Hey boxxla, I just came across that unharmonic word I was thinking of...hayaller. Both times I have heard it, it's been in a song. A girl in my class just recommended the group Badem to me, and I have been listening to clips of their songs. Too bad they're not on iTunes, but another singer she recommended is.
Edited by: DianaHaddad...eew, I don't like that other singer.
hayal - that's the Arabic "l" for you. It's always followed by e,i or ü and never by a, ı or u!
It looks like they didn't do much testing, and rather rely on us to test it.
This was obvious to me from day one, and I'm glad others are noticing and calling out LP on it.
From reading Carol's posts, I gather there was an imposed deadline. So it's a combination of poor planning (leaving out important TT3 features), absolute lack of testing and haste.
Somewhere Carol mentions a code-freeze over the Christmas holidays, so I suppose they had to roll out TT4, regardless, before everyone takes off. Way back when, the whole Tree used to go down for a couple of weeks, with Stacks of Festive Fun the one open and unmoderated branch. At least they are not doing that any more. Yeah, why do I have to keep being grateful for small favors? (end of rant.)
Since this thread has morhped into The Noble Tradition Of Complaining About TT4, I thought I'd alert you to this thread Feedback on the Today Page wherein Carol asks what people want on a Today page.
The responses are interesting, almost unanimously for "forget the bells and whistles, just give me that list of threads I posted to." (Do, please, go & add to the chorus) Which made me think. In the AATT threads about possible changes, there was a lot of stuff about "community." Looks like someone discovered that TT was a community and how could they make it more so. It occurs to me that TT is a community because the users have made it so, not because of the design. Unlike Facebook users, we don't need help. Below is part of what I posted to that Today thread. I'd be interested in your thoughts, either here or on that thread
Carol wrote this as a possible thing for the Today page:
>It didn’t indicate what was really happening in the community. What are people talking about? What are the most common questions? Who do I want to get to know? etc
I replied:
>All of the new stuff like tags and tag clouds and "Most popular threads" makes me think that TT designers feel this is the kind of stuff that is important to making TT a community. I disagree. I have no interest in such features and I'll bet many others don't either. One thing that makes TT a community is it actslike a community--we tell each other what's happening and point each other to interesting threads. No one else, and certainly no machine or peice of software does it for us. We do it ourselves. That's what makes it a community--people topeople.
I'll respond here, because they are trying to keep the feedback threads on topic, which is probably a good idea.
I agree with you, nutrax. Tags, "helpful answer" buttons, "popular thread" sidebars are not necessary to make a community.
It seems to me that they have misjudged who the people are who use TT. One of the great things about TT is that it attracts such a diverse bunch of people, not only from different countries, but also of a very wide age range -- as far as I'm aware at least 16 to 90 -- and background. Many internet forums are inhabited by young tech-savvy hip groups of people. People who not only use internet technology to do whatever it is they want to do online, but are also interested in that technology for the technology itself and aware of what techniques exist out there. Looking at all the bells and whistles of TT4 gives the impression that it was intended for a group just like that.
There are many forums that attract the kind of group for which TT4 seems to have been designed. But this isn't one of them. I'm willing to bet that TT has many users who aren't regular users of any other forum. Who aren't the kind of people who hang out on the internet hopping from one forum to the other, and who really don't care that much for the wonders of 'Web 2.0' (that's tag clouds, wikis, plugins, extensions.) All these kinds of advanced user options are great add-ons for those who like that kind of thing, but (a) they should detract from the basics; and (b) they shouldn't be implemented before those basics are operative.
Already in the days of TT3, there were always questions from people who didn't understand changes in thread order (recently replied on top vs. recent posts on top), how to change time settings, how to put a link in a profile, etc. Not everyone knows how to do these things, and not everyone has grown up in a world with internet and is used to clicking around looking for the right menu options. And why should they know? An interface should be intuitive, especially when you want it to be open and easy for everyone.
There are some functions that are the bare minimum for a functioning forum. Anything beyond that, that isn't immediately obvious might add a bit to the enjoyment of those in the know, but at the cost of losing users who feel intimidated by this technology. And so I'll argue that all these so-called community-building features have the opposite effect of creating a community. If anything, they can cause divisions. They create a class of users who go crazy gaming the system with tags and links, and a class of people who are left behind like a hitchhiker on a highway watching the fast cars race by.
It's interesting that the very first poll on TT4 asks "are you a member of Facebook". I think that fits with what has already been said, that the designers were thinking along the lines of that kind of "community".
Rather depressingly, more than 60% of respondents are Facebook members. Apparently I am old.
I completely agree with shilgia, a couple of posts above on this unnumbered (!!!) thread.
The cluelessness about how this board operates is crystalized in the new "answered" vs. "unanswered" options, which I have no intention of learning how to use. Good questions spark discussions, not absolute single answers, and that's where the community comes in. True, there may be only one bus a week on Tuesdays to get from A to B, but there could be a whole discussion of the area, etc. You can all supply your own examples. So many questions are open-ended. Some are impossibly vague and general, but that's another issue, and in fact can force the OP-er to focus in order to get help.
I also am a non-techie, and really try to avoid sites made by geeks, for geeks. I am frantically learning about coding, UTF, etc., right now, and I shouldn't have to. If I want to drive a car, I don't need to know how to build one. That's the model. K-I-S-S, keep it simple, stupid, has gome out the window.
A couple of people on the "Today page" thread have summarized what seems to have happened. TT3 needed revamping and someone decided that it was stodgy and should be jazzed up, somehow missing that the simple functionality was what made it popular.
Roadwarrior wrote:
>You are trying to develop a complex manual camera with a million individual settings for an audience that would actually prefer an easy point-and-shoot box that takes nice photos. Focus on ease-of-use and good aesthetics, not adding features and data that virtually nobody wants.
betsy (something; I forgot to copy the handle) added:
>The new clutter is distracting and irritating. The unnecessary repetition is unbearable. I do not need excessive "bells and whistles".
>I want to be able to post easily and quickly. I want to keep track of my posts and their responses. And that's it.
>I came to TT for its CONTENT.
And sarah55 finished:
>These quotes are what should be written large for all to see, at your next meeting with the web site developers. Given that it encapsulates just about everything that was said a while ago, when we were asked what we wanted from the new Thorn Tree, it beggars belief that we got this mess.
>We knew what we wanted, but you ignored our feedback at that time. Please don't continue to do so. You do not have the 'audience' for the flashy new site you seem to want to have.