I’m out sick today, and the devs have a well-deserved four-day weekend to recharge their batteries for the coming dev storm. After putting in more than two weeks without a day off, it probably wasn’t wise to have them mucking around in complicated code, and it certainly wasn’t humane. That does mean a pause in improvements until next week, but it does mean they’ll be more efficient upon their return.
In the meantime, we’ve been collating feedback and creating “tickets”, which is tech-speak for “thing that must be fixed”. The list has dozens of bugs, enhancements, and feature requests. There are obvious items that float to the top (like individual pages for comment links). The rest we’ve been sorting based on urgency.
EVERY SUGGESTION AND BUG REPORT MAKES THE LIST. Part of the sorting process is determining a) should we address it, b) if so, what does the fix look like and how long will it take, and c) where does it fit in our timeline of priorities.
Regarding that first step, the suggestions could be something like “bring back comment titles”. In cases like that, we can decide right away that no, we won’t be doing that. But we still give it its due consideration, to see if there was something we may be missing in that request, or something we might not have previously considered when making our decision. Because as much as we’re getting comments like “it’s obviously you don’t know how people use the site!”, fact is there are myriad ways people use the site. Dozens if not hundreds of ways. And when things change, it impacts different constituencies in different ways.
So the feedback is always good, and the more explanation WHY you want something the better, because it allows us to contextualize the request. And, oftentimes, there are better ways to accomplish what people actually want. For example, someone wanted HTML back in comments so that they could have better control over spacing between lines and blockquotes. Well, the problem there wasn’t the HTML, it’s that the default comment spacing needs to be tightened.
Incidentally, this was something we did throughout the entire beta process. Every suggestion was logged and discussed. Oftentimes, we’d spend hours on some minutiae, considering all those various angles and trying to make as informed decisions as possible. So if something that is dear to you is remiss, don’t take it as a personal insult that I was out to get you, or I don’t care about you, or it’s some nefarious form of social engineering. Sometimes, the way YOU specifically do something wasn’t something we considered, because other people did it differently.
So while the devs are recharging and I’m medicating, that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. The categorization of feedback and priorities continues, and our designer is doing a new pass to fix many of the aesthetic things bothering people (and things no one has mentioned, but that bother me personally).
Again, I’d like to reiterate that despite much of the sturm and drang, most of the stuff that is important to you makes perfect sense to us, and it all relatively easy to tweak and fix. So just give us time to make those changes. Two weeks is the magical number for significant improvements. We’re not even done with week one. And the stuff we can’t get to by the end of next week, we’ll at least have time estimates to give you.
Thanks! And I’ll check in later tonight to answer questions once I’ve hopefully gotten some rest.
p.s. Per request, added additional poll result option.
p.p.s. If there are typos, fuck it. The meds are kicking in.