There is an easy fix to that. Type Nevermind, problem solved.
I’ve just read through this entire thread and I’m quite surprised that nobody seems to have explained why the problem is a problem - it was more like “We need this feature because we need it” and 'No, I don’t think you need it"
As far as I can see, people wish to have the ability to explain why they think it’s inappropriate because:
- The SDMB rules are pretty extensive
- Posts on the SDMB can be long, rambling and multifaceted
- Mods don’t get paid for their time, so wasting their time should be avoided
Sure, a mod could read through the entire post and try to work out a)what part of it the reporting user might have considered inappropriate, and then make a judgment on whether that is true, or alternatively, read the entire post and weigh up every minute detail of it against the rules (which might require reading the whole thread as sometimes, ‘inappropriate’ is highly contextual.
Or the reporting user could have the opportunity to say this bit right here, because…, and save the mod a whole load of effort.
It’s the equivalent of visiting the doctor and saying “I feel unwell”, and leaving them to try to figure out what you mean, and whether it’s serious, or taking your car to the shop and saying “It’s been making a noise lately” and walking away to leave them to check the whole thing over, or phoning IT and saying “My computer is not working properly” and then going out for lunch without explaining what actually happened, or why you think its not right.
???
Several posters, including What_Exit, who started this thread, and myself, did try to explain why we wanted the feature. Maybe you don’t think any of us did a good job, but I’m at a loss as to how you read this whole thread and concluded no one even tried.
In any event, it seems like a moot point, since the thread was aimed at requesting that codinghorror add the feature, and he’s quit the board.
Well, if we get a tech admin, maybe some of this can be addressed if I read codinghorror’s post correctly. Currently we have a Board or Staff Admin in Ed and a group of Mods. Maybe at some point we’ll get either a tech or a mod with admin powers that is techy to tweak some minor things like my request.
Sorry - my bad - I completely missed that, but I see it now. Apologies. I guess what actually happened here was that I saw a lot of circular ‘But we think we want it’ vs ‘but you’re wrong to want it’ and I accidentally skipped over the discussion of the specifics
Okay, so next question is how the hell do we go about GETTING such a person and making sure they have the correct permissions?
I guess someone like me should bring it up in the Mod loop. Ed would have to make the decision for anyone willing and set the permissions.
I’m not sure who the computer techies are among the more experienced mods, but it seems like ECG might be a prime candidate if he was willing.
I don’t even know if the Owners of the Straight Dope Message Board want tweaks being made though. It is possible they want the board as vanilla as possible.
It is better to get the Design team of Discourse to add switches for things then for the SDMB team to modify code of course.
Yeah.
We can probably go a very long way just with styling and with configuration.
Actually writing and installing custom server code is probably out of the question. Especially if this instance of Discourse is hosted within a cloud managed by codinghorror’s company.
My biggest issue with this particular request is… From a coding/programming perspective, I can’t imagine why flag notes:
A) Don’t already exist by default for all flags
B) Wouldn’t be trivial to implement
The work is already done. The database field for a flag comment already exists. Shrug
I completely agree with this, contrary to some of the simplistic comments made by others. My understanding is that, indeed, the SDMB site is hosted on Discourse servers, and that was in fact one of the reasons mentioned for enforcement of the 10,000 post limit per thread (for performance reasons). So that’s one reason that custom code would be problematic, despite Discourse being open source in theory.
The other reason is the need for the appropriate development expertise which AFAIK doesn’t exist within SDMB (at least, not in any official permanent capacity), and last but not least, as you astutely pointed out earlier, the extremely problematic nature of having to maintain our own code variant through all future releases. The only practical ways of maintaining a variant code base is either having our own active development team or freezing the code and refusing updates, which is probably impossible on a Discourse-hosted platform, and a terrible idea anyway since it gets us precisely into the position of obsolescence that we faced with the old vBulletin system.
All that said, I also have to say in all frankness that creating excellent usability involves a confluence of several factors. One of them is having deep experience of the subject as well as great technical knowledge, which @codinghorror certainly does. But the other is continuously augmenting this experience by listening to your users and having the humility to appreciate that they may be making a useful point that may make your software even better than it already is.
As a side note of perhaps some relevance, my own experience with custom code bases goes back many decades to the PDP-10 mainframe timesharing system. Those were the days of a relatively small number of very costly installations. The venerable process known as the SYSGEN was used to formally customize the standard release code according to available parameters. However, back in those days, the SYSGEN was done through assembly-time parameters which controlled how the source code was assembled into the OS image. The source code was thus available to all customers, even though the term “open-source” was still decades away from being invented, and this code was at any rate proprietary and in no way actually open source.
But the point is that these code customizations were feasible not only because each installation had a capable development team, but because such teams worked in close collaboration with the vendor (in this case, Digital Equipment Corporation – DEC), and often represented significant enhancements that were often later incorporated into the mainstream product. I’m not suggesting that such grandiose development would be realistic here, but nonetheless my point is that @codinghorror’s abrupt departure means the abrupt termination of any semblance of that kind of user-developer collaboration, which is very unfortunate because such collaboration, stripped of individual personality conflicts, is a win-win situation.
Perfectly said in a way that should make sense to the non-techies in the crowd.
My professional experience in IT isn’t continuous, but starts about when yours did, albeit in the IBM S/360 S/370 world. “Sysgen” was very much a normal part of the senior dev team’s workload. As was continuous technical feedback to the OS & hardware vendor.
Ed, et al will need to step up with a paid administrator position to have the level of care and feeding needed to safely launch off into custom configurations beyond the trivial. It may well be a part time gig. But it can’t (safely) be subject to the vagaries of e.g. you or I choosing to play this month but not next month.