h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't understand some of the problems on that blog as they described them, if it was such a mish mash of design/function/coding on the old hootoo, there wasn't anythign to stop them just designing a new site up, a lot of the functionality afterall is pretty standard stuff nowdays really, forum conversations, user-contributed matterial etc.

The problem is, a lot of the faults I can see, and others have commented on, arn't* faults; its a site that has been designed to have (or not have is moreoften the case it seems), this functionality...

Not being able to rapidly track, reply and monitor conversation t threads, isn't just a community/idle chat issue, it dramatically affects PR too and thence the edited guide.

here http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A78067353 is a link to the bug and comment pages


so let me get this straight...

the editors of the bbc web presence have handed the redesign of h2g2 to a development company of which some members of the team dont even know what h2g2 "was"

evidently this team has been given the task of bringing h2g2 "up to" the standards of the rest of the bbc web presence

during which most of what made h2g2 h2g2 has been lost


and wasnt it the creativity, ingenuity and genius of the people who designed the dna machine that runs the bbc web presence -and many other web presences on the web- wasnt it that which created the h2g2 that this new team is trying to improve on?


that all got muddled when i tried to say it but can you see what i am trying to say?

The death of Goo = the death of the h2g2?

I liked what DmitriGheorgheni had to say. I also think Archangel Silly Willy makes a good point. Since we are very individualistic in our "skin" preferences, it was a stroke of sheer genius to let people have more than one option. Now H2G2 wants a "one size fits all" philosophy, which threatens to send many researchers away, but if they stay, they won't be as happy. Happy? Why doesn't happiness count for anything?

(Not that I care about losing alabaster and gaining the gray/blue theme, which I don't mind and rather like. I just think that variety has a positive value.)

I'm not even sure its just an issue of skins, I think all the skins had a pretty simular set of funcitonality, (yeh I know they varied, and the newer skins had some funcitonality that the older ones didn't)... Seems very odd what they've come up with.... Its not at all like a beta release or a testing, nearly ready/finished release... especially considering how long this redesign (which seems the wrong term), seems to have been

not that this has any bearing on the subject at hand but

i used to do maid work in a fancy resort here in the usa
and if we were pressed for time
the new condo tenents were arriving in 10 MINUTES!!!

we had a little trick
we would go around polishing all the shiny surfaces
and it would look clean
at first inspection
but by second inspection everyone had already dropped their bags and covered the counters with make up and whatnot
so stuff the maids hadnt gotten to would not be noticed usually

Replying to Paul, one of the things I liked so much about h2g2 when I first joined was that it was quirky and unique. The mission of the redesign appears to be to make us look like and function like everyone else. To me, this is worse than the technical glitches.

As to those, I'm still in alabaster. I've gone to noohootoo and can't navigate or post from it. Unless functionality is restored and maintained we're going to lose a lot of people. I hope that isn't the idea.

I was just trying Guide MK2 again, but had to give up as apparently I can't write a post which isn't offensive and gets blocked... I'm not at all sure what the desired aim of the guide MK2 was, I think I thought I knew what the aim was, but I don't see any attempt at forfilling this in the Guide MK2... Very mystifying.

I wasn't keen on the redesign, but like the looks. Unfortunately, that's the onyl positive thing I can say right now. As 2legs said, it doesn't look as if most of the functionalities we fought so hard for to get (and Jim Lynn gave us, like finding exactly the point in a conversation you read last) are meant to be there for us in the new skin. You can't even delete a guide entry any more, which is bad, since we sometimes create entries twice in the Post account, but only need one, so often, we just delete those we don't need. No option to do that any more. If you don't uncancel delete entries now (I deleted various entries for various reasons in the knowledge I could always get them back) - but you can't in Barlesque. Etc...

Oh, and there are so many researchers here who are official BBC testers, I wonder why they didn't ask them to test things.

They seem to have long ago forgotten the BBC testers group even exists (though as far as I know I and many other's form on here are still on/in the group).

The problem was, when we were shown the previews of the guide MK2 a while back, there wasn't any indication on that (which I can recall), indicating we'd be loosing most of the site's funcitonality in favour of... nho.. I still can't find anythign that is actually new on the new H2G2, cept maybe pictures and all that peripherlal stuff behind the actual site.
This wasn't what we were told the new site was going to be, so I don't know why this half-the-functionality-of-the-old-site seems to be what we have ended up with.

I understood that we had to look like the rest of the BBC, but I don't understand why we'll lose everything that is so important and had been developed specifically for us. We won't be any different from any other BBC message board then - but maybe that's the BBC's plan?

I personally like the new look, but I'm very concerned. We're told that most of the changes are merely cosmetic and linguistic, but there are some major fundamental changes that aren't immediately obvious. It's the things that are missing. We've lost a lot of the core functionality of what makes h2g2 special. What may seem like minor things are integral to how many folks use this site. Specifically things like the conversations popup and who's online; the navigation widget at the bottom of each post. It's often stated that what makes this site special is the community, but what makes the community is our conversations. The new version seems more like a generic forum. It seems like H2G2, by trying to adapt to the style and standards of the other BBC websites, is going to lose what makes it special. It looks like it's meant to be the kind of place where users pop in once a day, check new articles, make a few comments, and then go off to some other corner of the web until the next day. That's fine for the rest of the internet, but this is our h2g2. I've been here on a daily basis for 11 years. I wouldn't have done so if it was just another website. Getting new users is great, but not at the cost of those that have been here so long.

But, we're not a message board... I just can't understand it, basic functionality of h2g2 gone, no (that I can find) new functionality, and just a differnt colour scheme and background? I know they've changed a lot of the 'background code' behind the site, though quite why they've done that, when the alternative seems to be something less good (less functional), seems... well pointless, a single new 'skin' on the old site coudl have changed the colours/layout/pics without breaking waht was already here.

I'm in complete agreement, and am relieved to see others saying this too. I can't believe how much functionality has been lost, especially given we raised most of these issues in the beta testing I've posted on that blog, and here for the Eds: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F77636?thread=8012744&post=105470929#p105470929

And I've gone back to using alabaster.

RF

Given that this site doesn't get nearly the traffic it used to, I wonder how much it would cost to host it apart from the BBC again with banner ads for revenue?

Perhaps the beeb could just chuck it back out in to the web? Then there would be no need to conform to any guidelines and free open development could take over...

Has anyone succeeded in posting a guide entry in the new skin? It just ate my text.