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

Well it was inevitable. Given the time most people spend on forums, the changes were bound to upset people. It's just a pity that we overlooked the need for 'find latest' until it was too late to slot it into this release. Ho hum. It happens.

Here's how I see it working:

By default, we show the oldest posts first. This is correct a lot of the time because people start reading threads from the beginning.

We tweak the 'Recent forum posts' so that it links directly to your last post. This would be most useful in most chat threads. But we also give a 'go to latest' from the same place.

Have a 'show latest' button in the thread view itself. Ideally, have video recorder buttons - ffwd, rewind as well as previous and next.

And another possibility is a preference to specify if you always get shown the newest posts.

Slightly more work would be for us to finally implement a system of marking threads as read, allowing even more accurate navigation of forums. But that won't happen in a real hurry (like these other changes probably will).

Why the on your page, its not that bad, most things work and the few that don't can be fixed.
I like the idea of the video buttons on the forums
I'd just posted a similar idea in the feedback forum in my usual long winded way

It's probably because I'm not getting as much sleep as I'd like, and we spent an intense three hours deploying a completely rewritten site, and a couple of glitches cause people to dismiss it all.

I guess I've never been good at taking criticism.

Dissmissing anything new on the basis of a few minor glitches is an knee jerk reaction by most people , its amasing how fast people get used to something new once they are using it.
I bet that if you tried to change the site back you would get an even bigger tirade of abuse, so whatever happens don't let it get you down
As for being good at taking criticism, I don't know anyone who is, It always hurts.

Hang in there Jim. I know a bit about what it's like to spend a long time rewriting things only to have people go "yeah, but I liked it better the other way". Most of this initial whining will probably die down a bit. And hey, you just have to ignore the rudeness of the most vocal "this sucks" people, cos I know and you know that it doesn't.

The forums thing is very odd. For one, there are the people who are vehement that a forum is totally useless if you can't see an entire threaded tree. I actually think they're a small minority of chatters on the whole, but they're definitely out there. Then there are people who won't really care one way or the other. Then there are people like me (probably also a minority; the middle people are the majority) who actually think a tree structure is stupid and that forums should always be in a "conversation" style of chronological posts. In the case of h2g2, I think the tree-threaded people are really having a knee-jerk reaction to its disappearance. We aren't talking about threads that make no sense without trees. It's very difficult to get both ways to support well. As we saw the old way, if everything gets structured to the tree, it's impossible to find the one new post in an old, long thread.

Knowing what we've read before would be nice, but wow, what a scale to implement that on! It's one thing to do if a site has a forum in one place. This site is many forums all over the place. Everything has a forum. Implementing such tracking sounds pretty daunting to me. Linking the forum post links on our home pages directly to that posting does sound like an excellent start. Going directly to new posts is also a good idea, but what if there were 40 new posts? Which section does it go to? Perhaps the ability to name our own length of section would be in order, dunno how doable that is. Or! Or or or how about this? *gets a bit excited* Not a huge revelation, but I know when it was implemented in the UBB that it was a leap forward: on a forum topic that goes more than one "page", have direct links to page 2, page 3, page 4, etc. for however many pages there are. It doesn't have to take a lot of vertical space, just a horizontal Page: 1 2 3 4 5 like a search engine would suffice. How hard would that be?

Just rambling thoughts. But don't let that initial reaction get you down. You have to remember you're hearing from the vocal minority, and they don't always know anything.

I'm also sorry to see the

I'm already learning to use the new setup, I think people should give it a chance. Its easy to feel swamped by it to start with, but 2 days later and it seems easyish, even with the long fora

Also a request -
I assume that someone somewhere has a list of things testers should do.

But on Ripley, practically the first thing everyone appears to do is post a journal, titled something along the lines of "test journal entry" or "I wonder if this will work". The next thing they go to do is reply to said journal entry. But everyone does that, the chances of someone noticing a bug doing that is minimal.

Would it be possible to issue some form of guidelines, I guess to try to get people to use the site as they normally would? Then things like the fora may possibly have become more apparent. They may not, but I wonder if its worth a try.

Don't be I think it'll be better in the long run, when people realise that one of the things that makes h2g2, the community, is the same as it was, as are all the entries.

Thanks for the kind words, both of you. I'm feeling more now.

We have been trying to put a test plan together, but the first attempt wasn't actually any use, so we'll redo it. However, a loose 'why not try this' page on the test server would be an excellent idea. I was reluctant to enforce a testing regime on Ripley precisely because if you guide people into certain areas, then they won't randomly go off and test things that you didn't think of.

By the way, the ripley test site is still up, and I've put up a stab at addressing these forum problems. Take a look if you get the chance.

*goes to ripley and is immediately impressed*

It wasn't like that this morning!

>its amasing how fast people get used to something new once they are using it

Yep, it only took me a couple of hours before I was happily switching between h2g2 & ripley & not previewing anywhere (it shows doesn't it)

Don't let the bleaters get you down Jim

I expect that most of the more unpleasant agitators for "show us the latest first" will be the loudest & first to yell "how come no one reads the early part of the forum anymore" when the change comes

As an alternative model for viewing forums I'd like to suggest

That the top left area (currently used for the block of 20 summary) be used for a set of summary links - each linking to a block of 20 posts & showing a "last post" timestamp & utilising the current URL form (http://www.h2g2.com/FLR99999?thread=99999&skip=20&show=20)- but not an expanding tree view. The VCR buttons would work with it as well.

The 20 Summaries would occupy the same space as the current 20 post urls - so unless the forum contained more than 400 posts it wouldn't occupy anymore screen real estate than now. I don't know whether 400 posts is rare or common - you guys have the stats I'm sure

That nothing be displayed in the left hand frame until one of the Summaries is selected, unless the user is coming from their 'more posts/recent forums' list when you'd show their most recent post block.

Generating the summaries on the fly might give the db servers a serious flogging - but maybe a summary/header type record added to the database & generated when the forum is added to & a new header is required for a new block would be workable. Anyway that's your department.

I think it's a pretty intuitive & fairly English language independant way to do it.

Just my 2p worth
;^)#

Hi,
There have been some harsh words which I think you must have anticipated and I hope prepared to shrug off.
The site still working, so sod 'em!
If Charlotte has a minute, would you ask her if she could let me know whether my preferred "goo" format will continue to alternate with "alabaster" periodically, whether other researchers see my "alabaster page" as tumbleweed (as it reports to me when it shows up) and what poor old Fairly Strange has done to be excluded from the "Search for a Friend" facility?
I'm confident that such a bright young thing will be able to explain clearly to a puzzled old man.

Oops,
Should have mentioned:
Fairly Strange http://www.h2g2.com/U40399
He doesn't seem surprised because "Monsy" is the "prime user" of the pc but I thought I'd used "Search friend" to find him before.

One more thing:
Tonight, after a forum page failed to load I hit "Refresh". This produced a full screen without the Eyestorm feature.
It happened again later and Refresh produced full page without Eyestorm but only the left hand side "Index". I clicked at the top in the user's name which brought up a second full screen w/o Eyestorm and just the right hand side the "Forum posting". It was a new user's page with only the one message.
http://www.h2g2.com/U135785
Seems to be working properly now.
Heigh ho.

Oh, yes.
The "Preview" and "Post" message butttons make much more sense this way round. But then I'm right handed.

The 'Search for a user' feature isn't doing wildcard matching, so we've listed that as a bug.

Erm ...
At the risk of being a pain in the nappy region ...
Re the "left hand, right hand (Preview - Post)" trouble. As mentioned before I reckon it's better; have you considered applying this to the "Edit home page" buttons?
That's rhetorical, really.

As one of the initial whiners, I humbly apologize and submit to you that now i like everything just fine and am very used to it. I am just one of those annoying people who do not like change very much but then adapt well. I think you are doing a wonderful job and I appreciate all your hard work. I certainly could not do it! One question though- why do I randomly get kicked off of h2g2 and not recognized? That is minor because I usually shouldn't be taking up so much time on the computer anyway, but it can get annoying. Anyway, Jim, THANK YOU for your hard work, and don't let people like me get you down...

The problem with being randomly kicked off was because of a bug which was causing us to run out of connections to the database.

We believe we've tracked down the causes, so I don't think it'll be happening again (not for that reason, anyway).

Okay, thanks.

Well you certainly seem to have fixed that and in the process it seems to have made the site respond a lot faster

Well done to you and all the team

Yes, it's much faster now and very nice...