Café Still Not What It Used To Be, (but getting better).
There were some unique characteristics of TPM Café: First, we had depth of subject in our conversations, second, we had long threads, and third, we had a variety of subjects. The latter was made possible by having Discussion Posts that had to achieve enough votes to even get posted. And once up, they stayed for a very long time. The first was made possible by the second and third points. New visitors tended to comment that they had found nothing to equal TPM on the web, and I haven't heard about any serious competition since.
It was apparent that something had to change, when all ad content was server-delivered, content-linked, and needed fast-loading pages compatible with the system. And changes were made, but at the expense of most of the defining character of the Café.
I found the old function called "track" very useful. It showed all activity that the user had participated in. It listed posts, whether Discussion or Blog, that the user had commented on, and showed any new comments, simply displaying the number. This allowed a screen's worth of list to include ten or fifteen posts, and one could scroll quickly across a month's worth of discussion.
We have the Dashboard, but it is not nearly as compact, and doesn't show new activity at any place where the user has commented. He or she has to check in and see. I don't know how to replace another function we had, that showed replies to our comments.
The best I can do, for my purpose, is to follow no one, thus any subject in my Dashboard list is one I was already interested in, not all sorts of new stuff I saw in the main "Reader Posts".
Another feature that helped keep threads focussed, while allowing users to pursue a side question, was internal messaging. We still lack that here.
The up-recommend is the weaker replacement for the moderated Discussion posts, and we no longer can squelch spam by down-rating it. When we had the Discussion Tables, spam showed up on the blogs and quickly went away, ignored. Now it can shove good posts off the list, bad money driving out the good.
The folks here have succeeded in getting the site to load fairly quickly and update instantly. I was hoping Josh's post about TPM in 2009 would mention site software. Maybe Al will drop by to update us.
Thanks for htis and I so agree.
Hopefully, now that the election turmoil and stresses are over, TPM will be able to deal with these issues and others previously mentioned by other bloggers.
One I think is most important is limiting the amount of words in initial post showing on main page and once reaching that limit, must use 'extend' tab for read more.......
While the ability to post graphics is nice, too many are very large and also cause space problems for existing and new posts.
Also, the ads for games and other spam needs to have a method to be removed quickly.
Strongly Rec'd.
November 8, 2008 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
The deminse of the tracker function is to my mind the biggest problem with TPM Cafe 3.0, and with this iteration, too. I think without that, it's just too hard to keep a conversation going. I pretty much haven't been able to make use of the Cafe since then.
November 8, 2008 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I came aboard after internal messaging was disabled or disappeared and never had any problems with tracking discussions pre "upgrade". Even the unmoderated User Blogs were superior for carrying on extended dialogues. Sigh.
When it comes to user-generated content, this place is sort of like wandering around a gigantic fleamarket trying to relocate one's favorite vendors.
The Cafe was one of a top tier of sites that are invaluable because of the conversations they foster.
Now, not so much..........
Then again, my other fav sites are more narrowly focused and purposely designed to stimulate interactions among participants conversant with the issues under discussion.
apples and oranges
November 8, 2008 10:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom, I am answering your following reply to me from Ticia's post so I don't continue to abuse her thread:
From your comment I'm still not sure you understand the system or maybe your browser is not giving you everything that is on your page?
On the "Your Blog" page there's a tab that says "Comments." It's there to list all your comments, so you can follow the threads you've commented on. There's also a tab that says "Recommends," that's so you can follow the threads you've recommended.
These are not as convenient as the tracker we had that gave us a notice of a reply to the comment, but otherwise, this system does exactly the same thing we had before Movable Type, the only difference is that it only gives you the last 25 or so comments. The comments lists now even have the direct links to take you to the place where the comment is on the thread which we were missing previously.
The problem is that these are not updating properly, they are not working as intended, it is a glitch that they have not fixed. Several of us have been complaining about that since the change. Al Shaw assured us they were working on it. When it got close to the election, we laid off of complaining about the lack of the fix because they said they wouldn't be able to work on it until after the election.
In the meantime, until they fix it pseudocyants figured out that one could get one's comments and recommends to update two ways, so you can follow the threads you've commented on or recommended:
1) make a new blog post (which one can unpublish afterwards)
2) post a comment on one of one's own blog posts
The dashboard, it is an ADDITIONAL way to track. This is working properly, it gives you all the comments, recommends and blog posts of the people you follow, it gives you them immediately when they happen, like your comments and recommends tabs on "Your Blog" are supposed to do. It is a way to filter, like voting on discussion tables was a way to filter, different, but still a way to filter. If you don't like the type of posts that certain users make, you don't follow them. The people that have the same tastes as you in topics, you follow them. You look at your dashboard to see what threads people with your same tastes are participating on. With a good-sized list of "following," using it to surf with , you can avoid spending a lot of time looking at things that don't interest you, while still allowing those other audience groups with different tastes to use the site. The system of voting discussion tables is editing by an elite. This is editing by group.
November 9, 2008 12:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
My complaint about the dashboard is that it does not filter, but shows everything everyone I follow does. I use it as a filter by only following my own comments, which gives me the posters of interest, since I commented.
I could start over with a new username, but these of us with two-word names (weird concept) face a glitch that the posts won't show from "your blog". I can get there other ways, and I don't have more than one post running, usually, if that.
As to the "comments" tab, it doesn't identify the posts those comments were attached to, and takes more effort to figure what the subject was.
(All this means more time spent here, which should encourage better ad revenue. That's the US model, all activity is a vehicle for advertising.)
November 9, 2008 8:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Regarding your blog post here:
I too, prefer the old system, but at least the dashboard allows for some filtering. I suspect they wanted it that way because they could cater to many audiences that way, not just elite content. The idea is that people who prefer elite content could follow each other, and the people who prefer knock down drag out shouting matches could follow each other, and the people who want to post propaganda junk can follow each other.
They have pretty much shown their intent to grow the audience over the primary, and I think that means going beyond the type of discourse on the front page of TPMCafe, which only a small audience seems to like, or the old Discussion Tables, which only a small audience seemed to like. Therefore, I think any hopes of going back to something more like the old system is not realistic given that.
If you want to filter, you have to use the dashboard to filter by favored users, and if you want to follow the discussions you have participated on, you have to complain to them to fix the glitch that comments and recommends are not updating properly on user pages. (Not that many people seem to care.) That's all I think we can expect from this site. They don't want to cut down the audience potential, they want all those HuffPo people and all those Dem Underground people and the Kos people. They've given us the dashboard so we can filter some of those other audiences out a bit if we're not interested in spending time on them.
It doesn't look like they are willing to use the server space to give each of us more archive of our comments than 25 or so. That disappoints me, but it's a usable number when used in conjunction with the dashboard. It is a known control measure to keep people from posting lots of silly banter or fighting, and instead being more thoughtful about their commenting, to have a software enforced "time out" when they have commented too much. To give a reduced archive of comments is a little like that, maybe that's part of why they are doing it. It's a little too reliant on short term conversation and not allowing enough for long term for my taste. (The Facebook A.D.D. world.)
On this site as a whole, they have shown a noticeable preference for "breaking" news, talking about what's happening today, and then moving on, rather than big long-term topics which some of us might prefer. Even on the TPMCafe front page, they moved away from big topics and to news of the day. Even on their book club picks, they pick those related to news of the day rather than say, history. I've become more realistic about that, and use it for "news" purposes, rather than expecting to have long-term discussions about big topics. The latter just doesn't seem to be an interest or preference of management here, just not their thing.
November 9, 2008 12:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
As someone who reads much more than writes on the site, I would trade in the dashboard for a list of pages I visited and having those pages highlight new comments when revisited.
Without those two basic features, how can discussions be more than ships passing in the night?
November 9, 2008 9:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
I really miss the internal messaging feature which was great not only so that we could all have the occasional word with each other but with the featured posters as well.
November 9, 2008 10:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm still new to all this, but I use the dashboard & followers to see what people find interesting. If I pick a few posts to engage in, I just tend to leave them as a strip of tabs open for 24 hours or so, and hit refresh when I wander back in. That's about all I can do. Not perfect, but not bad.
And I like the new improvements. It'll be much easier once your own comments are updated regularly though, agreed on that.
November 9, 2008 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
quinn esq; your "leaving a strip of tags open" action seems to indicate that you use FireFox as your default browser. You could also bookmark all tabs at once in the open browser, and after reopening them all at once, delete that folder in the bookmarks file. The quick way is go to bookmarks->highlight the folder->right-click->delete. If you don't do this, you'll end up with a mess of untitled folders in your bookmark file.
I have a TPMCafe folder in my bookmarks file, and save individual threads I want to watch into it. That works best for me
Another reflection: leaving a computer on, and a browser open for days at a time is a behaviour that is strongly correlated to age, and geekishness. Older individuals, who are not geeks, tend to turn off their computers, when not sitting in front of them.
November 10, 2008 6:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks PCA. I use Safari, but yes, adding a Bookmark across all the open tabs does seem much easier. And yes, you guessed it, it WILL also let me shutdown more often. Thanks again.
November 10, 2008 7:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am not a news junkie or a sprinter -- I am a dancer. I don't miss the Cafe much, it's a waste of valuable time I'd rather spend doing more physical action in my life. I do appreciate the fact that my blog posts were saved, not lost -- as initially feared. I write at book length and I want my records.
I'll visit from time to time to see if the community-sense we used to have ever rebuilds. I am not willing to spend the time to start the rebuild though. I tried to do my part to be hospitable, before. In the changeover those efforts at building social connectivity were completely dumped to accomodate paying adverts. The qualitative analysis of the situation is I felt devalued by that, like the disappearance of the local coffee house.
I make good coffee at home, and fortunately have friends and invitations. The tone is newsy and buzzy here, but I preferred the more sustained sense of encounter we used to have on the reader's blogs. It was special to me.
The timing is too quick now for leisurely processing, and I don't choose to speed up for it. I don't blog at work, so any time here is my free time. Maybe I will change my mind, if content becomes more progressive here, but there are other sites I prefer for that.
November 9, 2008 11:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have been reading TPM for awhile, and commenting here and there. I recently setup a blog here and am not as fluid with the TPM website community 'workings' as I should be, but reading your comments I agree that any forum should make it easy to track all myriad of things...your posts, your comments..., threads you like...etc.
I hope the system here is to my liking. I will still post and comment here, as well as a myriad of other places, but the amount of time I linger here will be greater if tools are in place to hold a 'community' together.
Enjoy.
November 9, 2008 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I miss the discussion topics. I wrote one on socialized medicine that would like to recover, because I could use the material in another place. I was amazed when all the material simply vanished.
November 9, 2008 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
About the TPM/2009 post, please don't take the lack of mention of TPMCafe there as a sign we don't have plans for Cafe too in the coming year. I wanted to signal immediately after the election what are news coverage priorities were the coming year. So that was the focus there. We'll be updating shortly on more specifics, but we're definitely planning further upgrades to the community tools. So stay tuned. Now back to my post-election nap.
November 9, 2008 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sleep well, it's deserved.
November 9, 2008 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I sent a comment to TPM the other day about my problems with the Beta software. I'll change only one thing, which is a name I mentioned. It's irrelevant to this discussion:
PseudoCyAnts or others, any suggestions?
November 9, 2008 4:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I realize that I didn't address the quality of the postings, as they affected by improvements in the software. I think the main thing I see is the ability (again) to reply specifically to one person as the best function. I don't see that real quality can improve without a better sort of rating to weed out nasty stuff and irrelevancies.
November 9, 2008 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I face some of those bugs. We have a space between our names, which seems to correlate with the apparent lack of blog page. If you do post, however, you can get there other ways.
The follow thing is not a bug. It's more an updating clash. Once you follow, the new stuff displaces the previous list. As to unfollow, if the followed person's name page shows a box that says "Following", click on it and you will unfollow.
November 9, 2008 7:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't help you with your menu problems, but you should know it seems that nearly everyone has the problem of comments and recommends being old and not updating properly, until they post a blog entry or a comment on one of their blog entries. Then their comments and recommends update. People that are active bloggers here don't have any problem, because if they blog a lot, their comments are updated frequently.
Management knows of this problem, says they are going to fix it, but it doesn't sound like a priority to them and the comments I've gotten in reply sound like it's something that they haven't even figured out why it's happening yet.
Your last blog post is quite old--from before the software change, so I don't know if posting a ocmment on it would work for you. You can try. If that doesn't work, you can make a test blog post and delete it afterward.
(Users can delete blog posts now. When you are on the "blog now" software, select "manage" on the menu on the top, then "entries" in the drop down menu. You get a list of all your blog posts from which you can edit or delete them. Warning: if you want to delete a blog post, find and click the "unpublish" option FIRST. This will remove it from where you published it. Doing the "delete" function only deletes the file from your lists and the site database, but still leaves your entry on the Reader blog page. You have to unpublish first, then you can delete.)
If management sees a lot of people doing one of the two "update my comments/recommends tricks," maybe it will inspire to work on the problem? There are only a few of us so far who seem to care enough have spoken up on it, so we may be a minority. Seems like lots of people don't care about returning later to threads they've commented on? There seems to be a lot of people who just prefer to do the "driveby" thing on the major threads of that day and then move on to something else the next day.
BTW, Tom is correct that some user names with two words and a space between are having severe problems due to a glitch. I haven't seen management address this problem at all. I've seen evidence in some cases that it has something to do with them assigning the wrong language to the user urls. It used to be that a space was translated as "%20" in a user url but now on the new system it translates as an underline. Someone doing the code didn't do this properly for some old users with the switch, you get both urls depending on how you're clicking on the person, the one works properly, the other doesn't. Sometimes us readers get a Movable Type error page when we encounter a member like that. One guy had so much trouble that he just changed his user name and then put his old user name on the new account as his screen name. But you would give up your archive by doing that.
November 9, 2008 9:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
To stop following a user: go to their blog page, and click the box that says: "following".
I believe that the bug which is a function of user names with space(s) is being fixed with underscores instead of spaces for the user's id address. Tom's address is now: "tom_wright", and yours is: "the_facilitatrix". That should take care of the weird character escape code in the urls, which nobody in their right-mind other than old web geeks can understand anyway.
If you desire to have you comment feed updated, you MUST update something within your own blog; either a new blog post, or a comment in one of your own blog posts. Those are the actions, which I am sure cause individual comment feeds to update.
November 10, 2008 9:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Related comment just posted on Robert Reich's thread:
(BTW, I noticed this comment because I "follow" Dan K. I probably would not have seen it if it were not for the dashboard function, because I had already read most of the thread.)
November 9, 2008 9:40 PM | Reply | Permalink