so vote with your feet, or at least with your p’ness, if you feel so strongly.

I’ve already said that I won’t be renewing my subscription.

We have the ultimate say in that in the end the site / forum will rise or fall based on the users

That was my point: when you have a growing body of people saying the same thing, and you rely on those people for income, then it’s prudent to listen, and show you’re listening.

….. but their choice whether to or not. And I’d argue that a/ they have to an extent, and b/ if they decide not to, or not to the extent that others like, continuing to prod and poke (or worse) is pointless.

….. but their choice whether to or not. And I’d argue that a/ they have to an extent, and b/ if they decide not to, or not to the extent that others like, continuing to prod and poke (or worse) is pointless.

It seems pretty clear that the steps taken by Mark are in response to user feedback, so there’s no reason to suppose that more can’t be pushed for. Maybe you’re happy with the few crumbs that have been thrown, that doesn’t mean that everyone else should shut up. Have you considered that people are commenting because they want a vibrant resource to continue and thrive, and believe that the current course is the wrong one? Your “like it or lump it” attitude seems odd, to say the least.

Where did I say like it or lump it?

I said that IMHO we’ve done enough shitflinging, and moaning about whether it should have been done this way or whether Mark should be on hourly in sackcloth and ashes apologising, we should now focus on positive debugging.

I said that IMHO we’ve done enough shitflinging, and moaning about whether it should have been done this way or whether Mark should be on hourly in sackcloth and ashes apologising, we should now focus on positive debugging.

Giving feedback on how we want the forum to be and to be developed is not “shitflinging” or “moaning”, and I find your pejorative descriptors, coupled with argumentum ad absurdum regarding what we would like from Mark to be ironic really, because you’re doing exactly the same thing: attributing an extremist position to others to make it easier to justify your own.

Well, actually reading Mark’s post about what’s going on it’s clear that there’s a number of systems that in the past have been hacked together and they are now trying to sort them out. The forums are one subsidiary part of this.

I don’t know the regulations regarding BACS but from Mark’s comments about the cost of setting up a temporary server with it on, it sounds like each node is tied to a particular server/system probably to prevent fraud/money laundering. There’s the mention of other payment systems as well, they’ll have their own rules to follow.

It’s a bit like taking your car to the garage and complaining that they didn’t polish the bodywork when they spent all their time rebuilding the engine.

Edit: If I come across a bug/fault, I’ll raise it. The main problem here is that really you need a proper issue tracking system in which to report bugs. Someone then has to take care of duplicates put in by people who won’t take the time to see if it’s already been reported.

Link to videos works by just copying and pasting the url into the box. Check.

Clicking on the quotes symbol works. Check.

Emoticons next…

At last. Coming along nicely.

👍🏼

😬

I still don’t get any option to choose emoticons – I can add a smiley 🙂 or sad 🙁 because I know the keystrokes but I’m not geeky enough to remember the others.

It seems pretty clear that the steps taken by Mark are in response to user feedback, so there’s no reason to suppose that more can’t be pushed for. Maybe you’re happy with the few crumbs that have been thrown, that doesn’t mean that everyone else should shut up. Have you considered that people are commenting because they want a vibrant resource to continue and thrive, and believe that the current course is the wrong one? Your “like it or lump it” attitude seems odd, to say the least.

Mark’s statement is pretty clear I thought.  He’s acknowledged that the current situation is less than ideal, but they’ve made a business decision to proceed the way they are taking into account lots of other factors which aren’t immediately visible or obvious to everyone else. Communication could have been better, sure, but it looks like that’s being addressed now too.

I’d respectfully suggest that what people may or may not believe is by the by as they aren’t in full possession of the facts.  It’s like sitting in a pub with a load of football fans who all know better than the coach.  And I don’t mean that as an insult, just that as I’ve said all along there’s a lot more going on than what we can see.

By all means continue to feed back your thoughts here.  But the “few crumbs” is just the first step as Mark said.

There’s been plenty of shitflinging and moaning in the past 45 pages, even in the last page.

Attitude still stinks.

….the upgrade has been shite, if you want to defend it then carry on, from a user perspective it’s shite. Features broken, no help, no explanation. no advice as to how any new featrure/**** worked etc. Finally the owner showed up and still doesn’t manage to apologise to his customers about how shambolic the upgrade was.

The irony is that it isn’t the state of the forum that makes me spend less time here now, it’s the increasing nobbiness of the people who frequent it.

No has he emoticons but the forum does accept those from devices with them built into the keyboard.

📱

🤪

The irony is that it isn’t the state of the forum that makes me spend less time here now, it’s the increasing nobbiness of the people who frequent it.

Very much this.

The main problem here is that really you need a proper issue tracking system in which to report bugs. Someone then has to take care of duplicates put in by people who won’t take the time to see if it’s already been reported.

We have a shared document with issues on it which we’ve collated from this post and others.  Duplicates don’t matter because we can either add any additional information presented or simply ignore them.

>We have a shared document with issues on it

Is one of them WTF is the quoted text size set so ridiculously large?

There’s been plenty of shitflinging and moaning in the past 45 pages, even in the last page.

I wouldn’t have expressed it that way, but I don’t think it’s wrong.

I’d respectfully suggest that what people may or may not believe is by the by as they aren’t in full possession of the facts.  It’s like sitting in a pub with a load of football fans who all know better than the coach.  And I don’t mean that as an insult, just that as I’ve said all along there’s a lot more going on than what we can see.

I don’t recall claiming to have all the facts. I’m just a customer and revenue generator, who sees a highly problematic upgrade, one not replicated anywhere else I’ve used on the web.

I think perhaps the point is that whatever we say or do, to some people’s eyes it’ll be wrong.

And so long as ‘some’ means a prejudiced minority, then that isn’t really a problem – even if one or two then go effing and jeffing at you. There are enough idiots out there that they will almost always form at least a small minority of every population. This really isn’t the issue.

Using a few isolated examples of outright (and totally out of order) personal abuse and then projecting this onto the rest of the folk here is actually quite insulting and also reinforces what seems to be a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality.

Sure there are a few malcontents in here who want STW to fail – presumably they’ve had some kind of run-in with Mark or someone else – but forget them.

What there is a majority of is people who use this place because they like it, like the vibe and have settled on it ‘organically’. People who generate the ad revenue with clicks etc. They don’t want to see it fail, but they don’t want to be frustrated by trying to use it either. They (like me) are only here because they like it – if something is done that cocks it up and makes it so they don’t like it then they will drift away. They won’t send an expletive-filled rant. They’ll lament it occasionally, but they are not the types with “STW Forever” tattooed on their limbs either.

I don’t think anyone is “projecting” anything, that’s not how I read it anyway.  I’m certainly not.

<div>theotherjonv
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The irony is that it isn’t the state of the forum that makes me spend less time here now, it’s the increasing nobbiness of the people who frequent it.

The real irony is that it is the piss poor state of the forum that is bringing out the inner nobbiness of people. 😉

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I don’t think anyone is “projecting” anything, that’s not how I read it anyway.  I’m certainly not.

OK.

Probably best not to use such examples in this context, then.

We have a shared document with issues on it which we’ve collated from this post and others. Duplicates don’t matter because we can either add any additional information presented or simply ignore them.

shared document, eh?

that’s an example of bleeding edge software development technologies, right there…

It doesn’t cost much, well anything actually, to install something like Redmine along with Git to give yourself a basic bug tracking and software version control system. A few minutes to download and a few more to set up and you’re ready to rock and roll.

I’ve got a basic club membership management web “site” on my home computer. No-one else is ever likely to see or use it, I’m the only person to have ever worked on it. New features/bugs get added to the system, I create a branch in git to work on a particular problem. Check the work in, merge back to master, close the feature/bug. The code for the actual club website is also in git, same applies but obviously people see the end result. If there’s a problem after I’ve pushed changes then it’s easy to roll back to a working version and re-release that.

Is that cutting edge or bleeding edge?

And has anyone seen the cake yet?

If there is blood on the cake I don’t want a slice anymore thanks.

that’s an example of bleeding edge software development technologies, right there…

You know, it’s really disheartening to have people complain time and again about a lack of communication and then as soon as someone does try to explain something there’s always someone else lining up to take pot shots. It’s no wonder Mark isn’t on here every day giving updates, I can’t say as I blame him.

It wouldn’t have been my choice of method either, but it took seconds to set up and it works.  If they’d spent a couple of days implementing a bug tracking system or a CVS or something, there would be someone pissing and moaning that they should be fixing the forum instead.

Incidentally,

I’ve no idea what if anything STW uses internally for versioning, bug tracking etc.  They may well already have these things.  This was a method for us to report issues instead of sending multiple emails, is all.  What happens after that I don’t know.

It wouldn’t have been my choice of method either, but it took seconds to set up and it works. If they’d spent a couple of days implementing a bug tracking system or a CVS or something, there would be someone pissing and moaning that they should be fixing the forum instead.

Well one would hope that a VCS was in use already, and also an issue tracking system as well really.

Otherwise it is not really a surprise that this upgrade has been so messed up.

Setting up an issue tracking system wouldn’t have taken that long, not withstanding that one should be in place already. And it’s a classic case of a little time spent now is better than time lost later because you aren’t using the right tools.

Running a test server and disabling anything with financial implications should be easy – if there are configuration issues then these should have been sorted out before the upgrade – it just sounds like the devs are flying by the seat of your pants.

I’ve no idea what if anything STW uses internally for versioning, bug tracking etc.  They may well already have these things.  This was a method for us to report issues instead of sending multiple emails, is all.  What happens after that I don’t know.

We use Redmine.

A lot.

I wasn’t having a pop at you Mark, honest 🙂 , more musing on how I do it for my personal stuff. We have heavy duty systems at work linking bugs/requests with version control and billing, but way OTT for most.

@Cougar – My misunderstanding of what you meant by the shared document. I took it to mean that was the bug tracking system, I think others did too.

Just logging in again for the fourth or fifth time today.. 😉

Scrolled back a few pages to find Mark’s post. Which is a useful bit of explanation. I’ll not get too much into it but regular communication is very important to maintaining good will. I would suggest that post is added to the other locked forum post that only Mark posts in, and that the title is updated to reflect the last update – E,g ‘our forum – updated 14/02/18’

then people will see that an update to communication has been made and will read it.

As a note, I’ve been a print subscriber to both singletrack and grit.cx so done my bit to help this place along. All I and a lot of people are asking is that the mushroom principle isn’t applied to us

Mark, is the “Forum -> Favourites” list being basically random a known issue?

Mark wrote:

Our plan and how it has turned out has well, gone as expected.
…
Why does it look like we are developing on a live system? Well, we have a testbed server with a replica of the live site and we use that extensively. We have a sandbox server too and we use that lots too. But with all the BACS, Custom payment systems and such that are intrinsically interwoven we had a choice to make.
We could set up our testbed server and install all our financial systems including all our subscribers accounts onto it and submit it for BACS approval and some cost in order that we could test the forum and site extensively before simply switch the old one off and activating the new one or we could do what we’ve done and safely install the new forum core functions knowing there would be quite a few cosmetic issues that would frustrate many of you that we would then fix.

This is the bit I still don’t understand. You had test servers you were running the new software on, but expected to have all these problems when you went live anyway? Or is the suggestion that all the problems with the user interface on the site are somehow related to integration with BACS? Why is it that you weren’t able to fix those things before integrating, before going live? If the problems were related to BACS, payment or financial systems then that might make sense, but we’re talking about basic forum functionality here, which should have absolutely no connection with those and should run live in just the same way as on the test servers.

If I lived a bit closer I’d take you up on the visit offer – I’d love to know why you aren’t seeing these problems on the test servers. It does all work fine on the test servers doesn’t it?

I suspect it is down to experience aracer. I doubt a business like STW can afford to recruit at a real hairy arse level. I remember the dev ads having a salary circa £25k which is going to get you a lot of enthusiasm but not a huge track record of having done this sort of thing before. I’ve been through this many times and it isn’t easy so I do sympathise. Ultimately they are a publisher not a cloud company and this is probably where change is needed and hopefully is happening.

Sure, but we keep asking for them to be honest with us and Mark is still being bullish about it all being done in the best possible way.

Is there any idea when the buttons will appear for the button-less?

Member
Is there any idea when the buttons will appear for the button-less?

Buttons? Don’t need them if you can BB-code.

Oooh, new things? 🙂

Buttons? Don’t need them if you can BB-code.

Perhaps a sticky How-To guide would be a good idea to help keep the forum going in this indefinite period of malaise?

Oooh, new things?

Where are you seeing that?  Looks the same to me?

>Perhaps a sticky How-To guide would be a good idea to help keep the forum going in this indefinite period of malaise?

That was my suggestion also..