Have we lost Codinghorror?

Site Feedback
21

This.

There’s a bit more history to this than just this past year. When codinghorror showed up in 2012, he solicited opinions from Dopers about his idea for a new community forum, which later turned out to be Discourse. He was given a lot of shit in that thread, partially fueled by the snark forums by the end…

Can we build better forum software?

Then when Discourse was released, he was given even more shit about it.

New Forum Software - Guess who is the poster child for why things should change?

Ironically or something, a bunch of years later, the Dope was placed on the Discourse platform, the same platform that many Dopers thought was not a good fit for the Dope

I thought codinghorror was a good egg for showing up again after all of that to help out and answer some questions. I give him props for that.

I don’t blame him at all for taking off. It would have been nice for him to be able to post as a regular poster without some people treating him like he was their personal errand boy. I was enjoying him as a regular poster…

22

BigT does BigT. He was trying to explain very carefully, since codinghorror was seemingly not getting what we were saying. The rest of the posts were perfectly normal.

23

If he’s actually holding against us skepticism from 8 years ago, then I suppose his flouncing out is in keeping with that.

All he had to do was say that he was unable to make changes, not insist that we’re doing things wrong when the mods very politely asked to enable comments in the flags that didn’t have them or be able to disable the flags that don’t have comments enabled.

24

Exactly. I wasn’t even saying we’re special–I was saying all boards are special, and all may need different options. That the moderators of long-running boards have been doing it for years, and that they might know what’s best for their community. And while, for the most part, Discourse was indeed flexible, It seemed to me at the time that he was letting a personal preference color the software, rather than letting the software be flexible to his needs.

Since then, we’ve had many more pleasant conversations. If he was upset at me for what I said originally, he didn’t show it. When I figured out how to present suggestions properly, he was happy to take one that might help deal with an ongoing Discourse issue (“ghost bumps” from spammers who got deleted, which would pollute the new forum feed. I suggested automatically resetting the most rerent post date whenever the last post of a thread had been deleted.) His response seemed delighted that I understood what Discourse was trying to do.

Do note that he specifically asked for us to give him suggestions on what to change. He told us that we had a golden opportunity because the creator of the software was on the board. And, frankly, to the vast majority of issues, he did explain how an administrator could fix them.

The problem is that we don’t have an active administrator, so none of those changes could be implemented. And I don’t think either side ever quite understood that–codinghorror didn’t understand that we didn’t have anyone who could make the changes he suggested, and others didn’t understand why he couldn’t just go in and make the changes himself.

As for his original thread (and the subsequent one about using us in his advertising)–yeah, I do think some people hold animosity from that. I actually have at various times wanted to give him a friendly heads up on why some posters might be hostile. For my part, I’ve long said that holding on to stuff like that is counterproductive, and that you should judge someone by how they act now, and the way he interacts with me suggests he agrees.

And, to his credit, he did take my main suggestion back then, which was the same as it is now (despite the bad tone). That, if you want to make the “ultimate forum software,” the software needs to be flexible to the needs of the forum. And, for the most part, Discourse is.

I will freely admit that my hesitance towards us moving to Discourse right before the move was misplaced. It still has its issues that I wish would be ironed out, but it’s definitely good. (And most of those things will be fixed if we get a new, more active administrator)

I freely admit that I was wrong to be so worried about the move. I was working from an old idea of what Discourse was.

25

I probably should have posted this here, and not where i put it:

26

Not sure why that post showed as only mine that you quoted, and that without attribution, until I clicked the downarrow and could then see the whole thing, including your reply and the proper attribution.

I don’t think I was. I was trying to understand it.

I still don’t understand why, if we were supposed to put all requests and suggestions not anywhere on the Dope boards but instead on the main Discourse site, we’ve got the entire Site Feedback forum, and that without anyone pointing out that instead of that forum we should have a link to the Discourse page. In fact, codinghorror posted frequently to that forum, and without as far as I can tell ever telling us that we were supposed to be posting such discussions elsewhere. So if that’s what he’s ticked off about, why on earth didn’t he say so months ago? And if he didn’t want, himself, to discuss such issues on the board, why did he keep on doing so for so long, and often with all appearances of being happy to do so?

27

In an ideal world, we’d have an active administrator. The users would discuss what they want here, on this forum. The administrator (and possibly the mods) would determine what changes they wanted to make. If they had questions, or ran into actual problems with the coding, then they could go to the discourse support boards.

A lot of small changes can be made by the admin, and most probably don’t need to be bumped up to the discourse board.

But since it’s not obvious to users which things are baked into discourse, and which can be changed, it makes sense to discuss those things here.

I assume that eventually they will find a new administrator who doesn’t prefer to be retired. :wink:

28

The Site Feedback forum here was so we could provide feedback to the admin. We absolutely should be providing feedback about configuration changes we want made, and ideally our admin would handle that. We also are welcome to ask for changes to the platform, but our expectations need to be tempered. Platform changes means either it changes for all forums, or the platform needs an option to turn something on or off (see below for why software config options aren’t the panacea people somethings think). And it really should be our admin taking that feedback up to the Discourse folks, instead of a bunch of people here paging the co-founder of the platform to complain. (ETA: or what puzzlegal just said.)

Because I think he’s a nice guy who genuinely wanted to help us out. He has a lot of forums on discourse (1500 or more, I think), yet he still spent time to help just this one. And some people abused it. One poster here would randomly page codinghorror with “fix your platform” posts in the middle of threads because they didn’t like some feature. Consider that codinghorror sees a huge variety of forums, yet people here with experience on only this one or maybe a few more kept arguing how much more we know than him. Yes, we know more about SDMB, but we don’t know more about forum software.

He eventually realized that his personal participation in our forum was counterproductive and it would be better for us to follow the standard channels, so he politely bowed out. It would reflect better on us if we were appreciative of all the extra time he did spend with us, instead of arguing he either shouldn’t have engaged in the first place or he shouldn’t leave now.

29
My tangent about the problem with configuration options in software: (click to expand)

Software platforms like Discourse are used by many groups with different needs and priorities. That means either one group doesn’t get exactly what they want, or the developer can add a configuration option: turn it on and it works the way group A wants it, turn it off and it works for Group B. Perfect solution, right?

There are a few problems with that. The first (and often only) one people think of is the time to develop that feature. Every development cycle you spend on one feature for one customer means something else you can’t do.

But that’s actually the least important reason to not add options willy-nilly. Much more important is the complexity each feature adds, which impacts the platform in a couple ways. First is around testing. Let’s say one module of my platform has 100 test cases - every time I have a new release, I need to run those test cases to make sure everything still works. If I’m testing “perfectly”, then one simple on/off option doubles my test cases. From there, it’s exponential because I should test every combination of on and off for each option. With four options, I’m up to 1,600 test cases. At ten options, I’m over 100,000 test cases. Even if I automate the execution of the tests, someone still has to define the expected result for each case. Of course, the reality is that no one actually doubles the test cases each time, so I’m also increasing the probability of more software bugs.

The other big problem with complexity is product training and support. Training materials have to include all these options, and the expected functionality for each case must be documented. Support staff has to know how the system will behave differently in each case. Software support is not the most glamorous job; a lot of people get into it as a stepping stone to something else. Turnover is high, and median employee tenure is measured in months, not years. So the more complexity in the system, the less likely they are to know how it should be working, and the more they have to chase through levels of a decision tree based on all the configuration options. All this adds up to poor support.

And finally, a product that tries to be everything for everyone is destined to fail. Just because some customers want a feature or option, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to add it. If codinghorror wants automatic moderation tools to be part of his brand, it hurts his brand and strategic direction to add a bunch of features focused on the type of moderation we’re used to. Some people wish Rolex would also sell cheaper watches, and some people wish McDonalds had options like caramelized onions and fresh avocado. But that’s not what those companies want to be.

All that said, it’s a balance. Obviously, configuration options make sense in many cases, and any software platform will have some. Reasonable discussions can be had about the costs and benefits of new options. We shouldn’t shy away from those discussions, and neither should the platform developers. But we need to recognize the reasons why we might hear “no”, and not be so arrogant that we think what’s important for SDMB is obviously important for Discourse.

30

But again, with very few exceptions, that is not what was happening in the recent discussions. We were not only hearing “no”, we were hearing “I don’t even recognize this as an enhancement a reasonable person would ever want.” So it seemed like nothing we asked for would be done, ever, even when there was time to develop, since from the point of view of the developer it was ridiculous to even ask.

31

I’m pretty sure that some of what we’ve asked for can be done with the existing software, if we configure it differently.

Honestly, while i recognize it came across as “you have no reason to want that”, i think he

  1. was trying to explain his reasoning to us
  2. hoped to get approval of “his baby”.
  3. despite that, he was honestly interested in what worked for us and why, because he really does want to improve.

But people got angry, and he probably got angry back. And sad as i am to lose him, i suspect it’s good for all concerned if he takes a break from us. I do hope he eventually returns. He seems like a really nice, helpful guy.

32

I admit that I didn’t have the history, and I misunderstood the situation. The subsequent posts in this thread have fleshed that out, which has been helpful. I would say that there were misunderstandings and assumptions on both sides. Overall, I agree that Discourse has been a massive improvement, in terms of functionality. If a request or suggestion is not possible, just say so and I will use a workaround or just live with it. If codinghorror does return, a pinned thread (or any thread) explaining the situation and his role would be extremely helpful.

33

I want to clarify that I don’t think he’s doing that. In fact, when that thread was recently revived, codinghorror posted:

From my perspective (not his), he was an awesome guy for coming back and helping out after what happened to him when he first joined.

Bill Gates posts on Reddit. He does the most awesome Secret Santa ever, and he does some AMAs and such. When he’s there, he sometimes answers questions about his software, often very politely. But if people demanded that he do so, I personally feel it would be reasonable for him to delete his account. Thankfully, no one does that at Reddit, so he continues to hang out there sometimes.

In my view, I didn’t get the sense that he was angry. It may have looked like that because he inactivated his account. I think he just realized that with all the confusion, he wasn’t helping the conversation, as TroutMan explained.

Back in 2012 when codinghorror stopped answering questions about the software, someone here emailed him, demanding that he return to answer questions. I don’t want to dredge that back up, so I won’t give details. It’s just an explanation for why he might have left the inactive label instead of just stopping answering. He might have wanted to pre-empt any attempts at future contact like what happened before.

34

I was responding, as I quoted in the post of mine you just quoted, to a couple of posts that seemed to imply we shouldn’t ask such questions of codinghorror at all, however politely or on topic; or even to ask them on this board; but that all such questions should go direct to the discourse feedback board.

That may not have been how those posts were meant; but I was responding to the way I read them, and TroutMan’s posts #9 and #16 still read that way to me, though post #28 appears to say differently.

35

This thread has helped me understand a lot of backstory and nuance I was unaware of, so thank you for that. However, I take issue with the characterization that he “politely” bowed out. In my thread noting that it is hard to tell the difference between “Oct 17” and “Oct '17,” I was certainly not rude, and all codinghorror did was post an annoyingly coy response.

If I was out of line to use the “Site Feedback” section of this board to post what I did, then I apologize. But c’mon! How the hell were we all supposed to know that? That’s a genuine question, by the way - if I missed something I should have read, I’ll gladly apologize for my carelessness.

However, it’s hard not to feel that lack of communication skills on codinghorror’s part contributed to this situation.

36

CairoCarol, you weren’t out of line at all to post those comments and requests where you did. That’s what the forum is there for!

The SDMB messed up by not setting expectations properly for what kind of changes were possible, how our feedback would be used, and what role codinghorror was in. Codinghorror could have done more there too, but he probably assumed (correctly) that it was the job of our admin. Which all would have been fine if we actually had one.

So codinghorror was having conversations about the platform, how we could work with what we had, and taking feedback for future changes to the platform. Meanwhile, we were asking for changes in how the forum was configured, and neither side realized these were different conversations. That’s bound to piss people off on both sides, because no one feels like they’re being listened to.

We made certain assumptions about codinghorror’s role and participation on the board, and as a result some of our requests and comments appear pretty rude and dismissive when you look at them from the perspective of his actual role. Codinghorror made assumptions about what we were discussing and what our (non-existent) admin was doing with our requests, and his responses can appear rude and dismissive when looked at from our perspective.

I do think he was polite when he finally bowed out, even if some of his comments leading up to it didn’t seem polite for the reasons above. By the time he left, we would have been pissed at him no matter how he did it.

37

Thanks for the above, and for other explanations. This whole thing is starting to make more sense to me now.

I hope somebody is also explaining us to codinghorror! but maybe he’ll read this thread, who knows.

38

We are an acquired taste, I fear. :thinking:

39

Wait, was that a flounce?

Can anybody do that, or do you need secret powers to do it?

'Cos over the past twenty-one years, I’ve seen a lot of posters try to flounce, only to be frustrated by their lack of a utility to do it with (coupled, often, with a lack of self-control).

40

coddinghorror isn’t just anybody, he’s the guy who made discourse.

I hope he reconsiders.