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!

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.

14 minutes ago, lizards2 said:

Now we're left to wonder if that was intentional or not! 

What? No credit? Man. tough crowd.

11 minutes ago, Transplant said:

Freud might argue that is not a trophy.

Maybe I'm just afraid that too many accolades would make me lazy.

Sometimes a trophy is just atrophy.

9 minutes ago, skypinkblu said:

Watch out, there is now a giant trophy in the post above your head...it's tilting...... but just a little;) 

5 minutes ago, lizards2 said:

The new boards won't let you put stuff above.  Your trophy will be coming from beneath the waves.  

 

 

Just now, Transplant said:

So you are afraid.  Doesn't it feel good to get that off your chest?

Phew. It sure does. The trophy thing especially scares me. I have this recurrent dream of a giant trophy falling on me. Is that weird?

Response to some of the quick issues to address:

1. Likes - probably not going to increase this substantially, but if a modest number of people all still want more likes, I could see raising the ceiling a bit
2. Gallery visibility - I added a sidebar for recent gallery additions
3. Window for invisible edits - no way to do this. We can either allow ALL edits to be invisible (which I don't like), or none. We have no setting to allow invisible edits for X minutes or anything like this. Given the two choices, I prefer visible edits so people can tell if original post content was altered after people responded.
4. Ask CGC - not handled by moderation - no opinion
5. Old journal migration - not sure of the status on this one.
6. Ignoring specific threads - no facility on the boards for this one. There might be a plugin out there for this, but I don't think I'm in favor of people narrowing their exposure to topics the community is responding to. I think if you are ignoring the original poster, though, then that thread is not see.
7. Search drop down changes - Probably would have to be re-tested as a few minor boards versions have been released, and I know they keep messing with search. I haven't looked at this. Generally, we've been considering replacing the main search with a plugin that uses google instead. Mainly because the boards software's search facility is problematic in a number of way - not least that it's limited to a 4 year index and even that performs poorly. As a result, we're not investing much attention in it.

2 minutes ago, Transplant said:

Why won't you let me like this post?  Are you afraid?

I turned off likes for admin because someone made a shill and was just liking everything I posted as some kind of reverse psychology sarcasm trolling. It didn't seem worth the hassle, so I just turned off admin likes.

7 hours ago, Marwood & I said:

Great question @skypinkblu, but you should have asked it in the questions section, not comics general. At least that's what Arch keeps telling me. 

But wait, I see that Arch has answered your question. But he hasn't answered any of the questions in the questions section? 

How peculiar... 

 

I answered it because when we make a change that could possibly block people from using the boards, we treat that as higher priority and of general interest. Similar to how, when we migrated to the new boards software we allow commentary anywhere and everywhere, and tried to monitor and respond to issues however we could.

Less urgent issues, even if repeatedly pushed by a single user, don't merit the same treatment.

For example, these issues have different priority:

1. A security change we made that could be preventing users from accessing the boards at all, or repeatedly challenging large numbers of users with captcha
2. A single user asking for a higher limit on daily likes for a second time after the total was previously raised in response to the same request

2 hours ago, skypinkblu said:

I just started a thread in the probation forum and I had to click on a bunch of mountains and hills. 

Has anyone else seen this? 

This is some added security we put on the site both to stop hack attacks if they are occurring, but also more specifically to cut down on the guest traffic from bots that was eating site resources for no reason.

This has significantly cut down on bot/spider traffic on the web site so it's achieving its goal. We've dropped about 27% of the bot-driven guest users on the site on our 2 day average. That's good news for performance of the site for real users.

There might be some legit activities though, that are getting swept up in the process. That's why we have it set to challenge a user with captcha as opposed to just blocking them. Since that appears to be the case, I just made two tweaks - I upped the allowed time on the site after solving a captcha to 1 hour, and I turned the security level down a bit to avoid catching real users at all.

Ideally we will identify the specific firewall rules that are catching legit site activity and adjust them or turn them off, so we don't have to just generically lower the security level. But we'll refine that over time.

For now, please let me know if this continues to happen frequently given the adjustments I just made.

Thanks!

1 minute ago, thehumantorch said:

Agreed on all points.

There are guys here who sell lots of books who I don't trust or aren't involved other than to move books.  Also a high post count is no guarantee of a high level of trust.

Sell a book cheap to a collector only to see it flipped for a profit and/or pressed and flipped for an even better profit and you'll quick quit giving deals.  Ultimately this is all a reflection of what's happening in our hobby and there's no going back.

Maybe a community maintained list... If you buy a book indicating it's a grail / collection piece, and then flip it within X time, you go on the list as a flipper -- not inherently a bad thing, but good information that might go into pricing...?

Oh man... does a market-place specific thread qualify for my official "the end is coming/here" post? I think I need a ruling... who mods the mods? I might be busted for being off topic...

9 hours ago, Marwood & I said:

I can't see that the actions you have taken so far are in line with your comments above Arch? You have removed the stickies, created the new 'Our Picks' section but left it with only one thread in it ('Show us your personal artwork'). You took those actions some days back, based only on suggestions from me and jsilverjanet, and therefore haven't waited to see how the community would react - you just went ahead and introduced a change no one asked for at a time when people have been much more concerned with performance issues. Come on Arch, raise your game buddy.

 

Less scrolling to get to new posts has been a hot button issue for quite a while and has been often requested in the past.

This was an easy change. Easy to do, easy to test, easy to put back. Doing experiments on board organization is how we improve things.

I took actions based on my judgement, and limited feedback. When people don't respond much one way or the other after a couple of weeks, we have a few choices:

1. Leave the feedback thread up for a while longer
2. Forget the change
3. Make the change and see how it works out

Which we choose to do depends on how sensible the change seems, and how risky it seems to try it. In this case, it makes good sense, opens up room to highlight other threads without stickying crazy numbers of threads to the top, and is easy to undo.

In the meantime, performance is a different scale of issue that isn't comparable in terms who or what it takes to address. It's a little like saying we should stop brushing our teeth until we get our clogged arteries fixed. Yes, the clogged arteries are a priority, but we should still practice good hygiene since it doesn't impact how we fix the clogged arteries one way or the other.

Performance is being addressed, but it's entangled with some of the rest of the technical infrastructure. The board software vendor wants us to arrange things in ways that are convenient for them, but worse in a number of ways (SEO, international performance, etc.). We're seeking better solutions, but that will take some time to work through.

By the way, I'm likely to remove a bunch of these posts after this change as settled out, as we're WAY off topic for the thread, Marwood. Please try not to bundle off-topic questions into stickied threads with a particular purpose.

22 hours ago, ygogolak said:

A thread that lists all of the threads already stickied at the top. Ingenious.

 

The point would be to unsticky a number of those threads and take up less front page real-estate.

What usually happens in these situations, though, is that if I make a post like this, solicit feedback, wait a few days and just do it --- it turns out that a bunch of people didn't read the thread and feel that they didn't have a chance to speak up. So often I will let some solutions co-exist to see how the community reacts over a longer period of time. If the feedback is clear and one-sided, I'll make the change quickly. If it's sparse and/or controversial, I'll leave it a while to see how things play out.

52 minutes ago, Marwood & I said:

It would be a shame if we started to 'lose' content in the way you're describing Arch. A year isn't much in the scheme of things and part of the appeal of these boards is the access to so much information, much of it historic. We've lost a lot of great stuff already due to third parties like photobucket mucking around which is why we all love that we can now add pictures direct and have the CGC site itself host them. But if they start to become unsearchable, or difficult to find after a short time then that will be a big loss. 

I have to read explanations a few times sometimes on these things.  To make it clear, when you say we my lose our posts after a year (if that were to happen) does that mean they are 'gone' or will there still be a way of retrieving them? Hopefully it won't come to that but it does seem that the boards are becoming a victim of their own success and if things are creaking already what will the future hold? 

I'm sure you and the team will do all you can to keep the place, and it's valuable history, alive and accessible as best you can. Thanks for the honest summary. 

Whoops! Let me make sure I'm not giving the wrong impression.

We are NOT talking about deleting posts. No posts are planned to be deleted.

When I say "Shorten the search window to 1 year" I mean that searches on the boards would only look for posts that happened within the last year. IF we replace the regular search with the Google search, then a generic search for some terms would actually search everything, all the way back to the beginning of the boards.

It's only the "Advanced Search" in that situation (the function built into the boards) that would be limited to 1 year.

5 hours ago, Bosco685 said:

Over the past month I have noticed the Advanced Search feature take an extended period of time to include the Movies-TV-Games sub-forum to your forum search options. The progress indicator will just circle like it is cycling through all the options.

And it doesn't matter the browser, as if functions the same whether you use Firefox or IE 11. Previously, it was slightly slow. Now, it seems to get locked in this search analysis to include all sub-forum options.

UPDATE:

I see what you mean. It's not just search results, but the ability to even see a sub-forum as an options. I've duplicated this on two other instances of the boards, and filed it as a ticket with the software maker.

-- SNIP --

THE BELOW IS TRUE, it just isn't directly applicable to the above question. Leaving it here for informational purposes, but the actual answer to this specific issue is above.

We've been watching this as well. Usage on the boards has been going up since we first migrated, and it's putting load on the system. At the same time, we have the search history window set to 4 years. That's greater than the 1 year recommended by the boards software makers, and they warn of performance problems for large search windows on big boards -- which the CGC board is.

However, 4 years is still far short of complete searchability, which is an important value of the boards given how many great conversations have occurred over many years on these boards. So, we have a few choices we are evaluating for dealing with this:

1. Shorten the search window to 1 year as recommended to us, and just live with the limitation.
2. Implement a plugin that replaces the Search All function with Google results
   1. This would allow searching of the complete history
   2. It only works for "search all", not for specific searches by author name, in a certain forum, etc.
3. Leave the search window large and just live with the fact that we may not be able to improve performance
4. Wait for some vaguely promised "Search Enhancements" that the software maker has hinted at several times
5. Spend more money on the boards hardware and hope that improves the issue (note: more hardware does not always directly improve specific performance issues)

Right now we're considering a combination - i.e.:

• Cut the search window to one year
• Implement the google search replacement for "search all"
• Upgrade the hardware / hosting for better performance

This isn't ideal, as it would still mean that specific searches via advanced search would only go back a year. I think it also means that the list of posts by a board member on their profile page would also be limited to 1 year.  It MAY also mean that searches of your private message inbox are limited to one year - I'm not sure on that one.

It would be great if the software maker suddenly improved search so we wouldn't have to make compromises, but they have given no timeline or specifics on that, so I'm not holding my breath.

P.S. we are testing the google search replacement on the PMG boards right now if anyone would like to see what that looks like:

https://www.pmgnotes.com/boards/

Hi all,

I thought it would be cool to make a single thread as an index of all of the ongoing contribute-forever kind of threads FROM COMICS GENERAL ONLY so people could find those cool gems. Some of them are pinned to the top, but definitely not all - there wouldn't be room!

I'm thinking that each forum could have a thread like this that gets pinned, and that might save some room at the top, while making space for more cool threads like these to be featured.

HERE IS HOW IT WORKS:

I added a tag to the threads listed below of "infinite". Because of that you can find the whole list of them AND click on the black dot to see new posts via this search:

THE INFINITE THREADS LIST!

Here are the first few that I tagged, but anyone who adds an "infinite" tag to a thread will show up in the search, so the community can add to it. This lets people easily find those threads without always having to scroll past them at the top.

On 20/09/2017 at 10:28 PM, ditko67 said:

Arch,

How do I change back to my old name?It was theshadowknows.I have no idea what the password was.

Thanks

Dennis

@ditko67, read this post and follow the instructions:.

7 minutes ago, Red84 said:

VERY BAD IDEA!!!

Example - post a sale thread here, then post on Facebook with a link to this forum.  Now we have random Facebook people who sign up just to make a deal on the forum resulting in significantly more buyers who don't honor deals and cause problems.  If you want to sell on Facebook, then sell on Facebook.  If you want to sell here, then sell here!

Well, maybe... but everyone here was once not here, and then they were new. This process could help grow the community. Yes, an influx of new members always means sorting out the reliable from the unreliable, but I wouldn't say that's a bad thing.

If a particular seller doesn't like the take a risk on new members, they could always just choose not to work with them until they have an established kudos thread?

Hi all,

Please check out this feedback post for a possible rules clarification for the marketplace. Thanks!

Hi all,

This came up on a recently moderated post, and I wanted to get some feedback from the membership on this.

The Background:
When we first offered a marketplace on the boards, people loved it because it was used as a way for community members who trust each other and trust each other's grading to buy and sell books with each other. Often those posts were even board-specific offers, meaning that because of the trust, the community, and the low hassle process the books were offered at a better price than elsewhere.

As the marketplace became more popular, people started advertising their eBay sales on the boards. This was a good idea, but it created a kind of annoying situation where people were just looking through the same books they just finished reviewing on eBay, but on the boards.

That was when we decided to implement the boards-only rule. It helps the community stay focused on selling to each other, and prevents the double-review issue above.

The Situation:
Someone posts a selling thread on the boards, and then cross-posts that thread to other social media (facebook, instagram, whatever) -- maybe even specifying that you must be contact the seller through the boards to buy the book, requiring the buyer be a board member.

The Question:
Does the above situation stay true to the spirit of boards-only offers? Even if it CAN be true to the spirit, if we allow this, does it become a problem if abused? I think that when posted to social media like Instagram, it's not quite the same as a true selling offer like eBay. It's also less likely that people are reviewing Instagram for books to purchase, and more likely that people will be encouraging new members to sign up to the boards from their social network.

Possible Results:
We will choose to either add an amendment to the rules to allow this kind of thing (with whatever stipulations), or disallow it based on a combination of admin opinion and your feedback.

Thanks! Please feel free to vote AND comment on the reasons for your vote.

https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/calendar/

On 9/12/2017 at 10:49 AM, pug productions said:

Ever since you have changed to the new format I have not been able to see a way to add to the calendar before I submit an event.  Please advise. Thanks, JP

 

Hi!

I noticed that too. You can no longer make a post and have it automatically also become a calendar entry. If you want both a post and a calendar entry, you have to do them separately. Sorry about that.

On 7/30/2017 at 9:08 AM, Dick Pontoon said:

What happened to the "Date Joined" underneath our avatars in posts? It's a nice perk and I don't want to have to visit somebody's profile to see it. Arch - what's the word?

The plugins that we used to show join date next to posts (it's not part of the core features) were recently updated to work with this newest version of the boards. So, I installed the update and it's back!

6 hours ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

IS that the space between the first and second post? I'm guessing you are running ad blocker.