If you've got a suggestion that's not a bug (ie something's broken on the site), or big picture content (for which you'd go to the content wiki, please put it here! Reply to comment
My first random things I noticed: First of all, NICE WORK! The site is incredibly clean looking and really well-thought out. This is just off of the first 30 min of tooling around on it, but impressive looking, to say the least.
Mostly I just messed around with the Community stuff and glanced at the Big Picture stuff quickly. I'll plan on actually reading things when I'm less hungover.
If it matters, I’m using the latest version of Google Chrome as my browser.
Here we go: -On the profile pages, the FIXES title runs into the stuff underneath it. -Me being a layperson, no idea what FIXES were at first. Figured it out pretty quickly, but is that an “industry” term? -From the home page, there doesn’t appear to be a link straight to the community stuff. Unless I’m an idiot. I accessed after I looked at Jeff’s profile. -SUGGESTION: On the Content pages, I like how they each start with the “What’s Broken”, “How We fix it”, etc. I like it so much, I think it should stand out a little more. Maybe double space those so there is a blank line underneath -What is POLISH? Is that explained anywhere?
First and foremost... Were the icons designed (in true Walt Disney style) to look ambiguously sexual? Law icon = male genetalia, Your Part icon = female genetalia!!! and its even labeled "Your Part" !!! I think I gotta get my head outta the gutter :)
Secondly, in the user sign-up, to be more politically correct/neutral, it might be best to just say Male, Female, Other, instead of "rather not say/neither"... Other just seems more encompassing.
Comments from first 10 minutes of use... more later. Reply to comment
Quick replies on a couple of these: - title running into: that's a bug, if you can file one on the tracker (so you can confirm that it looks good when it's fixed), that'd be great. - home page links - good point. we're also missing a log in link, both may be added. - double spacing: glad you like it! we'll try out adding some space. - polish: nope, it's not. Damnit, I knew jeff was right. This will probably be renamed "Quality" in the near future. Reply to comment
I haven't gotten a chance to really go in depth into the content, but I have to say I really like the organization of the site and the overall look of it. I am very much looking forward to going through everything when I get the chance.
One thing I did notice is that when I look at other people's profiles their name intersects with the dark blue line under it which cuts off the bottom half of the name. I am not sure if this is a bug or if this is how it's supposed to be, but it definitely looks off to me. Reply to comment
I am using Firefox 3.0.5. I'll send you a screen and submit it to the bugs page. I also just noticed that the little Global Warming link on the top right of community pages is getting cut off by the little white graphic (it looks like a corner of a page). I'll try to show you what I'm talking about in the screenshot. Reply to comment
I'm thinking that we need more News feeds. Possibly on the big picture page where the content feed is, and/or in your friends feed when they add a news story. Currently our only feed is on the home page, which you never hit if you are logged in. Reply to comment
I feel like if in being sent automatically to my "Your Part" page when I go to http://alpha.sixlinks.org, the Six Links themselves (the big picture) might not be emphasized enough. They are just little links on the top right of the page, and perhaps the issues aren't visible enough. I also think like Jeff is right in that the content feed is not visible enough with the "Your Part" page as the start page. I think that maybe the best would be for "The Big Picture" to be the start page rather than "Your Part" and adding the "Community Activity" and the "Latest News" sections that are now on the Home page to "The Big Picture",
I also feel like it might be a good idea to add the left side bar to the Home page for easier navigation from the page. I think Tom made a similar comment about this before. I think there needs to at least be a clear Log-in/Register button somewhere on the Home page. That might even be better than adding the sidebar because people can see the Six Links the first time they go to the site and that is emphasized before the community stuff, but there is still a very easy way to register for the site. Reply to comment
You also get news feeds if you favorite a news page in any section - it's like RSS but easy for that section's news. We could probably use some text explaining this to people.
I've thought that maybe a slightly extended setup sequence that has people pick a favorite link (fav'ing the news feed for them, or giving better instructions may help)
Could also swap that big pic page feed, if we think it's more useful than knowing what pages were recently updated (there is the wiki, afterall) Reply to comment
One clarification is this: if you have an account, and left yourself logged in when you last visited, you're brought to the your part page. If you're not logged in or don't have an account, you're taken to the Home page.
It's an interesting idea to start people on the big picture page, but if they're most likely to immediately go to "your part", does having them see the link buttons justify the extra click on every visit, and do they still see them after a while?
Left-side bar on home: We played with this, and I think it was an idea that I wanted to do but never satisfactorily was able to do without spoiling the simplicity.
Maybe what the combination of these ideas suggest is that there's a "logged in" home page that's sort of a hybrid of the home page and your part. that is, it's got the blue nav, the big picture top nav, some news, buttons for the links, and other big info/links (maybe the 'community updates' from the home page).
But then you still have to click once to get to /Your-Part/, so they'd might as well have just a plain home page.
I think we can assume that most people will leave themselves logged in once they have an account, so the question is where we want most return users to end up. If that's at the big picture then I think that's fine, if its Your Part (which I think there is a good argument for), then I think Your Part needs info about your friends adding news (since the only reference to news is the click to add a news story) and a news feed on the big picture home. Reply to comment
clarification - you do get news on your part. If you add any news page as a favorite, you get updated on that news.
I'm actually a fan of this "user home" page - if we can find the right features that hit what people really want (and don't require a click-away 90% of the time). In some ways, it seems disorienting to be dropped at "your part" when the first time you went to the site you were sent to "home". It's definetly an area we can improve in behaving intuitively. Reply to comment
Jeff, I understand what you're saying here with news- ie you posted a new news story, and I didn't see it at all.
Another, maybe more primary issue is that there's no quick way to distinguish new news from old news. Maybe we highlight news stories in the last 24 hours? 48? Reply to comment
I agree, just so long as we don't depreciate the value of /Your-Part/ My comment on news on your part is perhaps we want to see what your friends are uploading. Perhaps not. More important is probably a feed on the Big Picture home. I will file a bug to add the feature unless you disagree. Reply to comment
Don't necessarily disagree, but I don't know that we have a solution yet to file a bug on. To me, this depends on what behavior we want for people coming back to the site.
The friends submitting news stuff seems reasonable to me, unless one person ends up flooding the feed. Go ahead and ticket that as an enhancement (bug # 100! woot!) Reply to comment
Yeah, I think you're right about the no left-bar on Home. I still do feel though that there should be a log-in/register link right from that page. That might just be my opinion, though. Reply to comment
ok a few things I am noticing: -I just plain don't get the difference between guides and fixes I feel like there needs to be an explanation somewhere or maybe a change of terms for them. I mostly don't get guides; they feel redundant next to fixes. -There needs to be a continual fix, or ongoing, or eternal for fixes like not shaving your legs in the shower or riding your bike. You never really stop doing those things. -You could also use a resources section for fixes because there is pertinent information for some fixes that simply can't be completely included in this website -I feel like the community tab should come before the your part tab just because I had trouble finding this page and it seems to make more sense that you would come under community
I agree about having something for ongoing fixes. For example, if someone is going vegetarian, maybe there could be a Status that is "Completed since x date" or something, to show that it's an ongoing effort. I know that a lot of the guides we have (and will have) are devoted to one-time efforts, but I do believe that there is a place for the ongoing ones as well.
A general question for Steven and Jeff - is there going to be a "using SixLinks" guide that will detail differences between Guides and Fixes, etc? Because I feel that this would clear up a lot of the existing confusion. Reply to comment
Could 'creatures' maybe be changed to something like 'life around us'? Creatures sounds creepy and it feels like it only included animals and there's far more involved there.
Also, the 'protect key spaces' maybe change it to 'protect our spaces' its more inclusive Reply to comment
- Confusion between guides and fixes, as well as their intended uses and necessary parts may be addressed through better instructions when you make one. To try to explain it here, Fixes are things you are doing, guides are what you write to help others do a similar thing based on your experience from the fix you did. - Continual fix is something we are debating. On one hand, something that you are already doing isn't something new, so the website isn't really accomplishing anything. For on-going lifestyle things, we may create a new field in your profile, or you could put it in your things that describe you (although that is easier for some things than others). We want to make sure people spread their ideas of what they're doing, but we don't want to discourage them from doing other things by relying on what they've already done. - Resources section: would you need a resources section or could you just put it in the notes section? - I have no problem with moving community up, go from large to small in scale on the side (excluding sponsors). Thoughts from others? Reply to comment
'protect key spaces' comes from the triage principle of the site - while it'd be great to protect all of the natural spaces, we've only got so many resources - and we should spend those resources protecting the most important spaces.
creatures you can take up with jeff :)
Navigation words in general are really tough to refine, because they need to work for everyone from tom's 8th graders to a 95 year-old, coal-miners to academics. Reply to comment
Jeff's explanation confused me. So I'll try my explanation. Choose whichever makes sense to you :) A fix is something you do to 'fix' a area of how we live that's broken. It's an individual action, and fixes a particular problem.
A guide is a helpful manual for other people who might want to do what you just did. Good guides will provide all sorts of resources, information, and help people get past potential sticking points.
Here's my question: Aren't all fixes continual? If you change out your lightbulbs, you continue using the new ones. If your town puts up a wind turbine, they keep using it.
I went vegetarian however many years back. That was the change - that was the action. Everything since then has become maintenance. To me, the same goes for shaving and bike-riding. Changing from your current habits to more sustainable ones is the actual fix, and the significant part of the process.
Here's two questions for Katie, Rachel, and anyone else: 1) Can you think of a fix where the above isn't true? Aka, a fix where you don't make a change, then maintain that changed habit/usage/etc? 2) Do you feel that having the site 'check in' on you to see if you're still doing/using/living the way you said you did in the fix is useful? Does this fill what you were looking for in a continual fix? Reply to comment
I agree that "living things" or something of that sort would be better than creatures. 'Life around us' I think is too exclusive, I want you to care about the Tasmanian Devil, even though its not around you. The Natural World or something along those lines. We need a (short) phrase that includes plants, animals, spaces, and environmental education. Ready, Go! Reply to comment
I guess my problem with the word key is that i feel like it puts down people who are out there cleaning up their local stream bed and pushing for local govt to pay more attention to them who gets to decide what spaces are key Reply to comment
The original title (from the venerable sheet-o-paper) was "Natural Spaces/Biodiversity"
I believe we had one iteration between that and "Creatures", but I don't remember what it was.
I'm also going to put on my big-picture hat and point out that two biologists hashing out semantics is a minor issue when the site needs a total content work-through. : ) We've got to focus our energy in the most critical places. Let's rewrite the content for that section, and see what it tell us about the name.
That makes sense. And part of that is the perspective of this site.
We're taking the angle that not every place is going to be saved and worked on. So, we should put our efforts into helping the places that are critical to the ecosystem.
As far as the people down cleaning up their local stream, my (personal) thought is to ask how important that stream is in the big ecological picture. If it's not critical, then I'm ok leaving it out of what we call 'key' spaces. If that miffs people, I'm ok with that.
I think the gist of my perspective is that I'm sick and tired of feel-good environmentalism that makes people feel good about what they're doing, but has very little impact on the real problems. In my mind, that work is counterproductive because it a) wastes people's time, and b) lies to them that they're making a significant difference.
The trick, as you mention, is in the designating of what spaces are key. To me, we ask the data. What places have high varieties of biodiversity that are threatened? What places are critical to the survival of a large variety of species, whether they live there, or just pass through? We have to let reality show us where to act, instead of taking the easy, local way out. Reply to comment
I see that Steve is playing with this at the moment to try to fix it, but first, a poll: The reason why my response here is indented is that instead of typing my response into the box at the bottom of the page, I'm typing it after clicking "reply to comment" to try to stack conversations. Advantage: Keeps common threads together Disadvantage: Harder to find new posts
So, is this useful? and if so, how come no one is using it? Was it because you couldn't find the button or didn't know what it would do? Either way, your input will be important in figuring out how to redesign this. Reply to comment
but you can go back on those changes so easily and it's something you have to think about everyday. everytime it's cold or raining or snowing I have to make the decision of if i'm getting on my bike or if i'm getting in my car. once you change lightbulbs its over you don't think about it again until they burn out. Reply to comment
well, if you used jeff's lightbulb guide, you'll be thinking about turning them off, but that's beside the point.
This is great feedback - What we're trying to figure out is what the best way to represent things like this is.
And broader picture, does putting time in so that you can have a 'continual fix' make you do any more? Does it make other people do more? Does having that sort of thing impact the real world in a significant way?
The one way I can see is the #2 from above - the site checking in on you every six months or something to see if you're still on the wagon. What do people think? Reply to comment
it's useful to check out places that do this well. LJ, and slashdot are probably tops on the list.
Both use subjects, which I think we can get away without, if we're smart enough. We also need to see how hard it is to find new posts once email hits. I'm inclined to listen to the advice i always give my clients, "let's find out how it's broken when everything's there before we start to fix it."
ps. people are using it. rachel, you, me, and katie are all using threads :) Reply to comment
I would say that this is more of a scale issue than a triage issue. A local stream is important, it affects the local biodiversity. A major park maintains regional biodiversity. Reply to comment
It may encourage others to do more if they see you continuing to do it. I'm worried about the continual/one-time fix distinction, because there are shades of grey. I think its more a distinction between things you were doing before you joined and those you do after. On the latter point, I don't think a check-in is a bad thing. Reply to comment
I guess Your Part is a bit self-explanatory and Community is less so, so that things that I'm confused about where to find end up being in the community, such as guides and discussions and such. So the argument would be, put the most self-explanatory thing down at the bottom so people see what is elsewhere first. If that makes sense. Reply to comment
Looking at the Guide section, it seems very easy to get overwhelmed trying to sort through what is there. This strikes me as causing two problems: it makes it much harder for someone looking for a guide to find it, and it makes it much more likely for duplicate guides to emerge as people get lazy trying to figure out if someone already posted a similar one.
I would suggest adding categories for the guides to help group like guides together and make navigation easier. Suggested categories would be:
* DIY (Do it Yourself) * Political stuff * Educational stuff * Major Renovations * Lifestyle changes * Research projects (new technologies/ discoveries) * Engineering projects (using current/ emerging technologies to solve a problem) * etc/ misc Reply to comment
Some of this issue is that we're missing search and proper filtering / rating functionality.
I do like your categories though. Would these be things that you think should be consistent, or does the tagging functionality fill this issue? Reply to comment
The question's trying to get at the scope of the fix, if that's clearer. In general, is this something you do in your home, or something that's changing in a city (the city council's passing a new law, or a new business is opening), national, etc.
Completely agree the wording can be much improved. Any suggestions? Reply to comment
I would suggest replacing "which area will you be working in most of the time" with, "to which of the following categories is your fix most relevant." or something like that. From the wording it was unclear whether the question refered to the fix in particular or the general habits of the fixer. Reply to comment
Ahh, that makes sense. Yeah, didn't see that inclarity at all, but definitely do now.
If you don't mind, please add a bug over at the bugtracker. That way, you can keep abreast of changes, and follow-up if future phrasing still doesn't work for you. Reply to comment
That's an interesting thought that at least I hadn't thought of (perhaps Jeff had). My thoughts were that most of the fixes would be things you, yourself can do.
Some of this will be resolved by future voting/rating by the site's users of guides and fixes. Some won't.
Here's a question - if I'm random political user adding an e-petition that I think will solve everything (which, it won't), don't I check that DIY box anyway? If so, what box wouldn't I check that would still include your parasitic loads stuff? Reply to comment
So from my posting of my first guide, I've run into a few things that I feel could be problems. First of all, I think there should be an "Add a guide" link on your "Your Part" page. I couldn't find the link to make it easily enough (I could after it was made) so I just made my guide based on the first guide I could find, in this case Sam's. There are a few things that I didn't like that this brought up, many of which are interrelated:
-When I first posted the guide, it took away the descriptions I made for steps and replaced my steps with the ones originally on Sam's guide. This might be a bug. I'd test this to see if this happens again but I don't want to clutter my page with test guides as there does not seem to be a way to delete my guides.
-It does not seem to be possible to subtract steps when editing. I wanted two steps and the guide had three, and it would not let me use any less than three steps. I feel like it might be a good idea to let people remove steps when editing because I feel like it might help them refine their guides (or in my case fix it completely).
-There is no way for me to remove the based on field from my guide. This isn't necessarily a problem in itself (as it is good to let people keep credit for their original guide), but it's mostly just an annoyance caused by me not being able to find how to make a new guide enough from my profile.
-I think it would be nice to be able to delete one of my guides completely. In my case I made a guide that I just wanted to fix completely and couldn't (both because I couldn't unlink it from Sam's guide and because I couldn't reduce the number of steps).
I don't think this problem would happen to me again now that I found where the link to make a new guide is, but I know if I messed this up that I'm sure a general user could run into similar problems with all of these things.
On a separate note, I was thinking that maybe it would be cool if when you were looking at a fix that you posted and it didn't already have a guide posted for it (it says something like "This user is in uncharted waters. Maybe he'll write a guide once he's done.") if there was a link you could click right from there to make said guide. Reply to comment
A few of these are known issues, and as soon as I saw your guide with sam's steps, I started working on the code for fixing them :)
A quick reply, from your points in order: - have thought about this, the idea was that people in general wouldn't start off making guides - they should start making fixes, and then make guides once they've done them. But things in alpha are a bit different, so this may need to change. - sounds like a bug. I'll test it out in dev this afternoon. - known bug. A really really annoying known bug. - makes sense. Jeff or I can remove your based on manually if you want, let us know! - deletion is something that's missing across the site. guides are particularly tricky, since they should only be allowed to be deleted if they're not being used by anyone else. If they are, then they should be able to be abandoned, but not deleted. Reply to comment
On the add a guide thing (your reply on my first point), that's why I thought it might be an interesting idea to be able to have a link to add a guide straight from one of your fixes with no guide to it yet. I realized that this was probably your philosophy on things and I thought that being able to make the guide straight from a fix you did might emphasize this and make things easier.
The deletion problem (your last point) makes sense. I realized that might be a problem after I posted the suggestion and most of my problems had mostly to do with not being able to change other the things on the guide that I mentioned.
If you could remove the based on thing manually that would be nice. It really doesn't make any sense for my guide. Don't worry about it too much if it's going to be too much of a hassle though. It's not a huge deal. It just looks kind of silly. Reply to comment
Re: add a guide from fix. Yep, agree. The plan (this isn't yet implemented) was to have it so when you set a guide to Done, it prompts you to create a guide if you weren't using one.
Does that meet the need you reference, or would you prefer a button throughout the fixing process?
Your guide has had it's based-on removed. Poor sam's guide. It's like it lost the child it never knew. Reply to comment
The prompting on done makes sense. Except the one caveat being on "continual" or "lifestyle" fixes (eating less meat, etc.). You really aren't ever "done" with those so you'd never get the prompt from your fix. Reply to comment
Well that's interesting, looks like I broke something. You should probably do something to make sure if somebody screws up HTML tags in their posts (such as making an open bold or italics tag and not closing it like I accidentally did) it does not break the rest of a discussion page. Reply to comment
To sum things up, you might want to proceed with caution with the way discussion posts are formatted. If straight HTML code is going to work on a post, it really opens up a lot of potential problems. For one thing, people are going to screw up when posting things. There is just no way around this and you need to make sure this can be handled in a way that isn't going to break the site.
The more dangerous problem that I feel that this is going to cause is it leaves the site open to people trying to mess it up on purpose. This obviously would be no good.
Now for the hell of it, I am going to attempt to post an xkcd from the other day that I liked (mostly to see if I can put an image in a post):
On a related note (mostly thinking of all of the horrible other pictures I could have put in my post instead of the xkcd), there really should be a link to report a post as offensive. This is the internet after all, and while this site hopefully will attract a high caliber of person (after all the site does have very noble goals), who knows what could potentially be posted here? It's like Andrew T always said, "In any group of people, there's always at least one idiot". Reply to comment
On another sidenote (I know I am posting an inordinate number of times about this, but I feel like this is a potentially major issue), I am really tempted to post a close HTML tag to see what happens, but I will refrain from doing so in fears of how much this would mess things up. Reply to comment
So from what I can tell there are only four kinds of tags that you let come through:
*The first two are bold and italics. These probably won't cause any problems but you need to make sure that they are closed at the end of a person's post or else the formatting continues onto further post.
*The third is image, which appears to work perfectly fine, but with this feature you almost certainly will need a "Mark as offensive" option.
*The fourth tag that appears to come through the filter is the anchor tag (a href="", a class="", etc.). This is the one that I feel needs to be fixed. Obviously somebody making a normal link is fine, but it also has opened up things like I just did where I replied to a comment in this thread from my testing thread. You'll probably need to make sure that the only thing you can do is a straight a href="" tag for URLs and nothing else or else I'm sure people will be able to break things in very creative ways. Reply to comment
This is great stuff. I'm sure Steve will have comments about how to fix these things, but I encourage everyone to try to break things. Someone will, it might as well be discovered now. This is exactly the sort of stuff we want done to test the coding of the site. Reply to comment
Woah, so I'm not sure how I managed to do this, but in the top left corner of my testing page there is now a "Home" link popping up next to the SixLinks logo that I know isn't supposed to be there. Something that I posted must have caused this. Reply to comment
I'm not going to lie, it is extremely tempting to go put silly images/links in the top left of every page I can, but I will resist the urge. Reply to comment
On a completely different note from my previous attempts to destroy the site from within, I feel like you're own blog posts should be favorited by default.
As a sidenote from that, trying to favorite a blog post for some reason sends you to some random discussion page on the site and favorites that page. For instance, I tried to favorite my blog post and it sent me to the "Should the "Your Mom" person stay on SixLinks?" discussion page and favorited that. Reply to comment
re: all the above. I woke up to 60 some messages of nick trying to destroy the site from within. Well done, sir.
Re: blog post favorites. They're automatically treated as favorited, so you still get notifications, etc. This lets you single out ones you really find as a favorite without having to sift through every post.
Re: favoriting blog post -> discussion page. That's a bug that I suspect just started with the discussion favorite code refactor. Please post a bug for it. Reply to comment
Is it possible to add groups/categories to the discussion page. I think that a category "General Suggestions from Alpha testers" with separate threads underneath it would be much easier to follow. Also, as the site gets more use I think the discussions will become unmanageable without some way of organizing them. Reply to comment
The reason I had mentioned the blog thing in the first place is because Shoffstall had mad a comment in my blog post and there was no notification on my "Your Part" page that I could see (and the comment was more recent than any other activity that was on my page). There was also no email sent to me. I went to the blog itself and saw that it did have a star to favorite the page but was not already favorited. That's when I tried clicking it and noticed the issue. Reply to comment
This is something that I think will get implemented. As of right now, the comments bar on the right is actually a combination of the most recent comments on any blog posts about the fix Reply to comment
Which is actually a bit off from where it should be, should probably be on the home of transportation. Move it or has it made itself a home there? (Jeff is about to become the wiki nazi) Reply to comment
I still left it on the science talk page, since people might be looking there as well. We can add a note and pull it later? Or Jeff the wiki-nazi can decide :) Reply to comment
So day two of my nefarious plot to destroy SixLinks from within has been decidedly less successful than yesterday. I have, however, found a couple things you might want to look at. They aren't really bugs so much but they do make discussion pages look very ugly (and you can, of course, see examples of these on my Testing page):
*If you were to post an image that is wider than the box for the post, it will stretch past the right edge and will then stretch the page itself. So if I were to, for instance, post a picture that was 20000 pixels wide or a picture of a 34000 pixel long red line, it would stretch the page horribly. If there were some sort of way that the site could shrink the pictures so they fit inside the box or perhaps made them into a thumbnail if they were too big that would be nice.
*A similar problem happens with a continuous string of characters that is longer than the post box. The string will stretch outside the box and then will stretch the page out. I feel like this is a very common problem in message boards I have seen throughout the web. Typically this is a problem if somebody is posting a URL straight to the site. It would probably be useful if you could make these strings wrap somehow, as I know that they can make a page very ugly.
I don't know how difficult either of these things would be. Maybe if they would be ridiculously tough you could just make either of these things criteria to be marked as disruptive/offensive when this feature is implemented.
On a different note, Steve I believe you told me that ul, ol, and il tags were able to pass through the filter but I was unable to use them. I'm not sure if this a bug or not but I just thought I'd point it out. Reply to comment
Whether something goes off the edge is browser size/ screen resolution dependent. So I would not make it a criteria for being considered disruptive. If it is obviously intended to be disruptive, then certainly it should be considered such.
The UL and IL tags seems to work for me, except for putting bullets behind my avatar. OL tags don't seem to add numbers though.From looking at the html source it is stripping the OL tags. I'll add a bug report for it. Reply to comment
I was able to get the ol tag to work. Weird that you couldn't. What I was doing wrong before was that I wasn't making a close for the li tags which messed up the entire list. Maybe you're doing the same thing. Reply to comment
That's very bizarre. It wasn't autoclosing them for me. Something seems like it isn't quite right with the way lists are interpreted when you post them. Reply to comment
Well, I've favorited the page now, so hopefully that should solve the problem. Before I had a notification on my "Your Part" page that I had made the blog on monday but not of any comments to it since. It also never came up on my update. Reply to comment
Well now I'm just entirely confused as to what's going on? Maybe I was just screwing up before but I could swear I did it the exact same way before. Reply to comment
Each content wiki page now has a link back to the corresponding big picture page. Let me know if you find that any of these links are broken. Reply to comment
The bar on the right side of the screen at http://alpha.sixlinks.org/Big-Picture/ Doesn't seem to contain useful information. It just has a bunch of links to the news page with sixlinks titles. What is the bar supposed to be for? Reply to comment
I noticed that emails now are listed as being from [Name] via SixLinks rather than just "robot" or "SixLinks". I must say I very much like this change. Reply to comment
Any chance of having selective RSS feeds. I'm thinking one for blogs, one for fixes, one for guides, one for discussions etc. That way I could add the ones I care about (probably guides and fixes) to a live bookmark it in firefox.
I love teams, but don't really see what you can do with groups.
Maybe I'm missing how they should be used, but they strike me as more of a way to feel like you're doing something without doing it then a tool to help people do stuff. ("I joined the group for saving the I feel like I did something good today").
They're really more a place for people to freely join and discuss with people who share a common interest. I'd say they're actually fairly similar to facebook groups, and will end up with similar functionality.
As far as being a tool to do things, they're really more a tool to build community than a tool to accomplish specific things. (Notably, that community is the very thing that's going to make it easier for people to do specific things.) They're another way to get people coming back to the site, and then hopefully involved in helping out, or doing things.
The other important role they fill is to have an open grouping of people, rather than the more restricted teams. Reply to comment
It will be interesting to see what happens with them.
I think your biggest draw to getting people to come back will be the "look at the cool stuff people are doing" rather than the groups, but then I'm not a huge facebook group user.
I would caution that having people group could also divide and fragment the community rather than keep it cohesive. This is especially true if political (particularly not relevant to site related issues) groups are created.
Are you thinking that the groups would be common interests related to the theme of the site or other random common interests (such as knitting, underwater basket weaving and elephant taunting)? Reply to comment
My hope is that the groups give people an outlet to express their beliefs, views, and passion with like-minded folks, even (especially) those that don't fit in with the core mission of the site.
It gives space for people in a broader community to be different, carve out their own issues, and own spaces, even if they disagree with us or some of the community on particular issues or views.
I think we'll find that there are different sorts of users, who all find different parts of the site to be useful. Some will focus on fixes/guides, others on the metrics, others on groups. Still Drunk from Last Night, for example, could have a group that, while not directly accomplishing things, fosters a real sense of grouping and friendship in a virtual space.
I think in general, one of our guiding views was to put good tools in front of people, and let them tell us what they want and need. Our users ultimately decide the shape of the site. We're committed to creating a site that gives people the big picture, lets them get inspired and informed by what other folks are doing, and helps them take real action in their own lives. What shape that takes, and what tools are used, abused, and improved by the community is up to all of us. Reply to comment
So I know I've been pretty passive about the whole "break the site" thing, but I'm trying to be better... anyway, a few thoughts:
One, there isn't a "contact us" or "about us" section (would probably ideally be one of the gray links at the bottom of every page). Giving people an easy email form to use to try and contact you would A) yes, mean you'll get a lot of silly questions via email that people could have probably answered themselves if they dug deeper on the site, but also B) make Jeff and Steve more accessible for the few big questions people are bound to have. Which leads me to...
Two, it might be a good idea to consider including another gray bottom-page link for Media/Public Relations. Put all the basic info that a reporter/researcher may need, plus contact information (maybe even a specialized "media relations" email link) so that anybody looking to cover your story has an easy place to start. Which is similar to...
Three, your sponsors page doesn't have any information for an organization looking to sponsor you. Your mission in About SixLinks is good (though you might consider adding a Vision Statement as well), but beyond that, if I were representing a granting or funding branch of a company, I wouldn't have any information about what sponsoring you would do, for me or for you. If my company gave you money for operations, would you allow me a sponsored/featured guide? Or maybe sponsors could get enhanced guides that include links to the services that my organization provides to help accomplish the fix?
Anyway, I gotta run, but there'll be more... I love this site, guys! Reply to comment
Thanks for the great feedback! We know sponsors is mostly blank, and it's one of our biggest priorities right now (and why, if folks are wondering, all those bug reports aren't dropping like proverbial flies).
Great idea on the media/PR, and our "about us" definitely needs lots of love. All of those are on the (heavy) slate for wasabi.
Contact form. Oh, contact forms. See, the thing is, you're right. And I know you're right. It's just that A) scares me so much. I think I have email PTSD right now. Probably a contact form is needed. (And it hurts me to say that.)
I definitely agree with this, Jeff. Also, I think it would be great if there were a simpler way to just put up a link to a news story, with a brief description, rather than writing a story yourself or copying the entire text. The way it is right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me - if you're writing your own story, you're very likely to have more than one original source, unless you're just paraphrasing. Or, unless you're summing up - but, that would go in the summary section anyhow, wouldn't it?
It is usually illegal to copy text from an article and paste it.
For example, NY Times Member Agreement Section 2 Reads:
"2.2 [NYTimes.com] and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, *publish*, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, *reproduce* (except as provided in Section 2.3 of this Agreement), create new works from, distribute, perform, *display*, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.
2.3 You may download or copy the Content and other downloadable items displayed on the Service for personal use only, provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained therein. "
This website would not be considered personal use. Even if it were, there is no way to maintain the copyright. I LOVE the News section, but this is something that you could get in serious trouble for. I would prefer being able to just post the link and maybe a brief summary; another option, if you really want people to post their own work, is to include a "I have the rights to distribute this material" button/contract, and then to make clear that other users can't steal the producer's content. Reply to comment
I agree, the way the copying of news stories just seems off to me. Maybe it would be cool to have news postings to be a link to the story and a brief summary of it. It also might be cool to allow for commenting on a news posting as well, but I don't know if that would be too much like Digg or similar bookmarking sites. Reply to comment
Oh, it looks like this has already been partially addressed (per Steven's upcoming fixes discussion).
However, it was still confusing when I tried to post a story yesterday; I got the same long screen asking for a body text as I had before.
Additionally, now that there are ones with just a summary and a link, I think the link should be more prominent. For instance, on the page for "Does the U.S. Need a New National Electrical Grid", the only link to the article is at the bottom, under Source: Greenresearch@Wordpress (which I initially expected to open an email-the-author window in Outlook). Maybe the title itself could be a link to the article? Or, maybe next to the title, there could be a "Read the Article" link. Reply to comment
I would also like to be able to comment on News stories, and think this could make for great discussion and brainstorming.
For instance, in the "Heat may spark world food crisis" article, I'd like to comment about the additional negative effect that possible cooling in Europe due to changed ocean currents might have on crops. I really feel like these things could spark a great exchange of ideas.
I guess this would be a lot like other bookmarking sites... but those sites are successful for a reason! I guess there is always the risk that any on-line discussion will devolve into personal attacks, though. Reply to comment
I think that if people must be members before commenting on news stories it will reduce the amount of undesirable traffic.
Also, it might make sense to require people to create at least one fix before commenting on the news stories. That way they have at least some stake in the community. Reply to comment
I like this idea of commenting on news stories for members. As far as copy/pasting, in case you didn't see Steve's post (which I don't remember the details of anyway), we are removing the body field and making it just a title, summary, and link, possibly with a photo or something. For now, just leave the body section blank. Reply to comment
I like the idea that people have to be members first, rather than posting anonymously.
Having to do something first is a great idea, but I wonder how it would actually play out. If someone stumbles on a discussion and wants to comment, but after becoming a member finds out they have to jump through another hoop before they can post, I think they'd be more likely to get frustrated and annoyed than to run over and create a fix... that would be my response, at least :) Reply to comment
Yep, right now anonymous comments are disabled, both for investment in the community, and simple reasons of stopping spambots.
I'm not as big a fan of the 'do a fix first' idea, because it's not how everyone coming into the site would choose to interact with it. One of our goals is to lay out good tools in as many ways as possible, and let people use them in the way they're comfortable. I'm not as interested in prescribing a certain use pattern or flow.
If we find out as we expand our audience that people are simply posting and not completing any fixes, then this is something that we revisit (probably by figuring out how to make fixes more accessible/compelling than forcing their use) Reply to comment
I feel like the way that group discussions work are a little weird. It seems to me that someone should be a member of a group before they can participate in the group discussions. Basically, this concern came from yesterday when I posted a discussion topic in the "Making Energy" group about facts about a person you may not know to facilitate the Tour de SixLinks task of the day and the two people who responded to it were not in the group. Obviously, I have no problem with Kaitlyn or Rachel's posts in this situation and in fact found them both very interesting and informative. However, I feel like this could cause other problems further down the road. Or maybe perhaps you could just make an option when making a discussion in a group if you want that topic to be group only.
I think at least it should be more clear what the location of a discussion topic is. It shows up in a person's feed but it is kind of hard to see in the discussion itself (it's kind of a faded color) and there's absolutely no way to see it in the All Discussions listing. Reply to comment
If you don't have an account, you'll need one. We recognize that this is a pain, but we do it to keep spambots from flooding the site. If this really bothers, you, please let us know. We're listening!
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First of all, NICE WORK! The site is incredibly clean looking and really well-thought out. This is just off of the first 30 min of tooling around on it, but impressive looking, to say the least.
Mostly I just messed around with the Community stuff and glanced at the Big Picture stuff quickly. I'll plan on actually reading things when I'm less hungover.
If it matters, I’m using the latest version of Google Chrome as my browser.
Here we go:
-On the profile pages, the FIXES title runs into the stuff underneath it.
-Me being a layperson, no idea what FIXES were at first. Figured it out pretty quickly, but is that an “industry” term?
-From the home page, there doesn’t appear to be a link straight to the community stuff. Unless I’m an idiot. I accessed after I looked at Jeff’s profile.
-SUGGESTION: On the Content pages, I like how they each start with the “What’s Broken”, “How We fix it”, etc. I like it so much, I think it should stand out a little more. Maybe double space those so there is a blank line underneath
-What is POLISH? Is that explained anywhere?
All I got for now. Reply to comment
Secondly, in the user sign-up, to be more politically correct/neutral, it might be best to just say Male, Female, Other, instead of "rather not say/neither"... Other just seems more encompassing.
Comments from first 10 minutes of use... more later. Reply to comment
- title running into: that's a bug, if you can file one on the tracker (so you can confirm that it looks good when it's fixed), that'd be great.
- home page links - good point. we're also missing a log in link, both may be added.
- double spacing: glad you like it! we'll try out adding some space.
- polish: nope, it's not. Damnit, I knew jeff was right. This will probably be renamed "Quality" in the near future. Reply to comment
I like the change to "rather not say/other" - will put that in. Reply to comment
One thing I did notice is that when I look at other people's profiles their name intersects with the dark blue line under it which cuts off the bottom half of the name. I am not sure if this is a bug or if this is how it's supposed to be, but it definitely looks off to me. Reply to comment
Also, what browser are you using?
Thanks! Reply to comment
I also feel like it might be a good idea to add the left side bar to the Home page for easier navigation from the page. I think Tom made a similar comment about this before. I think there needs to at least be a clear Log-in/Register button somewhere on the Home page. That might even be better than adding the sidebar because people can see the Six Links the first time they go to the site and that is emphasized before the community stuff, but there is still a very easy way to register for the site. Reply to comment
I've thought that maybe a slightly extended setup sequence that has people pick a favorite link (fav'ing the news feed for them, or giving better instructions may help)
Could also swap that big pic page feed, if we think it's more useful than knowing what pages were recently updated (there is the wiki, afterall) Reply to comment
One clarification is this: if you have an account, and left yourself logged in when you last visited, you're brought to the your part page. If you're not logged in or don't have an account, you're taken to the Home page.
It's an interesting idea to start people on the big picture page, but if they're most likely to immediately go to "your part", does having them see the link buttons justify the extra click on every visit, and do they still see them after a while?
Left-side bar on home: We played with this, and I think it was an idea that I wanted to do but never satisfactorily was able to do without spoiling the simplicity.
Maybe what the combination of these ideas suggest is that there's a "logged in" home page that's sort of a hybrid of the home page and your part. that is, it's got the blue nav, the big picture top nav, some news, buttons for the links, and other big info/links (maybe the 'community updates' from the home page).
What's everyone think? Reply to comment
I think we can assume that most people will leave themselves logged in once they have an account, so the question is where we want most return users to end up. If that's at the big picture then I think that's fine, if its Your Part (which I think there is a good argument for), then I think Your Part needs info about your friends adding news (since the only reference to news is the click to add a news story) and a news feed on the big picture home. Reply to comment
I'm actually a fan of this "user home" page - if we can find the right features that hit what people really want (and don't require a click-away 90% of the time). In some ways, it seems disorienting to be dropped at "your part" when the first time you went to the site you were sent to "home". It's definetly an area we can improve in behaving intuitively. Reply to comment
Another, maybe more primary issue is that there's no quick way to distinguish new news from old news. Maybe we highlight news stories in the last 24 hours? 48? Reply to comment
The friends submitting news stuff seems reasonable to me, unless one person ends up flooding the feed. Go ahead and ticket that as an enhancement (bug # 100! woot!) Reply to comment
-I just plain don't get the difference between guides and fixes I feel like there needs to be an explanation somewhere or maybe a change of terms for them. I mostly don't get guides; they feel redundant next to fixes.
-There needs to be a continual fix, or ongoing, or eternal for fixes like not shaving your legs in the shower or riding your bike. You never really stop doing those things.
-You could also use a resources section for fixes because there is pertinent information for some fixes that simply can't be completely included in this website
-I feel like the community tab should come before the your part tab just because I had trouble finding this page and it seems to make more sense that you would come under community
I'm sure I'll find more things Reply to comment
A general question for Steven and Jeff - is there going to be a "using SixLinks" guide that will detail differences between Guides and Fixes, etc? Because I feel that this would clear up a lot of the existing confusion. Reply to comment
Also, the 'protect key spaces' maybe change it to 'protect our spaces' its more inclusive Reply to comment
- Continual fix is something we are debating. On one hand, something that you are already doing isn't something new, so the website isn't really accomplishing anything. For on-going lifestyle things, we may create a new field in your profile, or you could put it in your things that describe you (although that is easier for some things than others). We want to make sure people spread their ideas of what they're doing, but we don't want to discourage them from doing other things by relying on what they've already done.
- Resources section: would you need a resources section or could you just put it in the notes section?
- I have no problem with moving community up, go from large to small in scale on the side (excluding sponsors). Thoughts from others? Reply to comment
creatures you can take up with jeff :)
Navigation words in general are really tough to refine, because they need to work for everyone from tom's 8th graders to a 95 year-old, coal-miners to academics. Reply to comment
A fix is something you do to 'fix' a area of how we live that's broken. It's an individual action, and fixes a particular problem.
A guide is a helpful manual for other people who might want to do what you just did. Good guides will provide all sorts of resources, information, and help people get past potential sticking points.
Does that make more sense? Reply to comment
It's really good to hear where people are getting confused - this highlights to us where we need to improve! Reply to comment
Here's my question: Aren't all fixes continual? If you change out your lightbulbs, you continue using the new ones. If your town puts up a wind turbine, they keep using it.
I went vegetarian however many years back. That was the change - that was the action. Everything since then has become maintenance. To me, the same goes for shaving and bike-riding. Changing from your current habits to more sustainable ones is the actual fix, and the significant part of the process.
Here's two questions for Katie, Rachel, and anyone else:
1) Can you think of a fix where the above isn't true? Aka, a fix where you don't make a change, then maintain that changed habit/usage/etc?
2) Do you feel that having the site 'check in' on you to see if you're still doing/using/living the way you said you did in the fix is useful? Does this fill what you were looking for in a continual fix? Reply to comment
To me, that only takes second to big picture in importance.
The scale-ordering makes sense to me, but I'm concerned about de-emphasizing Your Part. Reply to comment
The original title (from the venerable sheet-o-paper) was "Natural Spaces/Biodiversity"
I believe we had one iteration between that and "Creatures", but I don't remember what it was.
I'm also going to put on my big-picture hat and point out that two biologists hashing out semantics is a minor issue when the site needs a total content work-through. : ) We've got to focus our energy in the most critical places. Let's rewrite the content for that section, and see what it tell us about the name.
Feel free to tell me to stfu. Reply to comment
I think this is easier to understand. Feedback from all is very welcome! Reply to comment
We're taking the angle that not every place is going to be saved and worked on. So, we should put our efforts into helping the places that are critical to the ecosystem.
As far as the people down cleaning up their local stream, my (personal) thought is to ask how important that stream is in the big ecological picture. If it's not critical, then I'm ok leaving it out of what we call 'key' spaces. If that miffs people, I'm ok with that.
I think the gist of my perspective is that I'm sick and tired of feel-good environmentalism that makes people feel good about what they're doing, but has very little impact on the real problems. In my mind, that work is counterproductive because it a) wastes people's time, and b) lies to them that they're making a significant difference.
The trick, as you mention, is in the designating of what spaces are key. To me, we ask the data. What places have high varieties of biodiversity that are threatened? What places are critical to the survival of a large variety of species, whether they live there, or just pass through? We have to let reality show us where to act, instead of taking the easy, local way out. Reply to comment
The reason why my response here is indented is that instead of typing my response into the box at the bottom of the page, I'm typing it after clicking "reply to comment" to try to stack conversations.
Advantage: Keeps common threads together
Disadvantage: Harder to find new posts
So, is this useful? and if so, how come no one is using it? Was it because you couldn't find the button or didn't know what it would do? Either way, your input will be important in figuring out how to redesign this. Reply to comment
This is great feedback - What we're trying to figure out is what the best way to represent things like this is.
And broader picture, does putting time in so that you can have a 'continual fix' make you do any more? Does it make other people do more? Does having that sort of thing impact the real world in a significant way?
The one way I can see is the #2 from above - the site checking in on you every six months or something to see if you're still on the wagon. What do people think? Reply to comment
Both use subjects, which I think we can get away without, if we're smart enough. We also need to see how hard it is to find new posts once email hits. I'm inclined to listen to the advice i always give my clients, "let's find out how it's broken when everything's there before we start to fix it."
ps. people are using it. rachel, you, me, and katie are all using threads :) Reply to comment
I would suggest adding categories for the guides to help group like guides together and make navigation easier. Suggested categories would be:
* DIY (Do it Yourself)
* Political stuff
* Educational stuff
* Major Renovations
* Lifestyle changes
* Research projects (new technologies/ discoveries)
* Engineering projects (using current/ emerging technologies to solve a problem)
* etc/ misc Reply to comment
When posting a fix I really am not sure what the following question is trying to get at or why it is required.
Which area will you be working in, most of the time?:
* Home and Lifestyle
* Community
* City
* Nation
* Global
* Career
While your fix may cover several of these categories, which one most describes where you'll be spending most of your time? Reply to comment
I do like your categories though. Would these be things that you think should be consistent, or does the tagging functionality fill this issue? Reply to comment
Completely agree the wording can be much improved. Any suggestions? Reply to comment
To be honest, I didn't even notice the filter by section when I was first looking through it. Reply to comment
If you don't mind, please add a bug over at the bugtracker. That way, you can keep abreast of changes, and follow-up if future phrasing still doesn't work for you. Reply to comment
Some of this will be resolved by future voting/rating by the site's users of guides and fixes. Some won't.
Here's a question - if I'm random political user adding an e-petition that I think will solve everything (which, it won't), don't I check that DIY box anyway? If so, what box wouldn't I check that would still include your parasitic loads stuff? Reply to comment
-When I first posted the guide, it took away the descriptions I made for steps and replaced my steps with the ones originally on Sam's guide. This might be a bug. I'd test this to see if this happens again but I don't want to clutter my page with test guides as there does not seem to be a way to delete my guides.
-It does not seem to be possible to subtract steps when editing. I wanted two steps and the guide had three, and it would not let me use any less than three steps. I feel like it might be a good idea to let people remove steps when editing because I feel like it might help them refine their guides (or in my case fix it completely).
-There is no way for me to remove the based on field from my guide. This isn't necessarily a problem in itself (as it is good to let people keep credit for their original guide), but it's mostly just an annoyance caused by me not being able to find how to make a new guide enough from my profile.
-I think it would be nice to be able to delete one of my guides completely. In my case I made a guide that I just wanted to fix completely and couldn't (both because I couldn't unlink it from Sam's guide and because I couldn't reduce the number of steps).
I don't think this problem would happen to me again now that I found where the link to make a new guide is, but I know if I messed this up that I'm sure a general user could run into similar problems with all of these things.
On a separate note, I was thinking that maybe it would be cool if when you were looking at a fix that you posted and it didn't already have a guide posted for it (it says something like "This user is in uncharted waters. Maybe he'll write a guide once he's done.") if there was a link you could click right from there to make said guide. Reply to comment
A quick reply, from your points in order:
- have thought about this, the idea was that people in general wouldn't start off making guides - they should start making fixes, and then make guides once they've done them. But things in alpha are a bit different, so this may need to change.
- sounds like a bug. I'll test it out in dev this afternoon.
- known bug. A really really annoying known bug.
- makes sense. Jeff or I can remove your based on manually if you want, let us know!
- deletion is something that's missing across the site. guides are particularly tricky, since they should only be allowed to be deleted if they're not being used by anyone else. If they are, then they should be able to be abandoned, but not deleted. Reply to comment
The deletion problem (your last point) makes sense. I realized that might be a problem after I posted the suggestion and most of my problems had mostly to do with not being able to change other the things on the guide that I mentioned.
If you could remove the based on thing manually that would be nice. It really doesn't make any sense for my guide. Don't worry about it too much if it's going to be too much of a hassle though. It's not a huge deal. It just looks kind of silly. Reply to comment
Does that meet the need you reference, or would you prefer a button throughout the fixing process?
Your guide has had it's based-on removed. Poor sam's guide. It's like it lost the child it never knew. Reply to comment
I'm splitting off the continual fixes into a new discussion, since this is a piece of feedback we've heard from a few people.
continual fixes discussion Reply to comment
working link Reply to comment
The more dangerous problem that I feel that this is going to cause is it leaves the site open to people trying to mess it up on purpose. This obviously would be no good.
Now for the hell of it, I am going to attempt to post an xkcd from the other day that I liked (mostly to see if I can put an image in a post):
My testing page
Anybody else should feel free to try to break the page as well.
On a different note, perhaps it would be a good idea to have the ability to preview a post if any kind of formatting is allowed. Reply to comment
*The first two are bold and italics. These probably won't cause any problems but you need to make sure that they are closed at the end of a person's post or else the formatting continues onto further post.
*The third is image, which appears to work perfectly fine, but with this feature you almost certainly will need a "Mark as offensive" option.
*The fourth tag that appears to come through the filter is the anchor tag (a href="", a class="", etc.). This is the one that I feel needs to be fixed. Obviously somebody making a normal link is fine, but it also has opened up things like I just did where I replied to a comment in this thread from my testing thread. You'll probably need to make sure that the only thing you can do is a straight a href="" tag for URLs and nothing else or else I'm sure people will be able to break things in very creative ways. Reply to comment
As a sidenote from that, trying to favorite a blog post for some reason sends you to some random discussion page on the site and favorites that page. For instance, I tried to favorite my blog post and it sent me to the "Should the "Your Mom" person stay on SixLinks?" discussion page and favorited that. Reply to comment
Re: blog post favorites. They're automatically treated as favorited, so you still get notifications, etc. This lets you single out ones you really find as a favorite without having to sift through every post.
Re: favoriting blog post -> discussion page. That's a bug that I suspect just started with the discussion favorite code refactor. Please post a bug for it. Reply to comment
If there is a way I suggest that it be more obvious (preferably on the page when looking at the fix). If there isn't a way, I suggest there be one.
Reply to comment
More comments welcome! Reply to comment
I still left it on the science talk page, since people might be looking there as well. We can add a note and pull it later? Or Jeff the wiki-nazi can decide :) Reply to comment
*If you were to post an image that is wider than the box for the post, it will stretch past the right edge and will then stretch the page itself. So if I were to, for instance, post a picture that was 20000 pixels wide or a picture of a 34000 pixel long red line, it would stretch the page horribly. If there were some sort of way that the site could shrink the pictures so they fit inside the box or perhaps made them into a thumbnail if they were too big that would be nice.
*A similar problem happens with a continuous string of characters that is longer than the post box. The string will stretch outside the box and then will stretch the page out. I feel like this is a very common problem in message boards I have seen throughout the web. Typically this is a problem if somebody is posting a URL straight to the site. It would probably be useful if you could make these strings wrap somehow, as I know that they can make a page very ugly.
I don't know how difficult either of these things would be. Maybe if they would be ridiculously tough you could just make either of these things criteria to be marked as disruptive/offensive when this feature is implemented.
On a different note, Steve I believe you told me that ul, ol, and il tags were able to pass through the filter but I was unable to use them. I'm not sure if this a bug or not but I just thought I'd point it out. Reply to comment
The UL and IL tags seems to work for me, except for putting bullets behind my avatar. OL tags don't seem to add numbers though.From looking at the html source it is stripping the OL tags. I'll add a bug report for it. Reply to comment
The no email is a known issue - it's not implemented yet. Reply to comment
Li tags don't require closing. They're auto-closed by the next li, or a closing ul/ol.
OL tags shouldn't be stripped out. Will double-check that this is happening. Reply to comment
Test:
- first
- second
- third
Reply to commentTest
- first
- second
- third
Reply to commentAny one else think this would be useful? Reply to comment
I love teams, but don't really see what you can do with groups.
Maybe I'm missing how they should be used, but they strike me as more of a way to feel like you're doing something without doing it then a tool to help people do stuff. ("I joined the group for saving the I feel like I did something good today").
Am I missing something about what groups offer?
Reply to comment
As far as being a tool to do things, they're really more a tool to build community than a tool to accomplish specific things. (Notably, that community is the very thing that's going to make it easier for people to do specific things.) They're another way to get people coming back to the site, and then hopefully involved in helping out, or doing things.
The other important role they fill is to have an open grouping of people, rather than the more restricted teams. Reply to comment
I think your biggest draw to getting people to come back will be the "look at the cool stuff people are doing" rather than the groups, but then I'm not a huge facebook group user.
I would caution that having people group could also divide and fragment the community rather than keep it cohesive. This is especially true if political (particularly not relevant to site related issues) groups are created.
Are you thinking that the groups would be common interests related to the theme of the site or other random common interests (such as knitting, underwater basket weaving and elephant taunting)? Reply to comment
It gives space for people in a broader community to be different, carve out their own issues, and own spaces, even if they disagree with us or some of the community on particular issues or views.
I think we'll find that there are different sorts of users, who all find different parts of the site to be useful. Some will focus on fixes/guides, others on the metrics, others on groups. Still Drunk from Last Night, for example, could have a group that, while not directly accomplishing things, fosters a real sense of grouping and friendship in a virtual space.
I think in general, one of our guiding views was to put good tools in front of people, and let them tell us what they want and need. Our users ultimately decide the shape of the site. We're committed to creating a site that gives people the big picture, lets them get inspired and informed by what other folks are doing, and helps them take real action in their own lives. What shape that takes, and what tools are used, abused, and improved by the community is up to all of us.
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So I know I've been pretty passive about the whole "break the site" thing, but I'm trying to be better... anyway, a few thoughts:
One, there isn't a "contact us" or "about us" section (would probably ideally be one of the gray links at the bottom of every page). Giving people an easy email form to use to try and contact you would A) yes, mean you'll get a lot of silly questions via email that people could have probably answered themselves if they dug deeper on the site, but also B) make Jeff and Steve more accessible for the few big questions people are bound to have. Which leads me to...
Two, it might be a good idea to consider including another gray bottom-page link for Media/Public Relations. Put all the basic info that a reporter/researcher may need, plus contact information (maybe even a specialized "media relations" email link) so that anybody looking to cover your story has an easy place to start. Which is similar to...
Three, your sponsors page doesn't have any information for an organization looking to sponsor you. Your mission in About SixLinks is good (though you might consider adding a Vision Statement as well), but beyond that, if I were representing a granting or funding branch of a company, I wouldn't have any information about what sponsoring you would do, for me or for you. If my company gave you money for operations, would you allow me a sponsored/featured guide? Or maybe sponsors could get enhanced guides that include links to the services that my organization provides to help accomplish the fix?
Anyway, I gotta run, but there'll be more... I love this site, guys! Reply to comment
Thanks for the great feedback! We know sponsors is mostly blank, and it's one of our biggest priorities right now (and why, if folks are wondering, all those bug reports aren't dropping like proverbial flies).
Great idea on the media/PR, and our "about us" definitely needs lots of love. All of those are on the (heavy) slate for wasabi.
Contact form. Oh, contact forms. See, the thing is, you're right. And I know you're right. It's just that A) scares me so much. I think I have email PTSD right now. Probably a contact form is needed. (And it hurts me to say that.)
Great stuff - keep the ideas coming! Reply to comment
It is usually illegal to copy text from an article and paste it.
For example, NY Times Member Agreement Section 2 Reads:
"2.2 [NYTimes.com] and its Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, *publish*, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, *reproduce* (except as provided in Section 2.3 of this Agreement), create new works from, distribute, perform, *display*, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Service (including software) in whole or in part.
2.3 You may download or copy the Content and other downloadable items displayed on the Service for personal use only, provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained therein. "
This website would not be considered personal use. Even if it were, there is no way to maintain the copyright. I LOVE the News section, but this is something that you could get in serious trouble for. I would prefer being able to just post the link and maybe a brief summary; another option, if you really want people to post their own work, is to include a "I have the rights to distribute this material" button/contract, and then to make clear that other users can't steal the producer's content. Reply to comment
However, it was still confusing when I tried to post a story yesterday; I got the same long screen asking for a body text as I had before.
Additionally, now that there are ones with just a summary and a link, I think the link should be more prominent. For instance, on the page for "Does the U.S. Need a New National Electrical Grid", the only link to the article is at the bottom, under Source: Greenresearch@Wordpress (which I initially expected to open an email-the-author window in Outlook). Maybe the title itself could be a link to the article? Or, maybe next to the title, there could be a "Read the Article" link. Reply to comment
For instance, in the "Heat may spark world food crisis" article, I'd like to comment about the additional negative effect that possible cooling in Europe due to changed ocean currents might have on crops. I really feel like these things could spark a great exchange of ideas.
I guess this would be a lot like other bookmarking sites... but those sites are successful for a reason! I guess there is always the risk that any on-line discussion will devolve into personal attacks, though. Reply to comment
Also, it might make sense to require people to create at least one fix before commenting on the news stories. That way they have at least some stake in the community. Reply to comment
Having to do something first is a great idea, but I wonder how it would actually play out. If someone stumbles on a discussion and wants to comment, but after becoming a member finds out they have to jump through another hoop before they can post, I think they'd be more likely to get frustrated and annoyed than to run over and create a fix... that would be my response, at least :) Reply to comment
I'm not as big a fan of the 'do a fix first' idea, because it's not how everyone coming into the site would choose to interact with it. One of our goals is to lay out good tools in as many ways as possible, and let people use them in the way they're comfortable. I'm not as interested in prescribing a certain use pattern or flow.
If we find out as we expand our audience that people are simply posting and not completing any fixes, then this is something that we revisit (probably by figuring out how to make fixes more accessible/compelling than forcing their use) Reply to comment
I think at least it should be more clear what the location of a discussion topic is. It shows up in a person's feed but it is kind of hard to see in the discussion itself (it's kind of a faded color) and there's absolutely no way to see it in the All Discussions listing. Reply to comment
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