholders in the company are hesitant to adopt BuildMaster. Even though they can see the benefit of some of the features, they are not willing to disrupt existing workflow.
You sit down with the Indedo team to discuss. During your research you discover that there are many, many, many other companies that use the exact same "unsupported" workflows. Do you and Inedo:
- Tell the company that they're wrong, their process is stupid, your vision is correct and they better just spend lots of their productive time and energy learning to adapt to BuildMaster, even though the majority of employees don't want it.
- Learn their workflow, and teach the company how to use things like "Manual Actions" to incorporate their workflow, even though it may mean a significant extra amount of work for the company and thus put BuildMaster adaption at risk.
- Take their feedback as valid, learn their workflow, and add it as a feature to BuildMaster. It may mean you take a bit of a hit on this project, but it will guarantee you get the company as a customer AND can turn around and market BuildMaster to all those other companies with the same workflow. And it will work, because now there is no barrier for adaptation for BuildMaster.
... because it's all the same scenario here. You/Atwood are trying to sell us on Discourse. And yes, there are tons of great features that make things easier like reading, cross posting, @repliying, etc, etc. Those are the features you're trying to sell us on. But the forum users, ie the company looking to buy your product, are telling you we have specific requirements. Pagination. Post count. Styled similar to old forum. Lots of other things that may not sound important to you or @codinghorror, but are mission-critical to us.
Right now, all we're getting back is #1. Yes, @codinghorror and @sam are fixing some bugs, but really-- that just means we're being abused as free beta testers for a platform we don't want. These are UAT bugs we're finding, not integration bugs.
Occasionally, we get #2-- in the form of "this might work, but you'll have to fork the code and make a plugin or write a Greasemonkey script". Well, that isn't really acceptable either. Every one of us works for a living in a profession that bills, at its lowest, between $100-$200 per hour. How much money are we supposed to sink into Jeff's project for him? Because for me, it's $0. I'm perfectly happy using CS, or a shitty phpBB (or Simple Machines, or D, or any other familiar forum software). Keep in mind that lots of people, including myself, have offered to do the job of getting a working forum running-- offered to do data ports, css, and so forth. Basically, we'd be willing to put in a bit of work helping you give our forum the final push onto a stable, accepted, working platform. Not spent dozens or hundreds of hours learning how to code in a new language, on a new platform, for an unfamiliar piece of software, to kludge it into working MAYBE how we want, but then having to maintain a custom fork of it. Nope.
If you and Jeff want Discourse to be accepted, we need #3. The things we're asking for are common. Common enough that if you come across any thread talking about Discourse adaptation, these are the things everyone is asking for. If all the users are asking for a feature, or expecting the software to behave in a way, then the software is wrong and broken and needs to change. Users are #1. Period. It doesn't matter how great Discourse is if no one will use it. And to be perfectly honest, Jeff should be making the changes we're requesting. Discourse as it is is way too big of a UI/UX leap from forums. It won't work. Too hard, to discoverable, too unfamiliar. We're telling him how to build a bridge.
And that feedback should be fucking valuable beyond rubies. Seriously. Everyone talks about the needs of the "user"-- y'know, that mythical unwashed masses of drooling idiots who are too stupid to "use computers", who just want their grumpy cat, don't understand technology, and need everything dumbed down for them. That's what the current "simple" software is aiming for. I don't believe these people exist. But if they do, Discourse isn't for them, because again, it's too big of a learning curve. The "users" don't do learning, right? If you dropped them blind into a Discourse install, they'll just get frustrated and leave, and here's the critical part: without giving useful feedback.
We are the developers, though. The power users. The architects. The maligned "not everyone knows software like you" minority. Again, I believe it's a bullshit false dichotomy, but let's go with it. We're the "real users", right? So we're telling you how to bridge the gap. Yes, it's because it's what we want-- but damn, this is valuable information here. This is the holy grail. This is how Discourse gets fixed up enough so that a drooling idiot user can just pick it up, say "that looks familiar enough" and use it. What's the resistance? What's the hesitation? Yes, getting it in place for TDWTF might be a burden, but goddamn-- it'll be a weapon @codinghorror can use to strike down all detractors and rule the world of discussion.
So why isn't he?
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Fuck that. I want the post count. I'm the fucking user of the system, not @codinghorror or his fucking ideas.
Again, @apapadimoulis, deal-breaker type stuff there.
I get the over the top reaction to infinite scrolling, but post count?! I'd like to have it back, too, but how can that possibly be a deal breaker? You're exhausting my capacity for #caring here.
Here's a question for @codinghorror, @sam and maybe @awesomerobot : is there another Discourse installation (that isn't discourse.org) that's as interested in bugs and features of Discourse as this one?
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@Lorne_Kates said:
But the forum users, ie the company looking to buy your product, are telling you we have specific requirements. Pagination. Post count. Styled similar to old forum. Lots of other things that may not sound important to you or @codinghorror, but are mission-critical to us.
I think that you're going a little over the top with this "ALL THE USERS ON THIS FORUM HATE THIS" when what you really mean "LORNE KATES HATES THIS". Stop lumping me in with your opinions, I am perfectly capable of forming my own.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Every one of us works for a living in a profession that bills, at its lowest, between $100-$200 per hour.
What purpose is post-count going to achieve? You know what rate you're posting, so you already have some idea.
Ok. I am very much intrigued by this statement and also you've lured me into starting one conversation with you.@Lorne_Kates said:
I want the post count. I'm the fucking user of the system
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Here's a question for @codinghorror, @sam and maybe @awesomerobot : is there another Discourse installation (that isn't discourse.org) that's as interested in bugs and features of Discourse as this one?
I am going to take risk and answer "NO". New forum v/s migrated forum. That is key
difference.
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I'm DumbByAssociation - which is too long to use as a username here apparently...
@too_many_usernames seems to have got his name sorted finally - you might want to have another go at changing yours.
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Wait, how would that achieve anything.
I don't know about everyone else on here, but I at least might hate you less. There's nothing that pisses me off more than someone who puts out bad software and refuses to admit it. Except, maybe, someone who puts out software and expects it to automatically fit every use case.Oh wait, you currently fall in both of those categories, so admitting your software isn't what we want, and that it's full of bugs would be a step toward making me (at least) despise you less. Instead you'd rather piss on what we want and tell us we're idiots.
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I get the over the top reaction to infinite scrolling, but post count?! I'd like to have it back, too, but how can that possibly be a deal breaker? You're exhausting my capacity for #caring here.
Yes, post count is important. It's a feature of the existing product. It may seem trivial to you, but it's something I enjoy seeing, not only on my user profile, but on others too. And other users enjoy it too.
It is a feature. One of the tenants of switching software is to not drop core features. It is something in every forum software even invented. I want that feature. The people who make this forum have plainly stated that they feel it isn't an important feature. Not that it isn't important, or impossible to do. Just that they feel it isn't, and I'm a bad person for wanting that feature. So yeah, it isn't so much the lack of the feature that's the deal breaker, it's the shitty attitude of the software makers who have literally said "I don't care about your desires, this is MY philosophy and I will impose it on you".
Not an acceptable attitude from a software vendor. If that is their design philosophy-- then fine, I don't want their software. Period. It's an unworkable relationship.
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I appreciate the reply, and you make a lot of valid points. But a couple things...
@Lorne_Kates said:
The users of the system-- y'know, us who are generating the content and ad-revenue-- want post count.
There have been no paid ads this year. I cannot put up AdWords because, somewhat ironically, all of the spam attacks on CS (links for selling credit card numbers, etc) flagged the site as shady.
The site costs about $2,000/month to run... well, slightly more this year with all the redesign expenses. Bottom line... this is and always has been a hobby site that I can justify the costs to run b/c I put a few ads for my company up. Speaking of...
@Lorne_Kates said:
Serious question time, Alex. Someone comes to you and wants to buy BuildMaster. During requirements gathering and discovery, you come across a set of features that are critical to the business.
This isn't a great analogy for a lot of reasons. You also didn't include option (4), which is basically, "wish them luck and move on." Sometimes aquiring or keeping a customer isn't worth the opportunity costs.
@Lorne_Kates said:
I'm perfectly happy using CS, or a shitty phpBB (or Simple Machines, or D, or any other familiar forum software).
Well, I'm not. Nor are a lot of other users.
@Lorne_Kates said:
Keep in mind that lots of people, including myself, have offered to do the job of getting a working forum running-- offered to do data ports, css, and so forth.
Offering is easy. I've gotten lots of offers for help over the years. Thus far, @moderator is one of the few who have made it in the "actually emailed me" camp, and from what it sounds like, might make it past the "holy shit this is actually a pain in the ass, and not fun to do" camp. I'm hopeful!
@Lorne_Kates said:
And that feedback should be fucking valuable beyond rubies.
Ruby is what, $2,000 per carat? Hmm, yeah... if I could only plant one tree, sorry, it's going to be the ruby tree.
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Whoops, hit REPLY to fast....
@Lorne_Kates said:
We're the "real users", right?
You're one user. These forums represent what, a few hundred users? Few thousand maybe? The discourse github repo has 10k stars and 2,800 forks.
Of course user feedback is important, but @codinghorror's job is to balance ALL of the user feedback, carefully weighing paying user feedback and free user feedback. Guess which camp we're in?
The fact that him and @sam even show up to answer this rediculously hostile feedback is why I'm so committed to Discourse.
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The site costs about $2,000/month to run
I'm curious here, because I've never tried to run a website - but what drives this cost? Surely electricity and the net connection aren't anywhere close to that are they? Or is someone being paid to monitor the server(s) or something?
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I was curious about the same thing. I have a forum site up for the video game I'm developing, and it only costs about $400 per year for the domain name and hosting. (Though there is very little traffic except for in the private subforums used by me and my partners, but that could change once we make it to a semi-public Alpha stage.) Also had a one-time $140 cost for XenForo which is the modern non-crappy version of vBulletin.
Are you actually renting a dedicated server instead of some kind of shared hosting solution? And I assume it's Windows, which seems to make hosting more expensive as well. I'm probably just getting a tiny slice out of a LAMP system somewhere.
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Offering is easy. I've gotten lots of offers for help over the years. Thus far, @moderator is one of the few who have made it in the "actually emailed me" camp, and from what it sounds like, might make it past the "holy shit this is actually a pain in the ass, and not fun to do" camp. I'm hopeful!
What specifically do you need help with? I'm less than useless when it comes to RoR but I could certainly take a whack at some of the CSS stuff that's been mentioned, maybe even some JS if that's a thing that you have control over. Maybe you should start a
threadtopic where you can post specific requests?
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Agreed. I looked into Ruby on Rails once and my brain nearly exploded, but I have a fair amount of JavaScript/JQuery experience and would gladly donate a bit of time if there was a specific list of TO-DOs.
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The most expensive server package I can find with my host is £340($570)/mo for the first 24 months then £50($85)/mo thereafter. That includes things like backups, dedicated server etc.
The package I have running 3 hobby sites and a business website off a virtual host is £18($30)/mo.
I can only summise that there must be some employee costs in there somewhere
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Yes, post count is important. It's a feature of the existing product. It may seem trivial to you, but it's something I enjoy seeing, not only on my user profile, but on others too. And other users enjoy it too.
It is a feature. One of the tenants of switching software is to not drop core features. It is something in every forum software even invented. I want that feature. The people who make this forum have plainly stated that they feel it isn't an important feature. Not that it isn't important, or impossible to do. Just that they feel it isn't, and I'm a bad person for wanting that feature. So yeah, it isn't so much the lack of the feature that's the deal breaker, it's the shitty attitude of the software makers who have literally said "I don't care about your desires, this is MY philosophy and I will impose it on you".
Not an acceptable attitude from a software vendor. If that is their design philosophy-- then fine, I don't want their software. Period. It's an unworkable relationship.
I'll admit I'm on the fence about post count myself, but the way @codinghorror put it, they think putting in post count is dumb because, as PJH pointed out:
[meta.discourse.org: Show post count of users][1]
Show post count of users
No, we absolutely don't want this there.How much you talk has nothing to do with how well you listen. And conversations require more listening than talking, so why make "how much you talk" a high score? It's counterproductive.
If anything I'd rather put number of posts read there, not posts created
While @codinghorror makes half a good point, that how much you listen is important, that's a value that's to difficult to accurately measure. Someone could easily inflate that value by build a bot to slowly scroll through the threads for them.
Like @Lorne_Kates, I like seeing how involved someone is in the forums. It's kinda cool seeing how much time they put into being a part of the community. The only effective way of measuring that is to show a post count, and I shouldn't need to go into their profile to see that.
Ah, screw being on the fence. I'm with @Lorne_Kates about this. Just not quite so ... vehemently.
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@Lorne_Kates said:
Yes, post count is important. It's a feature of the existing product. It may seem trivial to you, but it's something I enjoy seeing, not only on my user profile, but on others too. And other users enjoy it too.
Funny thing is, I'd say that removing post count and focussing on read time is about the only thing that they've managed to get right. Everything else isn't about breaking people's expectations of how forum software works, rather breaking people's expectations of how web pages work. Back button? No, that doesn't work how you'd expect it to. Browser history? Nope, we'll crap all over that. Search button? "Nah, we beak that, use the search facility instead". It's a fucking usability abomination, it seems strange to focus on something as trivial as post counts.That said, it's far easier to remove something (as I tend to do with post counts on other forums) than to magically make it appear when it's not there.
But no, the developers aren't listening, aren't willing to listen. And neither's Alex.
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Are you actually renting a dedicated server instead of some kind of shared hosting solution?
Yes, it's dedicated server and some extra stuff like backups. Maybe that's $400-500 month?
I also firmly believe in paying authors; it takes a tremendous amount of time/effort/energy to write articles, and while a (small) check doesn't quite compensate for that, I think it's a nice "bonus" -- maybe something you can take the wife to dinner with, buy a video game, whatever.
And then there's misc administrative expenses, like gas money/tolls when I drive to Pittsburg to meet w/ Mark and Remy, and paying the bookeeper to keep track of everything.
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Ah okay. So there's more than tech costs in there.
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Ruby is what, $2,000 per carat?
Ruby is free, idiot. And I don't know why you'd want more than one. The 2.0 branch blows 1.9 and 1.8 out of the water. Unless you count jRuby as a ruby, too?
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This isn't a great analogy for a lot of reasons. You also didn't include option (4), which is basically, "wish them luck and move on." Sometimes aquiring or keeping a customer isn't worth the opportunity costs.
You're dismissing @Lorne_Kates's analogy too quickly. While it might not be a perfect reflection of your business, he's trying to give you something that you can directly relate to. If you encountered a situation like that, a case where adding a new workflow to BuildMaster could open up an entire new customer base, would you really just let them go? If so, I guess you're ok setting limits on the ultimate growth of BuildMaster, and that's your choice. @Lorne_Kates was trying to say that must people in that situation would take the chance to expand their market base, if they could. And while TheDailyWTF isn't paying for Discourse, I'm sure there are groups out there that would pay for discourse, if some of the stuff that we've asked for was added in as optional features.
The fact that him and @sam even show up to answer this rediculously hostile feedback is why I'm so committed to Discourse.
From what I can tell, and I may be wrong, we didn't start hostilities. We said that we wanted a certain set of features, and @sam kept asking why we'd want them, despite being given multiple use cases. Then, he told us:
Technically what we are doing here is far more complex than paging, Discourse really is rainbows, nothing is stopping one of you writing a plugin that gives you godawful paging.
Telling a user base, especially a skilled user base, that what they have is hard to do, and what they want is "godawful" is a good way to piss them off. From my point of view, that's when things got heated. I feel like that comment is what started the hostile attitude.
Of course, it didn't help that many users are frustrated that when you asked for input, you ignored some of the things that were flagged as absolute deal-breakers. People wanted to keep a similar look and feel (completely gone in Discourse), and there were many who voiced opposition to infinite scrolling, even before Discourse came. The fact that those two points - and possibly others, but those seem to be the biggest - were completely ignored pissed a lot of people off before @sam and @codinghorror even showed up. From reading various posts, and definitely speaking for myself, it feels like the user base is being told to either accept the changes or fuck off.
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What specifically do you need help with?
I guess, getting the forums up to snuff? I don't know specifically what that involves.
As I mentioned somewhere else, there is just a single server with discourse installed... and we're all new to this software. It's very easy to add in CSS and Javascript. In fact, here's one thing that we added in...
<script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ /* Only hack in "Feature" link if user might be an admin... This is actually authenticated on the TDWTF side. */ if (!document.getElementById("show-topic-admin")) return; var articlePost = $('#post_1').html().match(//i); if (!articlePost) return; var articleId = articlePost[1]; $('nav.post-controls').each(function(index){ $this = $(this); var postId = $this.closest('article').attr('data-post-id'); $this.prepend('<button class="create" title="Feature this comment"><a target="_blank" href="http://thedailywtf.com/Admin/FeatureComment.ashx?postId=' + postId + '&articleId=' + articleId + '">Feature</a></button>'); }); }); </script>I'm very hesitant to modify the core code, because right now the system is set-up to update very easily.
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I did nothing of the kind....
Yes you did:
meta.discourse.org
Show post count of users
No, we absolutely don't want this there. How much you talk has nothing to do with how well you listen. And conversations require more listening than talking, so why make "how much you talk" a high score? It's counterproductive. If anything I'd rather put number of posts read there, not posts created.
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I guess, getting the forums up to snuff? I don't know specifically what that involves.
I'm reminded of a half-remember Douglas Adams (I think it was DNA):
It was a bit like writing "end poverty poverty" on the to-do board. Good intention, but a bit light on the specifics.
As @mott555 said a few posts up, if there's a specific set of TODOs I'd be happy to donate some time, but "make the forums perfect for everyone all the time and make it shoot rainbows and give all free handjobs" is a bit of a tall order.
Client: I don't like it.
Designer: What don't you like about it?
C: I don't know.
D: Is it the color?
C: No, the color's fine, I just... can you make it pop more?I think it would be a good idea to have a thread where this stuff was broken down a little bit more. Help us help you.
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I'm curious here, because I've never tried to run a website - but what drives this cost? Surely electricity and the net connection aren't anywhere close to that are they? Or is someone being paid to monitor the server(s) or something?
It involve making payment to entertainment star posters like me. Luck would have it, I am cheap, unlike Shahrukh Khan who is charging more than 1 million rupees to dance at weddings.
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The 2.0 branch blows 1.9 and 1.8 out of the water.
DFHack, the Dwarf Fortress modding system, still uses version 1.8.7 of Ruby, meaning simple things like XML sanitization and conversion from CP437 to UTF-8 are missing and have to be added for each script separately.
It's quite annoying.
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If you encountered a situation like that, a case where adding a new workflow to BuildMaster could open up an entire new customer base, would you really just let them go?
Maybe. There are many paths to growth/success, and none of them are guaranteed. Some of them give short term gains, but ultimately send you down the wrong path (i.e. mid-/long-term losses).
It took me a lot of years to understand that, and I wish I understood it a LOT sooner. So no, I'm not being dismissive, I'm just saying it's most definitely not, see growth opportunity, take it.
From what I can tell, and I may be wrong, we didn't start hostilities.
Oh, you are most definitely wrong. I saw a lot of ad homimen long before they jumped in, but moreover, when you so critically/harshly attack someone's life work, yeah, that's pretty hostile.
When people talk about me or my work that way, I tell them to fuck off and then ignore everything they say after that. Their opinion isn't valid and they may as well not exist.
Of course, it didn't help that many users are frustrated that when you asked for input, you ignored some of the things that were flagged as absolute deal-breakers.
I listened, and I tried to do it. But, the work turned out to be a lot harder than I thought and significantly less fun.
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There have been no paid ads this year. I cannot put up AdWords because, somewhat ironically, all of the spam attacks on CS (links for selling credit card numbers, etc) flagged the site as shady.
That is a complaint for a whole other day, then. I did make a few spam mitigation suggestions (using a database trigger, since that's the only part of CS that was under your control), cause I fucking hate spam. Hopefully a new forum will help. I don't know anything about Discourse's spam controls.
But here's the catch 22: if you put up a more secure but less popular forum, you lose users and thus the potential ad revenue.
This isn't a great analogy for a lot of reasons. You also didn't include option (4), which is basically, "wish them luck and move on." Sometimes aquiring or keeping a customer isn't worth the opportunity costs.
In this analogy, that's Jeff picking up his forum and moving on. He's free to do that. What you're implying is booting forum users. So what percentage of forum users are you willing to lose-- both in terms of users, and their contributions? How much of the community is worth letting die in order to switch software? Do you know what the critical tipping point is, where there won't be enough users left to sustain the community, and no one new will join because there isn't enough activity?
Well, I'm not. Nor are a lot of other users.
Except for all the users who said "I'd be happy with a phpBB-like installation". I concede it is your server and your choice, but still.
Offering is easy. I've gotten lots of offers for help over the years. Thus far, @moderator is one of the few who have made it in the "actually emailed me" camp, and from what it sounds like, might make it past the "holy shit this is actually a pain in the ass, and not fun to do" camp. I'm hopeful!
WTF, Alex? I've literally said "give me the data base and I'll do it". And you know that not only am I good for delivering projects, I love this site enough to go way the fuck above and beyond for it.
Here: http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/30922/355720.aspx#355720
Monday, 10 Feb, 2014 "Regarding the content, I'd argue heavily against archiving the current forum in a read-only mode. It will kill all existing conversations, and make it impossible for new users to add to "older" ones. There's been plenty of times someone has discovered a thread a week or two after the last post, and can provide relevant information without necroing. I feel one of the top priorities should be recreating all user accounts and threads and post-counts. If you need help with this, I've done data migration before. Any change you can clone the CS database and give me a test-install of whatever custom version of Discourse you're going to use?"
That was a month and a half ago, before I got busy with the dance show (which is June 3, 4, if anyone's in the area. And by area, I mean "Markham, ON", which I have to tell you because Discourse doesn't show user location in the meta widget). I can pick that ball up again right after the show. I could have had it done before these beta forums went live. I'm glad Moderator is working on it, though it's later in the project life cycle than I'd be comfortable with if I was pm'ing it. The offer's still there. You have all my contact info.
Also, I noticed in that thread he was taking the reins on the look and feel to match the current install: http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/30922/355475.aspx#355475
"The skin and appearance of Discourse will be as close to TDWTF's look as possible. We won't let the two things feel like separate sites."These look like vastly different sites. Is Remy working on this still? The only reason I haven't tried to write a stylesheet or userscript is because I assumed that part of the conversion requirements was being met. If not, fuck, add it to my list of offers.
You're one user. These forums represent what, a few hundred users? Few thousand maybe?
I can't phrase this in any way without sounding arrogant, so take it as you will: I'm an important user. I'm #2 in post rank. I start a lot of topics. I contribute to others, both informative and humor. I write for the site. I've been a member since Sep 2008 (if you count my old account). I believe in this place enough to sign my real name to everything I say and do here. Everything I'm saying has been echoed by a number of other forum members. I'm just writing it way more often and way more passionately. I am a representative sample. (And for the record, both Morbs and Blakey are also top users, and in some way agree with me re infinite scrolling-- so that's a larger sample).
What's up in the air is how big of a slice of the community my opinions represent. I'd hazard a significant amount. Maybe less than all, but certainly enough to make a dent. And also up in the air, how important this feedback is. If you want to just say "fuck it, it isn't important", fine. Message received. Site owner and software vendor have heard and don't care. WONTFIX. I'll shut up and stop using the forum. Right now I'm operating in the hope of effecting change. Let me know if that isn't an option on the table.
Of course user feedback is important, but @codinghorror's job is to balance ALL of the user feedback, carefully weighing paying user feedback and free user feedback. Guess which camp we're in?
If we're in a camp that's labelled "fuck them", then that's a pretty shitty camp to be lumped into. If we pay him, will he give a fuck about our concerns? If so, I'd hate to pay to have to have my concerns cared about, but how much does he want? If not, then why pay him at all? If not paying him means he doesn't care about us, why are we using his product?
(And by pay him, I mean how much would the community have to throw into a Paypal account to get him to seriously fix this and implement pagination?)
What other user feedback is he getting? From what I've seen, infinite scrolling is a major hurdle. I don't believe we're the first to bring it up. In fact, searching for "Infinite Scrolling Discourse", one of the first hits is a meta.discourse.org post called "Discourse Infinite Scroll has bad UX" https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-infinite-scroll-has-bad-ux/15415
So what is this balance? What else aside from massive, breaking UX does he need to balance with?
The fact that him and @sam even show up to answer this rediculously hostile feedback is why I'm so committed to Discourse.
In some ways, it is admirable. In others, it is pathetic, because they aren't addressing the issues, they are dismissing them. I'd rather have no reply than a "fuck you". And yes, the feedback here is above average hostile, but really it's because we vocalize here what others feel. Because we know how to vocalize it.
And to be honest, what the hell were they expecting? They're beta testing on a site of developers. nonono-- on a site dedicated to developers-- dedicated to developers talking about pointing out the flaws in software--- dedicated specifically to developers ripping apart bad software in a hostile and humorous manner. What sort of feedback was he expecting? And again, going by representative samples, this feedback is feedback he should be getting from other users, but is either being ignored, or "average" users don't know how to vocalize it in painful technical details.
And finally:
The site costs about $2,000/month to run
I-- what? No comment, since I have absolutely no idea if that's normal or not, or ways to mitigate it. Others do, I'm sure.
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Yes you did:
No he didn't. He was just quoting Discourse's philosophy, hence the link to "meta.discourse.org". Which is why it's infuriating, because it's a set-in-stone "fuck you" to forum users who want a post count. It isn't saying "it isn't technically possible". It's "We've put in a concerted effort to NOT do this because we believe it's wrong how you enjoy the forum".
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I was indicating that @PJH pointed out that @codinghorror had said that.
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Oh, you are most definitely wrong. I saw a lot of ad homimen long before they jumped in, but moreover, when you so critically/harshly attack someone's life work, yeah, that's pretty hostile.
When people talk about me or my work that way, I tell them to fuck off and then ignore everything they say after that. Their opinion isn't valid and they may as well not exist.
See, you and I differ on this. As you know, Bob, I write. And I post it in public places. And I get feedback on it, by way of comments. Some of it is rubbish, and is pretty easy to dismiss. A lot of it is people's opinions. I like hearing "I enjoyed reading that". Sometimes the feedback is that someone didn't enjoy it, and I read that. "It was too long". "Too many spelling mistakes". "Needs more humor". I determine which of those are subjective. Some people just will not like what I write, it isn't to their taste, they just wanted a CodeSOD. Fine, sorry you didn't enjoy it. Spelling mistakes-- fuck yeah, that's my fault. I know I make spelling and grammar mistakes. I didn't know how many until they were pointed out. I still make them, but fewer, because I put a concerted effort to fix them. I don't just reply with "Hey, you guys know what I was trying to say, just read around them".
I'm part of a writer's group. Every two weeks, someone submits chapters from a story. And we pretty much tear it apart down to its core. The assumption is that it is broken and needs to be fixed, and that's the attitude we work from. It is literally asking to attack one's life's work. The plot is stupid. The characters are acting unbelievable. This is too much of a leap of logic. There was no foreshadowing for this event. Basic writer's craft stuff, because as an author you're too close to the words to see the whole picture.
Sure, there are trolls. They are easy to spot and ignore. There are people making invalid complaints, and sometimes it is worth addressing them to explain why something is the way it is. There are the rare few who are helpless (why isn't this a Supernatural Fanfic? Well, because it's a family drama set in Northern Canada. NEEDS MORE SAM/DEAN). Then you just thank them for the feedback and move on.
There is plenty to praise about Discourse. But that isn't what the point of the beta test is. This is UAT-- does this software meet our requirements? This is a bug hunt-- what is broken and how can it be fixed? This is a forum of experienced developers who are just as good, if not better, at the craft than Jeff is. This is top notch EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE feedback he's getting from peers and professionals. He literally could not buy this feedback. Seriously, even if you just take the top 10 contributors here, who so far have spent hours a piece testing this software-- that's a good at least 100 hours, at $100-$200 per billable hour-- we just gave Jeff $10k-$20k of our time JUST YESTERDAY.
For the developers to then turn around and say "your feedback is worthless, fuck you" is a goddamn slap in the face.
