Was the rabble.ca downgrade...er, uh, "upgrade"...worth it?

Rabble looks better; Babble not so much. Do we know whether Babble or other parts of Rabble get more traffic? I must admit I rarely visit other parts of Rabble.

Everybody seems to love the new rabble, but there are some aspects I find less than satisfactory.

The font is too small, and it's boring old Arial.

The quantity of commentary has increased, but the quality has not improved. Currently the main featured article is by David fucking Orchard!

Having the "Active Discussions on Babble" on the Rabble front page is a mistake, IMHO, because it is apparently unmoderated (computer-generated) and beyond editorial control. This would allow a right-wing troll to start a whole slew of babble threads with disgusting titles, and these would be displayed on Rabble's front page. And as far as I know, babble thread titles still cannot be amended.

Also, Rabble is often far behind babble in bringing news and commentary to the attention of readers.

As René Magritte would say, "This is not a tag line". Only he'd say it in French. You may find it rather annoying to have to discipline yourself to ignore parts of certain other people's posts - but not everyone's. Wouldn't it be better to abolish them?

I feel the same way, Oldgoat. My posting has dwindled quite a bit since the relaunch, which I've blamed on freelance deadlines, new contracts at work, and the holidays, though I think much of that is misplaced. It's been my failure to sync to the new software, or to put the time aside to figure out the new features and mourn the old.

It is growing on me though, and I am lurking constantly.

Tag- you're it.

[IMG]http://i34.tinypic.com/11raq06.gif[/IMG]

Yes, the upgrade was worth it.  Rabble moved from legacy software that is no longer supported or developed for to software that is continually coming out with new features and lots of developers work with.

Many come to babble to moan and criticize, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people will moan and criticize the new rabble.

I would agree that looking at babble in isolation that the new system is not as usable or feature rich (or unique, for that matter).  However i think the problem is not the software, it's that rabble management simply doesn't adequately value babble.  Converting to drupal could've made babble a lot better.  And this could still happen--but the management would have to actually put the emphasis on improving babble. 

wage zombie wrote:

Yes, the upgrade was worth it.  Rabble moved from legacy software that is no longer supported...

Is the New Elbbab's™ current software actually "supported" by someone? I ask because I have seen precious little evidence.

There's no point having software that can be tuned and tweaked to perfection if there's nobody around who is actually willing to do it for free or to pay someone else to do it.

Impressionistically, there seems to be a decrease in posting at babble, EM and BnR. I wonder if posting at any of these sites follows the rhythms of the year.

Expressionistically, I would say that I often find myself frustrated with the new babble and impatient at the speed of sorting things out.  However, it is what it is.  There are still more refinements to come.

I miss my old profile, and my picture.   If I click on someone's profile, there is a spot where I can see what personal info they have chosen to enter, including things like occupation and personal interests.  I have no idea if non mods can do this.  I'll have to log in in a sock puppet account sometime and see.  There's not much point in having that if no one can see it.

One of the things I really liked about the old TAT was that as a moderator I could keep an eye on potential problems and the way the threads were going by being able to see the first few lines of every thread.  It allowed for a much more effecient use of  moderating time, and I could intervene if things were getting particularly pissy. There's way too many threads going to be able to track every one now.  Also, if I have to read a lot of stuff I may not find otherwise interesting, this crappy font doesn't help, and is made worse as my less than perfect vision is subject to eye strain.

Ok, I clicked on your profile sven, and all I can see is a list of threads you've posted to.

As for as the profiles, where people list gender, occupation, interests etc., this doesn't seem to be publicly available.  This strikes me as less than useful, as Michelle and I for the most part don't really look at that.  Also, most people's are blank, because in the new babble we reduced the mandatory fields you needed to fill out to register.  This stuff of course should be voluntary.

Now I think I'll set about trolling, and see how long it takes Michelle to ban  this account.

M. Spector wrote:

Is the New Elbbab's™ current software actually "supported" by someone? I ask because I have seen precious little evidence.

Yeah, there are thousands of developers actively working to make drupal better.  Go to drupal.org and you will see evidence.  There's a drupalcon in Washington DC next week that will be attended by 1300 people and hundreds more have been trying to get tickets for the last month (sold out due to capacity issues).  Go to dc2009.drupalcon.org and check ou thte attendees and you will see many Canadians are attending.  Last year in Boston i saw one of the people that (i think) is responsible for the babble upgrade.

Last year in Boston we were sharing the convention center with a printing trade show, featuring companies like Adobe and Xerox.  We had a few rooms at the top and one session i went to, at one point the presenter said, "...and we're going to put all of those companies down there out of business!!!" and everyone started cheering.

Many developers see drupal as revolutionary software.  The goal is to eliminate the web developer and eliminate the web designer.  The more enthusiastic drupallers see this as akin to the printing press.  In this digital age everyone should have the means to easily create any kind of web space they need.  Drupal's got some usability issues, which are being worked on, but it's free and universal access is highly valued (it blows everything else away in terms of multilingual interface, for example). 

So sure you've seen precious little evidence but that may not mean precious much. 

Quote:

 

There's no point having software that can be tuned and tweaked to perfection if there's nobody around who is actually willing to do it for free or to pay someone else to do it.

 There are lots of drupal developers all over the place.  Go to groups.drupal.org/toronto and you will see a user's group that meets every month in Toronto.  There are not a lot of postings but if you sign up for the mailing list you will see daily activity.  I've been to some of the meetings and have seen 30+ people come out.  Every year Toronto hosts a drupalcamp and last year we had 150 people out for 2 full days worth of sessions on how to use drupal (suggested donation of $20 as conference fee--food included at the conference).

If nobody wants to work on rabble for free and rabble doesn't want to pay anyone to work on it (although i doubt that's the case and i suspect you're talking out of your ass), well, what does that say, really?

Sven wrote:

My guess is that a lot of people are just hunkering down and worrying about what's happening with their own jobs, their own mortgages, their own consumer debt, etc. and not really in the mood to focus on solving "world problems" (like what's happening in Gaza, global warming, etc., etc.).

Oh, what?  Are we solving world problems here?  I suspect that many people have realized that much of what happens here is endless, circular banter that doesn't actually produce any results.  I thnk babble's a great news source, and there are some good discussions, but most of the posts are from a handful of personalities looking for attention and posting the same things over and over again.

Again babble's a great new source and entertaining for some political discussion, but if people are posting here in order to solve problems, well, i think many will soon realize they can find more effective avenues for solving problems. 

oldgoat wrote:

We do have someone.  It's workers co-op actually which specializes in this sort of thing.  They get paid, but progress happens within everyones financial and time constraints.

Sure, and that's how it goes.  I think the upgrade went well.  All these things like not seeing the first few lines of TAT and the user profiles and links being black, they're all little problems that end up getting put off until the big problems get fixed.  That's just how it goes.

Again my only criticism of the way the upgrade went is that it demonstrated that babble is a lower priority compared to the other components of rabble.  Rabble and babble even is in a much better shape now then it was in before.  Ancient, unsupported software doesn't allow for too many options.

Say, this may be a good time to link to THIS!

The so-called upgrade sucks. Posts sometimes will not display properly even after a lot of tweaking. The HTML function is a joke. [span][span][span] I always wondered why Rabble/Babble never used HTML in the first place. Even crap Blogger sites allow some kind of limited HTML. Even so, the old Babble would allow HTML commands (sometimes) so long as you enclosed them in square brackets rather than carets. Yes, I post less.

(ETA: And more important, I visit the site less.)

It's a tough call.  I prefer being able to insert html as well and would prefer drupal's standard input filter (accepts html tags) to this WYSIWYG.  But html freaks people out so they switch to a WYSIWYG to avoid it.  Unfortunately no drupal WYSIWYG really does a great job.

Right, well it's not so well done.  It's a WYSIWYG editor because that's what it attempts to be--instead of using strong tags around stuff to be bolded, we highlight and click the bold button.  It adds a certain amount of complexity to the whole operation and IMO it's not worth it.

Remember how the old babble would insert the [bbcode] tags around stuff when you clicked on the buttons?  And then you'd see the code in your textarea?  And once you learned the code that the buttons would insert you could just add it yourself?

Well for some reason (and i don't get it either) people think that having code in the textarea is too confusing for users.  Users, they say, like to click on the bold button and see their text go bold, not see some weird codes.

So then people go to a lot of work to build these fancy WYSIWYG editors that do all of this stuff.  And it adds so much complexity to the problem (entering text) that it gets buggy.  Sure there are no extra formatting options that the old babble didn't have (and they worked better on the old one), but at this point, with the rich text editor they have in place, they could allow for selection of different fonts, different colours, inserting and placing images, etc.  Basically a word processor in a browser window.

But so what?  We don't need a word processor in here.  We just need an easy way to add links and basic text formatting.  The WYSIWYG was overkill.

For anyone having problems when entering text, and especially if you know html or are looking to paste html, try clicking "disable rich-text".  That should give you a straight interface to enter html.

I'm going to say something nice about Babble. I like the (new) function for posts.

I find the new system more complicated to use and frustrating.

I disable the rich-text as it just causes problems for me when it is on. I don't need to decorate my text, I just want easy to read words and maybe a few emoticons. Who wants to change font size and colors and so on? That is for kids, not for political discussion.

I also find that I cannot edit a post when it is the start of a new thread. So if I mess up the initial post I cannot fix it.

Also users should be able to delete their own posts, at least within a certain amount of time after having made it. Like you can delete your own post up to one hour after making it. That would help to clear up double-posting issues and mistakes as well as any comments that might be deemed worthy of reconsideration.

Just my thoughts...

I like the look of the top page. But the discussion boards and interactivity is the heart of any website, and should be considered just as important as the top news pages.

Haha...I just noticed that each post has a button marked 'flag as offensive'. What happens if I click it I wonder?