Suggestion: Open (not anonymous) thread voting.

no, they have to change a setting. They have to alter the site in some way. They have to know that doing that will help their experience. None of these things are immediately obvious to the new user. In many cases they may not even know what they are missing, for they won't know that there is a lot of great content that simply will never get high ratings due to it's voting status.

That's not comparable to scrolling past something you don't like.... one takes action which you may or may not know how to do or even WHY you should be doing it, the other is scrolling your mouse wheel. Big difference.

Cycloptichorn

Weren't they pretty much shunned before?

Sure, you saw the topic, but did you ever post?

Now they can tag their favorite games, and they have a happy little community, and I don't have to keep regretting posting on some trivia thread that will show up in "my posts" forever.

Perhaps I'll even post to the trivia threads occasionally, now.




You have some vague worries about how people will use the site, but no concern you've raised strikes me as a bigger barrier to entry than the navigation issues at the old site.

There were navigation issues at the old site?

Pick a forum, post in that forum. How hard is that? If it wasn't clear enough work could easily have been done on the front page to make it clearer.

What were the navigation issues, exactly?

Cycloptichorn

As a computer professional, I'll tell you that people have no problem clicking on things randomly in an attempt to get something to work....

This isn't that big of a shift, frankly.

No -- not the site, their view of the site. And don't tell me there's a dramatic difference in the effort the user puts in. On the old A2K, you would bookmark the "New posts" site in your browser once, or or click a link on the homepage to get there. In the new A2K, you select an item in a pulldown menu once. The effort to get to the view you find the most useful is practically the same, and not worth talking about in both cases.

The home page was a mess (IMO), I couldn't sort all the ways I wanted to sort, all threads w/ current activity showed on my "my posts" page, no matter how long ago I posted, featured threads appeared and disappeared randomly (some remained for months after the last post)....

Sorry, but this doesnt make any sense. Thats how the old site used to work. If a thread wasnt "as active as some of the others", then it would inexorably disappear from the top of the list more often, since "new posts" was the mechanism - and only mechanism - to sort threads. Less active automatically meant lower on the first page and quicker to fall off it.

In the new system, an inactive, but high-quality thread actually stands more chance to keep being found over time. For example, people who come across it and like following it, whether or not they have anything to say right then, can tag it. Kinda like the old "bookmark" - except this time, they can easily find the thread back by clicking their "Iraq" tag, instead of wading through their "My posts" pages till they find it. For other examples, see my post above.

How it will fare in the sort-by-popularity view depends on your view of the "wisdom of the crowd". If you believe that mob rule will inexorably bring fluff to the top and bury in-depth stuff, then yes, this particular sort will disadvantage your thread. But a2kers are not yer Big Brother audience, they're a comparatively intelligent crowd. So far, at least, it doesnt seem to have been the in-depth threads that have suffered from the ratings threads - look at Lash's Georgia thread we have been posting in, it's got something like +12. Within the Politics forum, it seems that, if anything, it's the more crass and rabble-rousing threads (RexRed's Michelle Obama thread and the like) that have suffered. Reasons to be optimistic?

Whatever your evaluation of collective wisdom though, there's little reason to suppose that vote-count will be an unfairer judge than post-count. Either way it's the same principle at work: threads that attract the interest of the most people, will stay on top longest.

The only difference I can imagine, from the top of my head, is this contrast:

• A) A thread where two or three people keep going over the same thing while everyone else has given up, would keep popping up at the top of the list for everyone, with no opt-out, in the old system.
  
  Now it will sink. (IF and WHEN, of course, you select to see the topics by vote count in the first place, something you can switch away from with one click.)
  
  
• B) A thread where few people post (maybe because few people can write poetry in the requested form, or few people have something to say about Putin's biography right now), but that do interest a fair number of people (the poems are hilarious, Putin is in the news), would nevertheless have sunk quickly in the old system. (Bar for many "bm" posts, but even that you could only really do once).
  
  Now they will stand a better chance to remain near the top of the page. (IF and WHEN you choose to sort topics by popularity in the first place, etc.)

Doesnt seem like a bad trade-off. And beyond these two examples? You're basically talking of the difference beween

• a) sorting topics by popularity through putting the ones that are most posted to at the top - like in the old system; and
  
  
• b) sorting topics by popularity through putting the ones most people choose to keep in their view (by voting for it) at the top - the new system.

I cant for the life of me think of why b) must engender worse quality posts than a). I'd think that any difference in effect would actually be fairly marginal.

It's interesting to hear about others' experiences using the site. I never experienced any of the problems you guys describe, for I never went to the front page, ever. I never really went to 'my posts' or 'my topics.' I linked directly to the politics forum and that was that. And I can still do that, so that isn't an issue for me.

But these things can, or could have been, fixed without dramatically altering the nature of the site. The front page is a mess? That's a matter of redoing the text, not changing the fundamental nature of the site.

When the site was redone, it fixed some problems - but created others. To be expected, really. The fact that myself and others are not happy with some of the changes is not a problem with us, even though several of you would like to position it that way, and it most certainly isn't whining, as one rude poster suggested.

Cycloptichorn

At my work (international org, offices in five countries or so, affiliate users in a multiple number of countries), we have a spanking new Intranet. Also uses tagging as basic block of organisation. Looks like it might well be a (the?) new standard.

Damn clusters!

So why are you suddenly concerned about new users?

I should clarify - I've never seen another discussion forum set up in this way. Obviously, tags are used for other systems... but what affect do they have on long-running conversations which may or may not be popular to the majority of users?

Cycloptichorn

Most people haven't seen the concept (no folders, only tags) applied to an e-mail system either.

And then Google just did it.

Huge succes, I might add....

This is something that bothers me, too. I've commented on it before -- personally, I think it's likely that this is harder for old users (who became accustomed to doing things a certain way and now need to start all over again) than for brand-new users who have never been to either the old A2K or this one before.

It's hard to know, though, since the new users (like Dudley? Dunno if he's an old A2K person under a new name or an actual new user) obviously self-select. The ones who get through are the ones who get it. The ones who don't get it don't show up in the first place.

Anyway, a more general comment -- a few times I've seen variations of "why won't you let me criticize A2K, jeez." I have no problem, myself, with criticism in and of itself. Heck, I started the two major A2K criticism threads here! And I did so because there were things that were bothering me. I get that.

However, if I see a criticism that a) seems to be based on a misunderstanding, I'll see if I can correct that misunderstanding; b) seems to just be baseless, I'll point out that it's baseless. That's separate from whether criticism is inherently bad. Of course not, and there are legitimate things to criticize.

That's another thought I had, yeah... "So Craven is building a new standard from the ground up! We're avant-garde! Cool!" (Have you guys seen how many hits his SEO thread has gotten? His A2K mod is, like, famous.)

(Google "able2know mod")

Careful, you're in danger of setting off the geek meter....

Umm, yes. Plenty. You just got used to working around them over time, to the point of not noticing them anymore.

For example, as Craven already pointed out to you before, you had figured out that the place where you would find the stuff that actually interested you, the Politics forum, was not at all an obvious find from the homepage. It wouldnt even be in sight when you opened the homepage -- you'd have to scroll all the way down to the penultimate category of forums.

You worked around this by bookmarking the Politics forum and just using that rather than the homepage. And in fact, most regulars found a way around using the homepage. The actual homepage of the site - its business card, the place where new users would arrive - was cluttered, unclear, and consequently virtually unused by any regular save for the tiny "New Posts", "My Posts", "Unanswered" links at the very top of the page.

Compared to that, the opening page of the new site is infinitely clearer and more useful for new users.


Very, very true. Which is why craven & co have already announced, on their threads about tagging, that a further upgrade of the system will include longer lists of tags; the possibility to see all your own tags (and consequently, all of someone else's tags); and even a search box where, if I remember correctly, if you start typing in a word it will give you the tags that start with those letters (this is what our Intranet does, too).

Geeks rock. I aspire to geekhood.

Right. Exactly the point I ended up making above. The old homepage was so useless to any repeat user, that you never ever went there. You found ways to change your navigation (start at a different place, use the tiny "My posts" or "New posts" links and work from there, etc) so that the site did work for you.

And now you're complaining that the new homepage might not be functional, and that people might be scared off by having to toggle a button to get the site to work the way they want to?

Umm... *raises eyebrow and looks stern*


Yes, there is. Plenty of users have already posted here about how they've changed settings, discovered the advantages of changing settings, etc.

Yes - thats anecdotal evidence. But no more than the "several posts from frustrated users" that you cite.