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Fix TPM for GOD's Sake!
Here is a question:
How much money would it cost to fix the
sundry problems with this site? The problems that prevent it from
continuing its growth as a community?
The follow up question is:
would the people who like the potential (and some say lost during the
great upgrade) of this community be willing to contribute to cover this
cost?
I was looking at some blog entries that I only found
because I decided to investigate a normally semi-offensive poster to
see if there was some more meat than the usual stick-and-run comments. There is a ton of discussion that gets lost
if you do not catch it during its brief stint on the side bar, or if
you already know to go to that particular blog. Plus I lack the ability
to recommend, so I cannot help get blogs higher on the rec list.
I
add some to my bookmarks, but my book marks are not always with me.
Does anyone else have any other ideas of how to hang on to good
posters? or good posts that do not make the rec list?
Comments (10)
There really should be a subscription feature or a follow-this-poster thing like they have on the Gawker sites, but no offense to the management, I really hope that before they start bringing forth too many new features, they actually fix some of the problems that we have now.
April 2, 2008 2:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Elliot, I didn't step into the Cafe until just after it was upgraded. I rally enjoy the discussion and the people here, but agree 100% that the format for community blogging is not conducive to community or to ongoing discussion. I've seen many, many remarks about the superior format TPM abandoned to go with the current software. I guess I'd have to ask, would Josh and Co. be willing to consider rolling back the Cafe site to its old incarnation? Is it possible they're weighing this and putting off doing all the needed fixes until they make up their minds?
As an IT professional I can tell you (like the other IT folks who've commented on this) that the problems with this site are not difficult fixes. PHP is a very flexible and rather easy to use programming language, so its there's just no excuse for the problems that persist here. Hell, I'm no php expert, but I've built a couple of community sites with php/mysql and had them running and debugged far more quickly than what we're seeing here, doing all the work myself in my spare time. It's not a matter of technical difficulty, effort, or money. It's either a matter or will, or a contract dispute with whomever TPM has paid to do their upgrade. For better or worse, TPM is a commerical entity and probably wouldn't accept offers of free help. So chances are low that a user-based effort to bring about the fixes will have much effect on the problem.
Has Josh Marshall ever weighed in on this? Isn't it important to Josh and Co. that long-time users have left the community because of the problems? Don't they read the incessant comments from users complaining about the blogging and discussion interface here? Seems strange to me...
April 2, 2008 3:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
reply to GMan08-
Josh Marshall's last comments on the matter were posted on Andrew Golis' March 19 Update on Tech thread here:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/19/update_on_techness/
and before that on Jan Knaus'Feb. 16 complaint thread, here:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/02/talking-points-memo-suggestion.php
Previous to that, he made some comments on other user complaint threads, like those of Tom Wright, some quite detailed, but those are hard to find now, since only 10 comments are kept in record, and, it appears, only 10 blogs per user can be accessed
(when you click on "more," you don't get more than 10, the "more" at the bottom of the page gives you this message: "The user blog you are looking for has not been found". It appears new blogs by users are not being archived on the server past one page of 10 of them, as well as the problem of the old pre-software-change ones never having been brought back since being taken down. The main contributors, on the other hand, have all their posts on the server.)
I have always found it strange that he hasn't posted about it where everyone will see it, and responds only to a few certain people. He put the most recent comments on Andrew's entry when it was rather old, I found them just by happenstance, as if he preferred not everyone notice it.
I also find it odd that many of his comments here, hidden away on user threads, have said that he was upset with the bugs and problems, but that he praised the software company on his main page on Feb. 28:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/180582.php
Overall, I really don't get any sense of transparency from all that I have read, though Andrew often seems to protest suggestions of non-transparency along the lines of "we don't want to bother users with our problems."
Josh noted in one of the most recent thread that they were going to try to get better about making announcements about things. I've seen that here before over more than two years. My impression: they simply neglect these kinds of problems for other priorities until the noise about it gets too loud or the numbers drop too low.
The traffic numbers have not dropped low, they spiked with the New York Times article on the Polk prize and have been growing before that with the emphasis on "all Dem primary all the time."
I think that if there was a post a couple of times a day by different people complaining about the situation, that might get different priorities set, otherwise, if numbers don't drop, it's not going to be a priority.
You can get site traffic stats and graphs here:
http://www.quantcast.com/talkingpointsmemo.com/traffic
April 3, 2008 12:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
There are several ways to help yourself on this:
You can keep a simple text file of links you copy from the address bar and save them. THEN e-mail them to yourself at a web-based service that you do not POP with a desktop client, or that you have your client set to not automatically download from the server. Since virtually every machine Linux/Unix/Windows/BSD etc... has some sort of easy text file editor installed - you'll be able to open your text file from virtually anywhere.
Another, use Google like this
Elliott Klug site:talkingpointsmemo.com
That will show all of your posts up until the date of the last Google crawl through the site, this seems to happen every two days or so.
In the second example you can use whatever relevant terms you want in lieu of your own profile username
Of course, these approaches are not terribly elegant - but they would help you for now.
April 2, 2008 3:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, this has now scrolled of the main page, without enough recs to keep it going, so hardly anyone will see it.
I found it through my RSS reader, which I would recommended over viewing the site through your web browser.
April 2, 2008 7:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I use my RSS feed - but I have not figured out how to use it for an individual poster, or for the reader blogs. It does not help much for comments on older blogs either.
Detail more what you do, if you would?
Thanks
April 2, 2008 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Also, you can use delicious to save good posts.
April 2, 2008 7:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Elliott,
Tom Wright made a similar post to yours March 27
Goal: One Million Donors for TPM! @
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/03/goal-one-million-donors-for-tp.php
It got 7 recommends and 8 comments, but I don't think it ever made it to the Recommended list and scrolled quickly away.
Note Tom's last comment on the thread.
Also see other info. and links in my reply to GMan08 above.
April 3, 2008 12:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I feel it important to reiterate something I noted above, something I just discovered. All the new users are going to start noticing this sooner or later:
The contributors get all their posts archived, but apparently all Reader Blog get is one page of 10 per user, the older ones disappear to access.
The page that gives Reader Blog Archives
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/archives.php
is still actually populated by Contributor Blog Archives, as it has been since the software change. Reader blogs are not being kept.
Looks to me that
ALL READER BLOGS ARE NOT BEING ARCHIVED, past 10, they appear to be gone.
No surprise to us long-time users who have been asking to have our 2 years of posts back and all we get is promises. But the rest of you might soon be more than empathizing.
If you want your older posts, and haven't saved them yourself, start getting them off Google's cache ASAP, because they won't stay there forever. (As spiders do updates for Google, they do something similar to overwriting, the older stuff eventually disappears from Google's cache, on active sites, as new content and a new "picture" of a website comes in.)
April 3, 2008 12:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
URL for reader blogs feed is
http://feeds.feedburner.com/tpmcafe-Diary
Have never tried to find feed for individual bloggers.
April 3, 2008 1:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
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