Farewell, Friend: V.A.Discussion Forum Dies
Farewell, Friend: V.A.Discussion Forum Dies
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Fri Oct 19, 2007 08:40:48 CDT
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V. A. "Discussion Forum" was tragically killed on Sunday, September 30, 2007. Expiring at approximately 10:00 p.m., Forum went to cyber-space surrounded by his many friends and admirers.
Forum, born to The Victoria Advocate, left this earthly world much too soon. Struck down in the very prime of his life for reasons unknown, not a soul realized he was gone until it was too late. Rescuitation efforts by Chris Cobler and Dan Easton proved to be too little as well as too late. Life support offered little relief.
A very popular place to gather, Forum was visited often, and all who visited were entertained by the lively discussions found there. Never one to shy away from a controversial issue, Forum would want to be remembered as a catalyst for bringing out the best in most people.
Known for his neat and tidy appearance, Forum had excellent organizational skills that promoted a 'give and take' experience for his visitors that would rival the most eclectic Salons of 19th century Europe in terms of the intellect and stimulating thought brought forth by the great thinkers.
Forum leaves to mourn his passing his great friends Linda, bluegoose, Matt, Moved My Kids Out, Mike, Little Blue Book, Riverboat, ShureleeUJest, Coco, Tom, RedRage00, and others who are still grieving and trying to cope with this tragic loss.
(Please sign the guestbook at obits.victoriaadvocate.com)
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Just a minute ago, I posted a very positive comment about the HUGE improvement I found this morning. When I hit submit, it went somewhere, but not here.
So, I will try again.
Great job, guy! You all are working hard to fix this. This is perfect. Thanks!
Will try one more time...
(It worked!)
One of the major problems was that someone figured out how to post a meaningless message a dozen times or more on a given topic. The web master, Shawn Willmon, would get it cleaned up and the topic would get hit again. The trouble started with all the negative comments on the topic about the wanna-be cheerleader who didn't make the squad and Momma decided to sue the school board because her little darlin' wasn't chosen. I suspect some computer literate teenage hacker (a friend of the wanna-be maybe)figured out how to mess up the system. The phoney messages would sometimes run for two or three pages.
I do agree that the Advocate is trying to get this fixed, and I appreciate that. They are probably tired of hearing all the complaining.
But---help me understand why what we had prior to 10/01 seemed to work just fine, and what we have now doesn't.
Think about it-Everything seemed to be working just fine. The blogs didn't mingle with the discussions. Freshest posts sat on top. It was easy to navigate. Then someone decided to change it, and every working thing vaporized.
Question? Did all of the business records disappear as well? Is this why my paper has been thrown in my neighbor's yard for about the last three weeks?
You asked for patience, and I'm trying. It would be helpful if you kept us posted more frequently. Here, not on a blog.
You can probably have the order of listing go by date and time of last comment, instead of date of time of original story, or comment.
Mr. Cobler answered my complaint-filled post (listing the number of topics with zero comments, etc., etc.)in a rather clever fashion - he picked one of my blog posts titled "Mr Grumpy" to reply to my comments. The point of choosing that particular post wasn't lost on me - I so do appreciate a "dry" sense of humor, Mr. C!
In terms of old comments, we don't have an easy way to migrate that content to the new system. We hope the fresh comments generate even more discussion.
I'll try to keep addressing these and other isues as they come up on my blog,http://community.victoriaad... Thanks for the feedback.
Suzy - "I think the problem I have with it is that the threads/posts are listed by date...newest stay at the top and they stay in order, no matter what."That is precisely my gripe. I'm a member of a number of boards, and I've never seen anything set up like this. That, and the fact that so much material regarding the district woes suddenly disappeared. Coincidence? One can't help but speculate.
Read this fast, folks! In a couple of days, this will be buried under layers of more posts.
Well, I certainly appreciate your attention to this matter. I knew you guys were reading these things. All of your answers are to the questions I posed to Chris Cobler on another thread. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and I know Shawn is getting tired of talking to some of us. Or maybe just to me. I feel like I am screaming about this, and no one at the Advocate is listening.
This post was not meant to necessarily provide levity, but I am okay with you finding it funny though. Sometimes I crack myself up, too! I particularly liked the guestbook thing at the bottom, didn't you?
In any event--I am truly impressed that you would respond, so I will try to clarify a few things that I thought I had made perfectly clear.
First, just for the record, my buddy bluegoose is accusing you of murder; I am just saying that you are unsuccessful at keeping this alive. I don't know how much longer people will have patience. Only time will tell.
Now to the real stuff--waaaay back around 10/01/07, I complained about how hard it is to navigate through this mess. I would like to know how I was supposed to know that a discussion forum could not quickly be located under OPINION/DISCUSSION, but rather under COMMUNITY/COMMENTS. Who knew??? Where did we miss the directions? I think most folks just got lucky. You all were so busy promoting the Blogs and encouraging folks to start writing them, you failed to tell the non-bloggers how to use the rest of the website.
Expose the catagories all you want on the front page, but until all writings from the outside world are no longer dumped into one big pool, more or less, new listings on that page are meaningless. I never said there were too many catagories. The drawing of the process, though, looks like a funnel.
Items with 0 comments-fixed. Thanks.
Can't see previous...I'll trust that you take care of it.
I don't expect you to see that this is worse that the old version--you are part of the birthing of this baby, and you are proud of it. And you should be. This was a huge undertaking. However--if "the last thing we want to do is rush into a change that makes things worse.", can I take that comment as validation that you all won't make THAT mistake again?
Yes, all of us crybabies are from the old discussion board. You got us interested in something we liked, and then you yanked it away. What were we supposed to do?
And, yeah--what Suzy says. She is right.
Every discussion board that I have ever been on, has the last post posted to, on top. That way, the busiest ones stay at the top, where people who actually post more than once, can find it. Does this make sense?
that was a joke ;)
Seriously, nice post "Little Blue Book". I'm glad you could bring a little levity to what has been a bit of an emotional situation for some.
I as well as others on staff are a little reluctant to comment on discussions because it sometimes has the effect of stifling communication (shhhhhh.... the "parents" are here...) In this case, since you are accusing me of murder, I have to interject to try to clear my name.
I'm sorry that you feel that the new system is worse than the old system, but I have to disagree with that perspective. As with any online system, there are certainly things that can be improved. In this case, there are probably a half a dozen things that we have identified as "high priority" changes for the next version and we are working hard on those. Unfortunately those things take time. We would appreciate any patience you can muster. The last thing we want to do is rush into a change that makes things worse. I also think that with any change, people that were familiar with the original version have trouble accepting the new version. It's interesting to note that almost all of the complaints have been from those active on the old comments area.
I'll try to address some of what I think I've heard regarding the problems with the new site:
1) Finding "Your" Discussion - You can view all the most recent comments by going to [Community]->[Comments]. If I understand correctly, you can't find the thread you are interested in because there are so many other comments being posted that get in the way. Basically that translates into "Gee, this sucks... there is too much activity on the site now". Hopefully you understand why we don't share the same perspective, but maybe I'm just not understanding exactly what the problem is. Also note that we just fixed a bug with this today that was hiding some of the most recent comments, so perhaps that played into this. Please help me if I am not understanding this correctly.
2. Categories - I completely agree that there are too many categories - this requires some management that we aren't currently setup to do. In addition to managing it, we plan to expose these categories, including tag clouds similar to what is on the home page now, only instead of "Things They Like", it will be "Things They Are Talking About". We also hope to bring more structure to this so we can have content "channels" based on these topics, but again that will take a little more time to develop. This allow people to go to "areas" of the community site to find others that have similar interests.
3) Things With 0 Comments - We had been working on this for several days and got it fixed yesterday. Sorry... a bug slipped though. It happens. There are still some other problems related to this that we are fixing today.
4) Can't See Previous Comments When You Post - This is on the list. The technology we are using allows this right out of the box for comments on Blogs, but not Articles... go figure. We're trying to figure out how to hack a fix into the system. Also, as I type this I see how annoying it is to have such a small box... maybe I'm not supposed to be so long-winded...
I always say... when something isn't broken, don't fix it!!
I loved the way it was. I knew it would always be entertaining, lively, and informative and looked forward to checking in every day. Now....BORING and really not worth looking at.
I am still attempting to recover from your loss.
Tom :(
