Good Lord people. This is the internet. Technology and philosophies change in time and FR has been lacking some change in like, 5 yrs.
John moves a link here, changes how something looks there and you all freak out like somebody just moved one of your tacky salt & pepper shakers in your collection. Geez.
I wish John had more flexibility because he has some good ideas only restricted by a mass of tired farts afraid of seeing something slightly different the day before.
Are you comparing FR to a tacky salt and pepper shaker?
Surely you’re not advocating change for changes sake?
Question: I’m getting a variabale rate of loading of pages. “Latest Posts” is really slow. “Pings” was fine, but now it’s slow. Threads load fairly normally, but posting comments comes up slow.
Can we attribute this slowness to need-to-iron-out-the-wrinkles?
(Why do I hear a destinct Smooching sound?)
It boils down to ease of use. The way it was, was easily navigated. Now it is different and not as easily navigated.
Change for changes sake...not good. Changes made involve more difficulty to navigate than older model. Don’t fix what ain’t broken.
Too many detours to get where I want to go.
Yeah, people are like that. We each to feel, each step of the way, that we chose the next step, and the step was forward. But there is a wide range of user skills, and a wide variation in how much of that skill is unconscious muscle memory versus potentially conscious awareness of what the software is doing or could be doing.
When you start thinking of some of your users as the "enemy", rather than as blessings, you're toast.
Let me step back from the precipice here a bit.
John and whomever else is behind the curtain here in Freeper Land run one of the most remarkable, successful web sites and forums in human history. They do more, with less, providing the platform for a level of (usually) healthy interaction, informing and organizing that few other web sites, if any, can touch.
The site is fast, it handles huge loads, a wide variety of people figure out how to use it successfully, they do it on a budget that's astonishingly dirt cheap, and they've been doing it, with high availability, almost non-stop, for over a decade now (did we miss celebrating a ten year anniversary back there?), which is like forever in the life of the internet.
I salute John.
So ... how do handle change.
Well, what Google does, who with their Google.com interface runs an even more popular interface, with a 14.27 gazillion times bigger budget, is to run new fancier interfaces, along side the well known one. They never plan to remove the well known one, and they change it with a delicate touch that mostly avoids forcing anyone to relearn anything, even in the small detail. But alongside, they run fancier interfaces, which those of us who are feeling more adventurous can use, if we like.
Only those who ask for the new interface get it (see further iGoogle.com).
However, I'm not sure if that's an option here. I don't know if FR can and does have the presentation portion of its backend software sufficiently separated from its core data engine and core forum software internals, that we could run two interfaces, one classic (legacy) and one more leading edge, more fluid, more rapidly changing, at the same time.
Now if John could do that, he'd a a coding God that Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds and Ken Thompson would all bow before. But if John is a mere mortal like the rest of us humans, then one cannot expect that he's been able to produce this fine site while preserving a nearly perfect Model-Viewer-Controller separation of internals and presentation that allows for naturally plugging in alternative presentation (aka viewer) modules, along side the existing one, cleanly and efficiently, with little effort. That's simply too much to ask.
So ... well heck I don't know ... change is difficult in such cases.