Captcha? Is this something new here? 1 1

[Bird]

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[Architecht]

4 minutes ago, Marwood & I said:

 

That's a shocking response Arch, if you don't mind me saying. How does this fit with your aspiration to 'do what comes to hand with correct and natural dignity, and with humanity, independence, and justice'?

In your response above you attempt to belittle me by comparing my request for more likes to your security access activity. But you fail to point out here that you drew that request for more likes from a summary post with 7 other questions and suggestions in it - questions and suggestions targeted at making the boards a better place.

For completeness, here is that post: 

 

 

In a similar vein, you then proceed to give responses to my other suggestions and questions in a brief, hurried manner which gives me at least the impression that you do not care about the very boards you are paid to run. Here are your responses:

 

Just picking out a few of your comments. You say you are 'not sure of the status' of the journals migration, and ignore my concern that the situation may be putting people off participating. If you don't know, who does? Have I fundamentally misunderstood your role here? If you valued my input you would at least have said '...but I'll find out' if you took the matter seriously. 

"They keep messing with the search / I haven't looked at this / we're not investing much attention to it" - @fantastic_four is one of the most technically intelligent chaps on these boards and he didn't spot that the search bar is intermittently set to 'status updates'.  All of your language in your answer implies that you are a bystander and that you don't care. I've pointed out a flaw in the search function and you don't care.

"No opinion" How rude!  What would be so wrong with "not my area you'll understand, but I can see why you'd be irked, sorry" Do you not possess the ability to respond kindly, or with flair?

Arch, I think you paint me out to be the villain, because that suits your purpose. I put it to you that you are the villain here. You don't appear to care! Some weeks back a whole host of members - long established and new - were bemoaning the fact that the boards were slow and that one morning they were down for half a day. Your sole contribution to the boards that day was to 'like' two posts in the 'Your personal artwork' thread. Is that the action of an administrator who cares and wants to calm his flock?

My last point is that my questions and suggestions were good humoured, cloaked in horse play and full of humour and self deprecation. But at their heart beat a desire for the boards to be the best they can be. I wish you would display the same passion once in a while.

Now, you can either ignore this which will be the easy route, ban me for insubordination, or come back and for once - just one time - show a measure of self reflection and humility and a willingness to do better. Unless that is, you genuinely believe that everything I have said here is rubbish.

 

 

I think I can help provide you some perspective on a few of these things.

I'm really an escalation point on boards issues rather than any day-to-day responder to issues. I tend to deal with moderation at a policy level, and boards performance and design at an oversight level. I check in, and occasionally respond directly to users just to add a little more communication where I can and because I value the community and like to stay in touch at a direct level where I can. I do tend to try to respond in brief.

I think your frustration with these issues stems from a mismatch of expectations. You would like a community interaction process where all requests are responded to promptly, minor and major issues of any sort always get an answer as well as frequent updates along the way. That sounds pretty ideal to me as well, but alot of the types of issues you advocate for are lower priority issues for a variety of reasons.

1. The issue doesn't impact that many users
2. It's a preference request that there isn't major support for and/or has other side effects that we don't consider desirable
3. It would be nice to do, but it's unclear how to achieve it
4. The issue can easily be worked around so it is an inconvenience rather than a blocker
5. It's possible to do, but probably would take too much time/resources/cost to be worth it

We always want the boards to be better, and the users to be happier, but we do also have to make priority decision on what to address.

Sometimes that means that your comments will go into the "suggestion box", will get read, but won't really have any effort allocated to resolving them. That isn't because we don't care. It's because we have to make decisions about where to focus time and energy.

So, for example, this week the team has spent time on board performance and scalability. The security changes were an outcome of that attention. It cut a bunch of malicious and/or spider activity out and improved things. The team deployed a point release of the boards that addressed a variety of issues. The team is also currently testing and executing on a move of attachment storage to a new location in order to avoid running out of disk space and shutting the boards down. They have also spotted a system issue on the NGC boards that was eating 10GBs of storage with duplicate javascripts and made sure it was resolved. There are many more projects and issues being worked on across other web and mobile assets as well.

Lots of these things are beneficial to everyone, and generally higher priority than some of the requests and issues that arise more directly from the members.

We are very interested in suggestions and problem reports, and we do read them, but we are not guarantying a response to every item raised by the membership. You can think of it more like a suggestion box rather than a ticket system.

[Architecht]

@DeadOne @skypinkblu and anyone else on this thread - to bring it more back on topic:

Is anyone regularly experiencing these challenges at this point? The intent is that a normal user is rarely / never challenged with a captcha screen. So if you are still seeing these as of today with any regularity, I'd love to know.

Thanks!

[DeadOne]

Just now, Architecht said:

@DeadOne @skypinkblu and anyone else on this thread - to bring it more back on topic:

Is anyone regularly experiencing these challenges at this point? The intent would be that a normal user is rarely / never challenged with a captcha screen. So if you are still seeing these as of today with any regularity, I'd love to know.

Thanks!

I am not.

[Get Marwood & I]

25 minutes ago, Architecht said:

 

I think I can help provide you some perspective on a few of these things.

I'm really an escalation point on boards issues rather than any day-to-day responder to issues. I tend to deal with moderation at a policy level, and boards performance and design at an oversight level. I check in, and occasionally respond directly to users just to add a little more communication where I can and because I value the community and like to stay in touch at a direct level where I can. I do tend to try to respond in brief.

I think your frustration with these issues stems from a mismatch of expectations. You would like a community interaction process where all requests are responded to promptly, minor and major issues of any sort always get an answer as well as frequent updates along the way. That sounds pretty ideal to me as well, but alot of the types of issues you advocate for are lower priority issues for a variety of reasons.

1. The issue doesn't impact that many users
2. It's a preference request that there isn't major support for and/or has other side effects that we don't consider desirable
3. It would be nice to do, but it's unclear how to achieve it
4. The issue can easily be worked around so it is an inconvenience rather than a blocker
5. It's possible to do, but probably would take too much time/resources/cost to be worth it

We always want the boards to be better, and the users to be happier, but we do also have to make priority decision on what to address.

Sometimes that means that your comments will go into the "suggestion box", will get read, but won't really have any effort allocated to resolving them. That isn't because we don't care. It's because we have to make decisions about where to focus time and energy.

So, for example, this week the team has spent time on board performance and scalability. The security changes were an outcome of that attention. It cut a bunch of malicious and/or spider activity out and improved things. The team deployed a point release of the boards that addressed a variety of issues. The team is also currently testing and executing on a move of attachment storage to a new location in order to avoid running out of disk space and shutting the boards down. They have also spotted a system issue on the NGC boards that was eating 10GBs of storage with duplicate javascripts and made sure it was resolved. There are many more projects and issues being worked on across other web and mobile assets as well.

Lots of these things are beneficial to everyone, and generally higher priority than some of the requests and issues that arise more directly from the members.

We are very interested in suggestions and problem reports, and we do read them, but we are not guarantying a response to every item raised by the membership. You can think of it more like a suggestion box rather than a ticket system.

Thank you for this perspective Arch. I now understand your role better. I do think you should take more care with your language - the 'have at it' spirit of your replies at times doesn't suit your role. I think my days of pointing out glitches and making suggestions are over now, now that I know how they will be received. Let's leave it on a positive though - thanks for the galleries feature. 

[BlowUpTheMoon]

4 minutes ago, Architecht said:

@DeadOne @skypinkblu and anyone else on this thread - to bring it more back on topic:

Is anyone regularly experiencing these challenges at this point? The intent is that a normal user is rarely / never challenged with a captcha screen. So if you are still seeing these as of today with any regularity, I'd love to know.

Thanks!

@Architecht

These might be instances:

 

[Transplant]

1 minute ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

@Architecht

These might be instances:

 

I think we're all okay if some of Roy's posts get delayed or blocked altogether, amirite?

[Get Marwood & I]

1 hour ago, Bird said:

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Don't you start!

[Bird]

On 11/10/2017 at 2:02 PM, Bird said:

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well, I done got me a new title I see! This is the first time I ever posted a meme too, I think.

[comicdonna]

10 minutes ago, Bird said:

well, I done got me a new title I see! This is the first time I ever posted a meme too, I think.

Welcome to the club! 

[Get Marwood & I]

25 minutes ago, Bird said:

well, I done got me a new title I see! This is the first time I ever posted a meme too, I think.

That'll be five English pounds please @Bird