I just wanted to take a moment to thank codinghorror for the many ways that he helps the SDMB. He may not have changed the pet issue that each person on the board wants fixed, but he’s done a lot for the board in general. In MY opinion (and maybe not his), he takes a lot of grief from several people on this board. I’m grateful that he continues to show up and help out.
Here’s just a few examples of ways I think he’s helped the board.
Someone wanted wording to be fixed to cancel a draft of a post. codinghorror got it changed.
Got rid of a list of spam
Has replied approx. 78 times in site feedback and 30 times in ATMB. In most of those posts, he’s answering questions and giving tips and pointers on how to solve issues that are being asked.
Alerted people about some bug fixes.
Helped coordinate with zogstrip to fix migration errors that fixed the @ function.
I’m sure there’s a bunch more stuff that he’s done to help coordinate fixes for the board and stuff I didn’t see. Maybe other people have seen his help that I haven’t seen and can post about it here.
I know you mean well, but this type of post doesn’t seem wise to me, at all.
Sure, by all means, point out the changes he has made. If that was all you did, I wouldn’t object. But you’re fawning all over him, acting like he’s not got any flaws.
This thread now is essentially begging for someone to come in and give counterexamples. I’m having to bite my tongue so hard at this point, because I know those would help even less. (Heck, I’m posting this to hopefully stop people from posting such.)
I will say this much: I stand by my argument in the other thread about why talking to him can be quite frustrating. I thus understand people like the person in your first quote being frustrated with him.
And I do not think a thread like this helps with that frustration.
So do I. Read my post again. I said that it’s fine to report the things he’s done. The problem I have is the context and over-the-top praise.
This is not just some spontaneous thread, thanking the guy. It’s a reply to another poster, and as such flat out invites that poster to reply. And it’s just so saccharine that it pushes even me to want to add some balance by pointing out some negatives. I’m not usually the type who wants to do that.
Unfortunately, explaining further would do the very thing I’m hoping to avoid.
Wow, in this day and age of constant negativity you can’t even give someone a little praise for making things a little better without someone coming along and telling you that giving someone a little praise is a bad thing to do.
Can’t have people enjoy things, no siree, then people might be a little bit happy and we can’t have that now can we Internet?
Thank you Coding Horror and all the mods who put up with all the B.S. Part babysitting and in this day in age of social media they need a law degree to keep SD out of the courts.
I agree that he has been very helpful and I appreciate his involvement here despite owing us nothing. I believe he’s here because he likes the place and that’s cool.
@codinghorror would likely be better served if he let his wife pick out his clothing before leaving the house (although if you are going to wear T-shirts with that frequency, he does have some cool ones). Based on where he lives, he’s possibly an eater of bowls containing beets and avocadoes served over quinoa. He also seems to favor the Wumpus over the Wampus, which is almost unforgiveable.
Now that we have the flaws covered, years ago (long before he started working on Discourse and even before stackoverflow) he was the person who introduced me to Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold. I love that book so much that I added it to the “New Hire Package” at the office, although I’m down to my last few copies and it appears to be out of print for now. He’s also a big Tufte fan, and I’m always happy to find like-minded designers.
More importantly to this site, he’s been far more helpful in our transition to Discourse than should be expected of the software’s creator. We were on vBulletin for two decades and I can’t name a single person/user associated with them. His activity level here comes close to what I’d expect if the software had been written specifically for this board.
Discourse isn’t perfect. It is a well-designed piece of software that might take design directions that I don’t always agree with, but even they appear to be in place for a reason.
Based on his initial approach to us about ten years ago, I would say that’s right. He also used the SDMB in some of the documentation for Discourse.
I still don’t like being nannied about posting too much, but that’s probably not a bad feature for software that’s being used for a site that doesn’t have cool mods like we do. Since we do have cool mods who keep the discourse moving, I don’t think we need it, but eh, feature, not bug.
