Seconded. I am unclear as to whether that is part of the slightly longer-term plan (once the bugs are fixed) or not.

I know management has said that the recommendation feature should help filter. I hope they are right. I am not sure why that might be thought to be the case. It does not look that way at this point. Perhaps I misunderstand what the notion is here.

In the meantime I self-impose a max of one blog post a week for the next month.

If some progress report, or even an update, might be forthcoming soon on efforts to re-create a tracker function of some sort I for one would welcome that, even if there is no short-term good news to report on that front.

As I say, I am not leaving this place anytime soon. "Threats" to leave are not my style anyway. (I imagine management, reading of "threats" to leave by some denizens here, maybe me included, greeted privately with "Please, by all means, do, you (royal pain in the ass)!") I will be patient with the hope that, given time, (what I see as) improvements beyond the debugging will be on the way.

Well, at least a few friendly faces. I'm not sure how the Cafe that I had come to know over the past two years turned into Starbucks seemingly overnight.

I've been logged in and out so many times in the past week, I've lost comments and blog posts to the "whitespace" of the internet (or more appropriately, to the empty white space between the ears of the programmers of this system). Neither the transition from Scoop to the other system (who's name eludes me) was this rough and disconcerting. No site mapping, no user guides as to what would be lost or gained....

As I read the other day when Josh defended the change on economic grounds that seemed not to be the issue. Most here understand that the Cafe needs sustainability. The idea of moving user content transitionally into a "Web 2.0" environment from the walled garden of the cafe is rude. If TPM were valuing the community that they created, there would have been more back and forth from a "users group". I doubt if there even would have been a need to test drive if an analysis of features lost/features gained would have been proffered in a pdf help file.

Even this comment box is rude. Those of us that can write code can do this, but if you don't have that knowledge, you're disadvantaged.

Well, let's see if this makes it through.

Alphonse (Al) Kada

Notrol:
Just wanted to say I enjoyed reading your input on the meta. That is all.

Tip:

There appears to be a minimal ability to keep track of which main page contributor posts you like by recommending them. When you do, links show up on "My Profile" under the Recommended heading. It's not much, but it's something.

Just for bug reporting purposes:

My duplicate comment appeared because on the first submission I got the message along the lines of "you have submitted too many comments in a short amount of time."

Actually, I really hadn't.

I know lots of forum software systems have these time-out settings that the administrator can set, it's so people don't get into long troll fights and post in anger, sometimes the warning will even say "step away, calm down, come back later." In any case, it's absurd that the amount of comments I made today would trigger it. I have also seen a few others complain they saw this message, but I thought maybe it was because they were hitting the send/submit button over and over. I didn't do this in this case. Something is obviously going bonkers with that setting.

Two thoughts come to mind. One is that I think people should probably be only to tag their posts to muckraker or EC, not both. The current system creates too big an incentive have your stuff everywhere. And that cuts down on the effectiveness of the categorization.

The second point is that I can definitely understand the desire to have areas of the site with more focused discussions, a higher quality of content, if one's comfortable making those sorts of qualitative judgements. But I'd also like to have the current pooling of everything together and the system of recommending that gives certain posts more visibility. I'd like to have both, to have niches of the site where different kinds of conversation are possible, etc.

The question is how to do that, from a technical and organizational perspective. Earlier on in our discussions of this redesign, Andrew and I discussed having cafe denizens be able to set up their own 'tables', either interest focused, or topic focused, or catering to a certain quality of conversation. Reader X could start the table and invite Readers P, Y and Z. And it would their conversation area. And everybody could read but there'd be some sort of manager or organizer who'd allow new people in.

There's obviously a certain danger of cliquishness. But I thought that could create a more vibrant and multinodal community. So not just a plethora of voices but also different spaces where different conversations are possible.

I'd like suggestions if folks have them if any of this stuff strikes folks as a good idea.

Now, I know a lot of people are discontented with the changes. The old version of the cafe had a relatively small cadre of dedicated readers and participants. And by tying TPMCafe in more closely with the rest of our network we've sort of let the floodgates upon for a lot of new people who weren't part of that scene, don't know what it was about, are more fly-by in their approach to discussions here, etc.

I can see that that means something has been lost. And I respect and will try to understand more the discontent about that. I would like to ask in return too the respect not assume that whatever decisions we've made were based on some sort of model of profit maximization. You don't have to agree with what we've done. But I would ask people to see that we've got a network of sites, a large community of readers. And we wanted a community and discussion area that more of that community of readers could be a part of and was more integrated, plugged into the material our reporters are producing. On top of that there were cost and headache factors involved having parts of our network on two different software platforms (something that's hard to describe in detail; but was a very big deal.)

So we want to make these additions to the site, things like I've mentioned above, though it needn't be precisely on that model. A lot of it won't be possible immediately. This long process of renovating all our sites has cost us several tens of thousands of dollars. And those kinds of costs amount to massive capital expenses for a company like ours. But building TPMCafe further in this direction is a priority for us. So we'd like to take some time and in consultation with readers come up with a plan to add new features like the tables I mentioned, and then we'll take the ideas to the tech people who work with us and see what's possible both in terms of the technology and in terms of cost.

The private message feature is the one that would have allowed us to search for and contact members we've known and find ways to connect. That's missing now too.

I appreciate Josh's response here. And I appreciate his thought of setting up "tables" where you could invite an audience and restrict comments. That would foster little communities but it would also foster a sense of "exclusiveness."

The problem, in my view, is that Jose used the word "community" several times in the post above. But nowhere I am seeing, and please forgive me for saying this, nowhere am I seeing a "fostering" of community. Instead I am seeing the destruction of community. The absence of features which allow for reconnecting with posters we had been able to contact in the past. So "community" sadly seems to be a word Josh uses but it has become unhinged from meaning... it's an empty term now.

I still come to tpm for Josh's comments, which is what brought me here to begin with. I read the posts in the Muck or EC as I can. And look at the Cafe a bit. But tpm, for this user, has become a never-ending frustration in terms of posting anything... and that leaves me discouraged and really heart-broken... due to the difficulty of finding "community."

Indeed I liked tpm Cafe because it was not like Kos. Not so huge, so partisan (at least not till this election cycle). And I liked the backbench community that was evolving. But has now disintegrated with everything being thrown together. We had little circles of people, forming and reforming. Now it's gone. At least here.

Some of us have migrated to a refugee site to have a place to connect. You can find it by checking out Eric Stepp's blog if you can find that now....

Tom asks, "how did you find this post?" My answer is that it was linked in a comment in another thread that was a response, in part, to one of my comments. I don't think I would have ever seen it otherwise.

I appreciate Josh posting a thoughtful comment here. It is encouraging that he is following the discontent we are expressing. My conclusion is that the TPM Cafe so many of us learned to love is a thing of the past, a good memory, but never to be seen again. So, now we just have to find ways to make the best use of the new arrangement, according to our own needs and desires.

A friend described moving a factory from Binghampton to Houston. His summary :"We got every advantage we had planned for .And it was a disaster".

An illustration :He docked a barge with the heaviest equipment in the Houston ship canal. Moored tightly to the wharf. A supertanker went up the canal , sending off a large bow wave. The barge, moored too tightly to move, was swamped and sank.

Long term plans are necessary and should never be followed. The chances are pretty good you'll obtain every benefit you anticipate.
The chances are 100% that you'll suffer from unanticipated problems.