Oh Boy! Popularity contests, already.

He can send a ticket to the Help Desk. All he has to do is click "Contact Us" at the bottom of the page.

A response may be a little delayed; as you can imagine we are fielding a lot and will be for days.

I don't know that he can get in to do that, Jespah. Maybe .. I haven't tried getting in via googling the site and then just reading.
He'll call back if he still has trouble. Maybe he needs to enable cookies. I think he said he had trouble with repeating the code thingy, which I didn't have to do to log in. I hate those wavy code things.

I know what, I can give him by email the CONTACT US url.

Thanks (and congratulations on the launch).

FWIW...

JLN has always had some weirdness with A2K.

He is the double up post king, PM and on forum.

I wonder if the two are related? (he deletes the second most times on the upper deck)

Just trying to hepp...

This is so confusing. I have no idea how to get around in here, the background and text is hard on my eyes, none of the buttons seem intuitive, and the sniping and popularity thingy is very unbecoming.

I feel like I just lost all of my friends at once.

It gets better, Sqinn...

Jes has an answer post with all the tutorial stuff on one page, if yer a reader...

Punch Bear for me...

There are a few posters I'd ignore altogether. And I'd "Ignore" topics, too. But that's hardly intuitive. People will have to learn how to make this work for them. And I think a lot of us won't ever figure it out.



Well, yeah. You're the technological problem-solver here. I'll always be more interested in the social ramifications. That's why I'm here.



Again, that's not intuitive. Most people won't get it. Or we'll forget.



Okay, if there's too much work for the moderators, that's a fair reason. But I don't think the mob will do better than the mods, either.



Democracy is often overrated. Witness our current 2-term president. I much preferred having A2K run by a group of handpicked, smart, dedicated, reliably level-headed folks. Do we still have mods? (I hope so!)



Ah! I have power! (Nice touch.)
Honestly, I don't think this system is intuitive, and I think you'll have to keep explaining it ad nauseum, and a bunch of folks will still never get it. But we'll see.

You haven't lost us, Squinney.

Some of us are still hiding, though. Or maybe they haven't figured out how to open the door yet. They'll be along...

I'm still here, Squinney

We're all here squinney, don't worry!

Try to set some tags and you can eliminate certain groups and focus more on
the subjects you're in tune with. Mostly you'll find your "friends" there too!

I have faith that they'll figure it out. Red thumb down: bad! You already know how to use it despite your doubts. ;-)

About the ability to turn off the other people's effect on you, you wrote:


If you are concerned with what others will do I'm not sure how happy you'll be in such a hyper-personalized environment, there's just not that much top-down control so it's going to be very different from person to person. But if your concern is the effect on you I am confident that you can figure out how to make it work for you if you try.



Yes, but the hand picked part may change for scaling as well, and there might be user participation in the selection process. That's all far away and very undefined so I'll leave it at that but put it this way: the quality came at an extreme cost in quantity. A few busy mods and we were basically modless and it would have collapsed without change in the process anyway.



It really depends on who you ask. There is a generation of web users who have used these tools on rising social networks. For example, I believe the voting images were copied from Youtube, and the self-managed community movement has been going on for years.

Hell, even old dinosaurs like slashdot gave it their try. If you ever heard about "web 2.0" this is one of the things people used that vague label for. Those people often find all of this intuitive. Many here are new to it.

I don't think everyone needs to get it for it to be useful to those who do, but I do think that anyone who wants to get it can, and that we'll do very well at tweaking the UI to make it more intuitive. This is still rough, for example we have a graphic artist making the images for the voting badges. Right now it's using the "programmer" version of the design where we just give it a border and color through css.

We'll make it as intuitive as we can, but it's an optional part of the site anyway and users can get as into it as they want without getting too far in the way of the core posting/replying features.

My version of quoting -
Re: ossobuco (Post 3358489)
FWIW...

JLN has always had some weirdness with A2K.

He is the double up post king, PM and on forum.

I wonder if the two are related? (he deletes the second most times on the upper deck)

Just trying to hepp...



osso -
That's sure true, RH. On the other hand, once here, the man posts impeccably. (I've sent him an email which might have had too much information. Await response or repose.)

I vote for that being your new sig line :-)

Squin - I don't know how to do it on a pc, but I upped my VIEW to Bigger Text, and I love it, saying this as a fellow eyestuff person.

I've been here on and off a lot of the day, in fact I was worried about burning my tomatoes by not watering in the "tomato well" all those hours..

but I've gone from clamfloogled to loving it, in a gradual shift.



Check Jespahs thread on Answers, forget the title. Lot of info there. Craven has explained the whole voting thing previously at length, it must be linked there somewhere. (I hated the popularity thing on abuzz, this is different.)

This is the answer link, Squinney --

http://able2know.org/topic/120955-1

goodbye

Ah thanks for passing along the Secrets of the New A2K.

And yes, there are still Mods, we are still here. But our roles are changing and we are going to get more involved in more dire issues, such as getting rid of porn and spam, and less in community issues. Tagging will replace featuring, and ignoring posts and users will help to individualize user experiences and will also, we believe, defuse a lot of the arguments and other issues that people had wanted us to be involved in -- and those involvements were always tough for us and always resulted in someone having a severe case of bad feelings afterwards.

A lot of what is bewildering right now is going to get easier, not only as everyone uses the site and gets used to it but also as voting and tagging really get cooking. You'll see more of a push in the direction of seeing what you like or what is close to that but of interest (e. g. new things you didn't know about but might like) and away from seeing things you don't like and/or that don't interest you.

Huh? Of what?

I don't care for the rating system, either. It smacks of "ganging up" on someone. If one does not like a particular poster, it is easy enough just to scroll past his/her posts.

Funny thing, over the years I have learned that there are people on A2K whom I don't like in general, but who have written some fine things. I would hate to think that someone would leave the site, because he/she ended up on the wrong side of a popularity contest.

Personally, I take a thread or a post at face value, no matter whom has written it.
I would suspect that there are many members, who use the rating system as a club.

Probably true...but there were posters at the old site that did the same thing. They just didn't have the thumbs up or thumbs down...the thing is if there are threads you like you can always play them.

Reputation - well - it's not that big a deal here as far as I'm concerned. I know who I like and who to tip toe around and where I need to go to get away from them. And frankly the ignore button is a great resource for that.

Trust me - it doesn't matter where you are there will be those who try to make themselves feel better and they will find a way to do it...whether it is the old fashioned ganging up or this thumbs up thumbs down thing.

I think all of this will wear off in a few days as well. We are like a bunch of children playing with the buttons in the backseat.

I'm not voting up at all, but I am using the Ignore User and I'm also minimizing (I think that is voting down) the threads that hold no interest to me. I don't like scrolling past 200,000 posts on topics to get to one I like. It doesn't mean I think they're not valuable, just that I don't want to see them. Sorry if that makes someone feel unpopular but I agree with whoever said that this whole voting thing will wear off after a while and cease to be an issue.